“I can’t see you, but I know you’re there.” For me, the great Peter Falk, who passed away a week ago at the age of 83, earned his angel wings for three pictures: Wings of Desire, A Woman Under the Influence, and this terrific gritty sports comedy/road movie by Robert Aldrich. Made in 1981 (it was Aldrich’s final film) and released abroad as The California Dolls, …All the Marbles stars Falk as the go-for-broke manager of a pair of female tag-team wrestlers. As cheesy as the poster looks at first glance it has a zingy energy (with all that type on the diagonal) that is actually quite unlike the downbeat feel of much of the film.
Unfortunately there are not many other great Falk posters: most of his later ones are pretty awful. I already wrote about one of the best posters for Husbands (and my ambivalence about that film) a while ago. Most of the posters for Wings of Desire naturally feature Bruno Ganz and Solveig Dommartin, but the Italian poster (Il Cielo Sopra Berlino), perhaps due to Falk’s TV celebrity in Italy, features Falk as the film’s star. And then there’s the French poster for A Woman Under the Influence which actually identifies (and misspells) Falk as “Colombo.”
All the Marbles is available from the Warner Archives and is highly recommended. You can watch the trailer here.
