NORMANDIE - NIEMEN 1960 Jean Dreville PETER STRAUSFELD UK ACADEMY QUAD POSTER

Original British 30 inch x 40 inch Quad Poster for the 1960 Jean Dreville & Damir Vyatich-Berezhnykh War film NORMANDIE - NIEMEN starring Marc Cassot, Giani Esposito, Pierre Trabaud, Georges Rivière, Gérard Buhr, Jean-Claude Michel, Clément-Thierry, Jacques Richard, Roland Menard, André Oumansky and Jean Houbé.

A certain number of French fighter pilots who will not accept the Second Armistice at Compiègne nor Vichy’s orders decide to join the USSR. Once they have reached Moscow they resume training and form a squadron they call “Normandie”. Reinforced in 1944, the squadron wins many victories. Following the acts of valor displayed by its pilots during the Battle of the Nieman River, it becomes the “Normandie-Niemen” squadron for the rest of time.

The poster art is by Peter Strausfeld. Strausfeld was interned in the Isle of Man at the Onchan Internment Camp during the War where he met the Austrian producer George Hoellering. In 1947 Hoellering opened the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street and invited Strausfeld to produce some posters for the cinema which he did in wood and lino-cuts till his death in 1980.

The Academy Cinema, built in 1913, was saved from conversion to a shopping arcade in 1928 by Elsie Cohen of the original Film Society, who proceeded to run it as an arthouse which is how it was ran till it's closure in 1986.

The posters became a London landmark, in fact very few were used outside of London, resulting in very small print runs of 3-500. Most of these posters were printed at the prestigious Westminster Press and Ward & Foxlow.

The poster is in very good unfolded (rolled) condition.