Frazetta
The iconic fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta, who died earlier this week, also accepted the movie poster commission. Many of his posters, as seen in this post on film writer Glenn Kenny's Some Came Running blog, cast him as a sexier alternative to Jack Davis. The first poster shown, for Clint Eastwood's The Gauntlet, transposes his heroic sword and sorcery imagery to the modern day. Its familiar faces and contemporary setting make his unmistakable style stand out all the more.
Look at the bizarre biomorphic shapes that make up the rips on Sondra Locke's jeans. No pair of jeans ever tore like that. Nor do the shards of glass making up the broken bus window resemble any known shatter pattern. The bus itself looks more like a metal-skinned monster than a vehicle.
The weirdly sculpted shapes that make up the mighty thews of any of his barbarian heroes likewise depart wildly from anatomy as we know it. But when you're looking at a Frazetta painting, you want to live in a universe where torn denim stretches across a thigh like that. Its calculated wrongness establishes itself as preferable to mere visual observation. The force of his stylization, simultaneously muscular and impressionistic, catches and holds the eye. It is pulp illustration lifted to the realm of visual poetry, equally at home on the cover of a glossy limited edition or, in crudely airbrushed duplicate, on the side of a 70s stoner van. Many imitated him, but no one succeeded in capturing his off-kilter mastery of color, line and form.