WIND CANNOT READ

Original British 22 inch x 28 inch Half-Sheet Poster for the 1958 Ralph Thomas Romance THE WIND CANNOT READ, based on the novel by Richard Mason and starring Dirk Bogarde, Yoko Tani, Ronald Lewis, John Fraser, Anthony Bushell, Marne Maitland, Michael Medwin, Donald Pleasence, Tadashi Ikeda, Tony Wager, Heihachirô Ôkawa and Avice Landone.

An RAF officer meets, falls in love with, and marries a Japanese girl in India during the Second World War. He is captured and tortured by the Japanese but escapes and gets back to India to find his wife dying.

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”. Rank producer Betty Box insisted that Eric Pulford should produce the posters for all her films. This resulted in the agency doing all of Rank’s films. 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 Beuing 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.

Printed by W.E. Berry, Ltd., Bradford

The poster is in very good folded condition.