BITTER HARVEST

Original British 80 inch x 81 inch 6-Sheet Poster for the 1963 Peter Graham Scott Drama BITTER HARVEST, based on the book 20,000 Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton and starring Janet Munro, John Stride, Anne Cunningham, Alan Badel, Thora Hird, Terence Alexander, Barbara Ferris, Colin Gordon, Francis Matthews, William Lucas, Mary Merrall, May Hallatt, Norman Bird, Vanda Godsell, Allan Cuthbertson and Derek Francis.

Janet Munro runs the gamut of emotions as Jennie, a young girl from Wales who, with her girlfriend, is seduced and abandoned by a couple of heartless creeps in London, where she is later befriended by a kindly bartender John Stride. But Jennie snubs the bartender and takes up with a an unfeeling playboy. However, Jennie has gone around the park one time too many and is now torn between going back home or committing suicide.

Poster art by Arnaldo Putzu (1927 – 2012).

After studying art in Rome Arnaldo Putzu met poster artist Enrico de Seta in 1948 whilst doing illustration work in Milan. De Seta took him back to Rome to work at the heart of the booming post-war Italian film industry. In the early 1950s Putzu went freelance working for, among others, Augusto Favalli, a fine artist who had set up a commercial studio in 1946 employing several artists and collaborating with the production company Lux Film.

Around the same time John Davis of the Rank Organisation asked Eric Pulford, then creative head of Rank’s Downton Advertising, to produce some special brochures for their Italian office. Pulford flew out to Rome and worked alongside Augusto Favalli and his team of artists. When Favalli died in 1969 some of the artists, including Putzu, moved to London to work with Pulford, whose expanding company by then was producing poster art for several major film companies.

The poster is in very good folded condition in 4 separate sheets.