In the Heat of the Night movie posters
One Sheet poster (27″×41″)
From Wikipedia:
In the Heat of the Night is a 1967 American neo-noir mystery drama film directed by Norman Jewison. It is based on John Ball’s 1965 novel of the same name and tells the story of Virgil Tibbs, a Black police detective from Philadelphia, who becomes involved in a murder investigation in a small town in Mississippi. It stars Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, and was produced by Walter Mirisch. The screenplay was written by Stirling Silliphant.
The film title is based on Allen Cubist. This typeface was drawn by John S. Allen and shown by Photo-Lettering in 1965, together with a seriffed version named Abstract. Cubist is here used in green capitals, with tight letterspacing. Several letter pairs share a stem and form (custom?) ligatures. The wordmark exhibits three “bullet holes” from which concentric circles emanate. It is enclosed in so-called sign painters’ quotes.
The tagline reads “They got a murder on their hands. They don’t know what to do with it.” It appears to be set in Ad Lib. Like Cubist, Ad Lib has inconsistent, “jumping” stroke widths in glyphs where verticals meet horizontals, like A B F E H P R T. Ad Lib was designed by Freeman Craw – allegedly inspired by Harold Adler’s lettering for the 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse – and released by ATF as foundry type in 1961. On closer look, the letterforms on the poster for In the Heat of the Night are not only narrower than in Ad Lib, but also different in details like the angle of counters and terminals. They are either custom drawn, based on Ad Lib. Or they come from an unknown phototype adaptation. Repeating glyphs appear to be identical [edit: it is a phototype adaptation: Filmotype Pioneer].
On the U.S. posters, the names of Poitier and Steiger are shown in Akzidenz-Grotesk Bold Condensed, with most other information in News Gothic Condensed.
The movie logo, isolated
Half Sheet poster (22″×28″)
Spanish One Sheet poster (27.5″×39.5″) by Gráficas Bobes, Barcelona. The translated title here is lettering, emulating the the original wordmark. The names of the leading actors are set in Helvetica Inserat. Smaller text uses regular-wide Akzidenz-Grotesk.
This Australian One Sheet poster (27″×40″) appears to be entirely hand-lettered. It was printed by Robert Burton Pty Ltd, Sydney.
6 Comments on “In the Heat of the Night movie posters”
In 2021, Harold Lohner released a typeface named Stickshift, which he describes as being inspired by the logo of In the Heat of the Night. Judging from the angular O and G and also from the absence of any ligatures, it looks like he based his typeface on the Australian poster shown at the end of the post.
No sample for Filmotype Pioneer?
Now there is! I don’t have access to a full glyph set, alas. The sample thus is an approximation, using the digital Ad Lib BT with mechanically condensed letterforms, for the lack of a better option. It’s not exactly the same, see the comparison below.
Some of the differences are due to Bitstream basing their digitization on alternate glyphs, or maybe working from a different size of the foundry type. Others are inherent to the Filmotype version.
Filmotype carried upright (“AL”) and slanted (“AL-4”) adaptations of Ad Lib. In addition, they also had narrower and wider derivatives, Pioneer and Moose. The reason is that, unlike other phototypesetting devices that came later, the Filmotype didn’t allow letterforms to be optically stretched or otherwise distorted. Each variant had to be provided as a separate font – and got its own name.
Morris, Midway (bold), Prospect (bold italic), and Medina (bold extended) are similar, but further removed, with more even stem widths and a flat-top t. Here’s the whole range as shown in a Filmomaster catalog from around 1974:
Typography of Coop Condensed also reminds me of Filmotype Pioneer. Here I recreated the quote from that movie poster
And now I will compare the quotes between Filmotype Pioneer and Ad Lib BT from the movie poster
Filmotype Pioneer (top), Ad Lib BT (bottom)
Filmotype Pioneer was used on the 1966 album Hollywood Sings? As Impersonated By Guy Marks by Guy Marks.