Vintage A Tout Casser (1968) Johnny Hallyday Belgian Movie Poster 🎤 Eddie Constantine, John Berry, Buigen of Barsten

Johnny Hallyday on a Belgian Poster? 🎤 Vintage A Tout Casser (1968) Movie Poster, Eddie Constantine

Size: 14" x 22" ~ Unused archive stock. This stunning movie memorabilia is in excellent condition, with little to no wear. Everything here is stored in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled - whatever age a sheet shows, it had before it came to me.

This one comes out of the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007. Belgium is the only country in the world that printed movie posters at this size, and they were very flamboyant compared to their counterparts across the globe. Between the size, the graphics, and how few of them ever turn up, Belgian affiches like this one are a favorite among poster collectors, and I get why every time I unroll one. These came out of one Belgian archive, and once they're gone, they're gone.

🎤 What's Printed on It

• Johnny Hallyday in white brush script on a purple band across the top
• A TOUT CASSER in white block capitals, with EASTMANCOLOR set in a burst of lines beneath it
• Hallyday mid-song, eyes shut, the microphone cord looping down beside him, in a patterned jacket over white flared trousers
• A man in a dark turtleneck, mouth wide open, one arm thrown up and pointing to the sky
• Riders on motorcycles, big round headlights and a handlebar mirror up front
• The round seal of LES FILMS DU DRAGON, dragon and all, tucked among the bikes
• BUIGEN OF BARSTEN in heavy block letters along the bottom
• Dark purple-brown ink on bright yellow stock, with white highlights, inside a white margin

🐉 A Later Belgian Release

That dragon seal belongs to Les Films du Dragon, a real Belgian distributor. Cinema Belgica, Belgium's own film-history archive, dates its censorship visas from September 1975 to October 1988. À tout casser itself opened in 1968, so this sheet is a Belgian re-release, printed sometime between 1975 and 1988. It's still an honest period poster, printed for a real theatrical run, just a later one. Dragon's other Belgian titles from those years included King Kong Escapes and a run of Italian and Hong Kong action pictures, so this was squarely their kind of film to put back on Belgian screens.

🎬 The Film: À Tout Casser, 1968

À tout casser is a French-Italian crime comedy that opened in France on October 2, 1968, directed by John Berry. Eddie Constantine plays Ric, Johnny Hallyday plays Frankie, and Michel Serrault plays Aldo Morelli - only Hallyday's name made it onto this sheet, but all three carry the picture. Frankie and his friends open a nightclub, and right below them the gangster Morelli is planning a heist; the racket from upstairs drives him to try everything to get them thrown out. And it's no small-time job, either - Morelli is after a priceless tiara, the finest piece in an exhibition of the Vatican's treasure. Frankie's crowd are long-haired kids on big motorcycles, which is who you see on the bikes along the bottom of this sheet, and they pick up an ally in Ric Benton, Constantine's American adventurer, who has some old scores of his own to settle with Morelli. It goes out with a bang, too: a pitched battle in a cemetery, then Frankie and Benton roaring off toward Rome by Harley-Davidson to hand the tiara back to the Vatican. It runs 88 minutes, and it opens on Hallyday's own title song, "À tout casser," which he co-wrote with Georges Aber and Tommy Brown. English-speaking audiences knew it as The Great Chase or Breaking It Up; in Italy it played as Quella carogna di Frank Mitraglia. Belgium got its own two-language treatment: A TOUT CASSER in French up top, BUIGEN OF BARSTEN, "bend or burst," in Flemish along the bottom.

⭐ Johnny Hallyday, the Boy Who Took an American's Name

Jean-Philippe Léo Smet was born June 15, 1943, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. His father, Léon Smet, was Belgian, and left the family within months - which makes it feel right that his face ended up on a Belgian poster. The story goes his stage name came by way of Oklahoma: a cousin-in-law, the Oklahoma-born performer Lee Halliday, became a father figure to the boy, introduced him to American music, and the name Hallyday stuck. His first single, "T'aimer follement," came out in March 1960; by 1961 "Viens danser le twist" had sold more than a million copies and earned him a gold disc. He's been called "the biggest rock star you've never heard of" outside the French-speaking world, and he earned that with 79 albums over 57 years, more than 110 million records sold, and more than 40 films from 1955 on, working with Jean-Luc Godard and Costa-Gavras along the way. Plenty of people just called him the French Elvis, and his name alone was billing enough for this poster. When he died of lung cancer on December 5, 2017, at 74, a million people lined the streets of Paris for his funeral procession, and 15 million more watched at home.

🎥 John Berry, the Blacklisted Director

Born Jak Szold in the Bronx on September 6, 1917, Berry was on a vaudeville stage by the age of four. He worked with Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on its 1937 debut, assisted Welles in 1942, and directed Casbah (1948) and He Ran All the Way (1951) in Hollywood. In 1950 he agreed to direct a short documentary about the Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters and directors headed for jail after they refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in April 1951 fellow director Edward Dmytryk named him as a communist in his own testimony - which ended Berry's American career on the spot. He moved his family to Paris and kept working, directing Tamango (1958) and, ten years later, À tout casser. Once the blacklist weakened in 1960, when Dalton Trumbo got screen credit on Exodus and Spartacus, Berry went back to American work too, later directing Claudine (1974) and Thieves (1977). He died in Paris on November 29, 1999, at 82.

🕵️ Eddie Constantine, Another American Who Landed in Paris

The film's other star came from Los Angeles. Eddie Constantine was born Edward Israel Constantinowsky on October 29, 1913, the son of a Russian jeweler and a Polish mother. His American career never took off, so he moved to Europe in the early 1950s, where Édith Piaf cast him in her musical and had him help translate her 1956 album into English. He became a major French star as Lemmy Caution, the hard-boiled detective from Peter Cheyney's novels, and Jean-Luc Godard cast him as Caution again in Alphaville (1965). He went on to work with Fassbinder and Lars von Trier, settled in Germany, and died in Wiesbaden on February 25, 1993.

🌈 The Eastmancolor Line

The small EASTMANCOLOR credit under the title names the film stock. Kodak introduced Eastmancolor in 1950, and it became one of the first widely successful single-strip color processes, simpler than Technicolor's three-strip rig, which it eventually displaced. The name honors Kodak's founder, George Eastman.