This Polish poster for STAR WARS (1977) is by Michal Ksiazek.  There’s a fan art quality about this piece; it almost looks like something a diehard George Lucas fan would draw on his high school notebook during a particularly dull double studyhall… and I don’t mean that as a slight.  Ksiazek skirts the accepted STAR WARS iconography to show something about the film we rarely see this side of the pond… the sexiness, the androgyny, the interchangability of the Luke and Leia characters (before we knew they were brother and sister) that only a foreigner would dare voice – Ksiazek might just as well have shown Luke and Lei smoking Gitanes.  Plus, I like that Luke’s blaster has been reconfigured to look like a .45 automatic, which brings “Episode 4″ back to its roots as a knockoff of the old Republic serials of the 1940s.  As I’ve said before, my taste for STAR WARS has long since faded but I’d throw this poster up in my breakfast nook for all the world to see.

Sometimes a Polish poster really takes the long way around, even to the point of forgetting where it came from.  Take this poster (the work of the intriguingly-named “Twarodowska”) for Steven Spielberg’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) for example.  What is that cutting across the middle of the frame… the flying car from THE ABSENT MINDED PROFESSOR (1961)?  In a word… WTF?!  Did this artist even see the movie he was hired to paint the poster for?  That we really can’t figure out the answer to that question from the information available to us makes this particular poster a fun puzzle to ponder out as we sit… no, not at the breakfast nook, no… in the bathroom, I think.  Yes, this poster’s definitely a head scratcher and merits the kind of unfettered attention that one could give it only while seated for long periods of a time with nothing in particular to do.   

While not a complete nonsequitur like the poster above, this unsettling onesheet for Phil Karlson’s WALKING TALL (1973) is nonetheless a little on the curious side.  The artist, Krzystzof Nasfeter (about whom I know absolutely nothing), has made the bold choice to isolate a particular image from late in the film and to have it stand for the entire film.  The artist isn’t really wrong to do so – the image of Buford Pusser’s ravaged, bandage-wrapped face is a symbol for his almost Christ-like suffering (at least as depicted in the movie and its sequels) and the stripe of yellow across the top (which puts you in the mind of police tape) gives the poster an overall feeling of urgency and fear… but so much so that the thing almost looks like a horror movie, which WALKING TALL, for all its hideous violence, is not.  But that’s why I love the Poles… bold choices.