Movie poster

Prince of the City is a Sidney Lumet film from 1981 about New York police officer Daniel Ciello (Treat Williams) delving into his own city's police corruption. Vincent Pacella’s Collegiate is used for the title. Memphis Light is used for supporting text.

[More info on IMDb]

Cover of the soundtrack by Paul Chihara, released on Varèse Sarabande. [More info on Discogs]

U.S. One Sheet poster

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) sits somewhere between crime, true fiction and comedy. The plot revolves around a simple robbery that fails and then escalates into a live television viewing smash hit.

The poster design is credited to Bill Gold, a designer who worked on thousands of movie posters in his long career. Whether all three posters in this post are his is not entirely clear. The first two images show straightforward posters, with ITC Bolt doing a convincing imitation of the raw accent with which movie star Al Pacino spits out his lines. The last image shows a different idea, typeset with slightly modified Neil Bold.

In the film, the robbery is committed by two men. Pacino's sidekick is played by John Cazale who dons a somewhat unpleasant hairstyle (long hair with receding hairline, brrr). The commercial department apparently did not consider him a suitable poster boy.

[More info on IMDb]

U.S. One Sheet Style B poster

Original U.S. insert movie poster.

Title sequence for Sidney Lumet's 1971 American crime film The Anderson Tapes, designed by Frank Hillsberg, founder of F. Hillsberg, Inc. The film is based on the 1970 novel of the same name by Lawrence Sanders.

The titles are set in House Cybernetic, as seen in Photo-Lettering’s One Line Manual of Styles, 1971, under the “Computer and Magnetic Ink Styles” category.

“Many of his fellow officers considered him the most dangerous man alive—an honest cop.”

Serpico is a 1973 American biographical crime film starring Al Pacino. It’s based on the book by Peter Maas and was directed by Sidney Lumet.

IMP Awards credits this poster to the advertising firm Diener-Hauser (a.k.a. Diener Hauser Bates), and it was possibly designed by Paul Crifo. Ed Benguiat says in this 2000 talk (01:06:44) he created the title/logo itself, using “just a plain typeface.” This typeface appears to be Cadence as shown in Lettergraphics’ 1976 catalog, horizontally expanded. Castcraft’s Encyclopedia of Phototype Styles from 1978 shows the same face with the alias Marcher.

Ed Benguiat was the art director of Photo-Lettering, Inc., a New York-based competitor of Lettergraphics in California and Castcraft in Chicago. PLINC had a similar design in their own library, Pacella Decatur, but several of its letterforms including E L R require modifications to match the movie logo, which would be inconsistent with Benguiat’s statement. [edit: via Ray Cruz, I learned that Cadence is a design of his. It’s shown in a catalog by Schaedler. PLINC had closer ties to this type studio in New York, at least they carried some of their designs, like Loose New Roman and Cucumber.].

The small type is set in Eurostile. Judging from the top of t, the tagline seems to be in a phototype version of Venus Extended (dreiviertelfett?). Digital approximations include Vonness Expanded (Font Bureau, 2007) and Venusian Bold Extended (Wooden Type Fonts, 2018).

One-line sample for Cadence from Lettergraphics: The Complete Library, Collectors Edition, 1976

Still from the film trailer

Adaptation of the movie poster for the cover of the soundtrack album with music by Mikis Theodorakis

The Italian movie poster maintains the typographic choices made for the US original, but adds another (extended) style of Eurostile.

Czechoslovak poster from 1981 for The Wiz (1978) by Sidney Lumet, starring Diana Ross(ová).