Dog Day Afternoon movie posters
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.
U.S. One Sheet Style B poster
Original U.S. insert movie poster.
1 Comment on “Dog Day Afternoon movie posters”
The thin sans used for the credits on the third poster appears to be Photo-Lettering’s News Gothic Condensed. This adaptation expands ATF’s original design to ten numbered weights, with #1 being of a similar light weight as Lightline Gothic. It offered various alternates, including a single-story g, a spurless G, a tailless t, an i with round dot, a straight-tailed Q, and no less than four different a’s – one of which is used here.