80 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019
POSTERS^COURTESYOF^HERITAGEAUCTIONS^AND^TOMIUNGERER.COMGRAPHIC DETAIL The art of the movie poster by Adrian Curry
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1964)
Monterey Pop(D.A. Pennebaker, USA, 1968)
Too Far to Walk (Otto Preminger, unrealized)TOMI UNGERERW
hen otto preminger was looking to
get with the times in the late 1960s and
optioned John Hersey’s youth-centric
LSD novel Too Far to Walk, he bypassed his regular
designer Saul Bass (with whom he’d been working
since 1953) and instead hired counterculture phe-
nomenon Tomi Ungerer to create some preproduction
key art. Ungerer, who died earlier this year at the age
of 87, was at the time among the most famous chil-
dren’s book authors and illustrators in America, but
also a notorious maverick. In 1967 he made a searing
statement with a series of anti–Vietnam War posters,
the most famous of which shows a white arm shoving
the Statue of Liberty down a yellow figure’s throat.
Ungerer, who was born in 1931 in the French-German
province of Alsace—he never felt either French or
German—moved to New York in 1956 with $60 and a
stack of artworks (which he carted around in a Trojan
condom box) during the golden age of Madison
Avenue illustration. His spare, sketchy style, coupled
with his acerbic humor and satirical bent, was a breath
of fresh air in both advertising and children’s books.
He found almost immediate success with his first
book The Mellops Go Flyingin 1957, and published
over 140 more in his lifetime. For his friend Stanley
Kubrick, he illustrated the poster for Dr. Strangelove
(a rejected design on his website shows a general with
a mushroom cloud in place of a head). He created
iconic posters for The Village Voice (“Expect the Unex-
pected”) and The New York Times, but made only one
other movie poster: for D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey
Popin 1968—a bawdy, ejaculatory piece pointing
toward the erotic art that became his major interest in
the early ’70s and got his children’s books banned
from libraries in the U.S. for over 40 years. Ungerer
left New York for Nova Scotia and then rural Ireland,
and became a somewhat forgotten man, though in the
last decade or so of his life the opening of the Tomi
Ungerer museum in Strasbourg, France, the repub-
lishing of his books in the U.S., and the wonderful
2012 documentary Far Out Isn’t Far Enoughreestab-
lished his reputation. Too Far to Walk, meanwhile, was
never made; Preminger channeled his counterculture
energy into Skidooinstead, the poster for which has a
tiny Ungerer-esque character (unsigned but probably
his) popping out of a pair of unbuttoned pants. Adrian Currywrites about movie posters for
mubi.com and is the design director for Zeitgeist
Films and Kino Lorber.