VERY IMPORTANT PERSON

Original British 27 inch x 40 inch 1-Sheet Poster for the 1961 Ken Annakin Comedy VERY IMPORTANT PERSON starring James Robertson Justice, Leslie Phillips, Stanley Baxter, Eric Sykes, Richard Wattis, Godfrey Winn, Colin Gordon, John Le Mesurier, Norman Bird, Jeremy Lloyd, Jean Cadell, Ronnie Stevens, Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Norman Shelley, Brian Oulton, Frederick Piper and Joan Haythorne.

The key to this winning comedy is a witty script by Jack Davies and Henry Blyth that cleverly lampoons many of the conventions and stereotypes of the prisoner-of-war picture, a staple of the British film industry for over a decade.

Poster art by Renato Fratini (1932 – 1973). An Italian commercial artist who specialised in cinema posters. In Italy he worked in Augusto Favalli’s studio, a major producer of Italian posters. He then moved to London at the behest of Eric Pulford, who ran the Downton agency, which had accounts with Rank and several other film companies. There Fratini enjoyed a successful career throughout the 1960s.

Poster design by Eric Pulford (1915 – 2005). Having taken life classes at Leeds College of Art for 5 years Pulford was apprenticed as a commercial artist in 1931 to Gilchrist Bros a process house of 24 staff. Leslie Whitchurch, a partner in a Leicester based agency and also a part-time publicity manager for Rank, became aware of Pulford’s work and asked him to do some freelance work for him. Then in 1943 Rank invited Pulford to start a publicity department for them in London resulting in posters for “Henry V”, “Odd Man Out” and “Oliver Twist”. When the head of Downtons advertising agency, Charles Collins, died, Pulford was asked to take over. He became chairman and managing director but still spent most of his time designing posters. He retired in 1986. Pulford is responsible, either through his own artwork or design, for several hundred posters, some for classic films such as the ones already mentioned plus “Edge of the World”, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “Genevieve”, “Reach for the Sky” and “A Night to Remember”. He is, without doubt, the most important force in British film poster design from the mid-1940s to the early 1980s.

The poster is in very good folded condition.