DRIVER

Original Italian 40 inch x 56 inch 2-Foglio Poster for the 1978 Walter Hill Thriller THE DRIVER starring Ryan O’Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley, Matt Clark and Felice Orlandi.

Hill’s second feature is a beautifully crafted, dazzling stylised film noir with O’Neal at his melancholic best as the sharpest getaway man in the business. Dern as the police force’s most assiduous cop and Adjani as a beautiful ace gambler. Designer Harry Horner and photographer Philip Lathrop give it the appearance of a series of neon-lit paintings by Edward Hopper. Thrilling as cars hurtle round Los Angeles. Bleak, spare and haunting.

Poster art by Piero Ermanno Iaia. Born in Rome in 1933, Ermanno Iaia graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1959 he worked with Studio Favalli, at the time one of the most famous and qualified among those who work for cinema, and he then started long partnerships with numerous Italian and American distribution companies, for which Iaia signed about eight hundred sketches for a total of four hundred films, which he produced at a very fast pace. Iaia also worked for various production companies such as MGM, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal, creating posters for foreign countries.

His first poster was for Richard Flesicher’s “Barabbas” (1961) for which various poster designers were commissioned, including Averardo Ciriello and Iaia himself. In 1964 Iaia made his first sketch for an important Italian film “Seduced and Abandoned”, by Pietro Germi (1964), in which the protagonist Stefania Sandrelli is surrounded by numerous male faces.

The poster is in very good folded condition.