Spotted on Mastodon:
This was posted by Robin at Dark Corners Reviews, a Youtube channel specialising in, as they say, “the best and worst of genre cinema”; on Mastodon he has an extensive series of great horror film posters through the ages, and though he acknowledges this is hardly a horror film, he posted this one for its sheer misguidedness. I mean, it’s not an inherently bad poster for its vintage—Wiki tells me it opened in the US in early 1960—pretty good exploitation movie art of that time, but it’s completely unrepresentative of the movie; this looks like its trying to sell it as some sort of pulpy erotic melodrama, which is the last thing Ikiru is. It is the thing that the quotes on the poster say, but it’s a story about a minor bureaucrat staring down terminal cancer and wondering how to finally make his life meaningful in the little time remaining to him (it resonates with me an awful lot). The scene with the sexy dancer is a minor moment in the story, and I suspect anyone who saw the film on the basis of the poster was VERY confused. I know American distributors back then used to try and sell foreign films in exploitative style emphasising the sex angle when there was one, but Jesus Christ… In its way it’s almost as bad as those Italian posters for Night of the Living Dead I shared a while back, except this one actually gets the director’s name right…
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