Western Films Through Polish Eyes

Kevin Mulroy laughs at my first question about the show opening tomorrow at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage.

Everyone who hears about the exhibition, titled “Western Amerykanski: Polish Poster Art and the Western,” has the same initial response: “Why Poland?”

“We joke about it,” says Mulroy, director of the Autry’s research center, who has been answering the query ever since he proposed the show. The short answer is that the poster became the premiere art form in Poland after World War II and that many of its posters for American westerns are extraordinary works of art.

The long answer is contained in a companion volume to the show, edited by Mulroy and published by University of Washington Press.

Like Prince Charles and Ringo Starr, Mulroy became smitten with American westerns via TV and movies while growing up in his native England. He first experienced the power of the Polish posters for “Shane,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and other American westerns while working at the Griffith Park museum.

Because the museum is named after the late Gene Autry, it has had to fight the misconception that its collection consists of little more than the contents of Gene’s closet. But the Autry has always had a cosmopolitan notion of what should be in a museum of Western heritage, and so, some years ago, it began to collect posters for American westerns from around the world.

As a rule, Mulroy says, posters from Italy, France and elsewhere in Western Europe tend to be much like their American counterparts, only more so, with the cowboy heroes standing even taller in their high-heeled boots and the villains crawling even lower on their bellies.

But the posters that arrived at the Autry from Poland were a different animal altogether. As Mulroy recalls, where the rest of Europe produced posters to bring audiences into the movies being advertised, those from Poland stood on their own as art objects. And instead of the hyper-realistic iconography that was the norm on Western European posters, the images on the Polish variety were often bizarre, even surreal, including “cowboys mutilated, at the gates of hell, or crawling headfirst down giant gun barrels.”

A number of factors converged to make Polish movie posters so extraordinary, Mulroy explains. Somewhat surprisingly, the Communist government in Poland became a generous supporter of poster artists, and perhaps because the government dismissed these movie posters as mere advertising, state censors failed to see the subversive messages they sometimes carried.

One of those messages is that violence always has terrible consequences. Violence doesn’t equal power as it so often does in American films and the posters for them. In the Polish posters, violence inevitably ends in loss and death, not surprising, Mulroy theorizes, in a nation that was devastated by the Nazis and subjected to Soviet domination.

Artistically, the posters benefit from the radical tradition in Eastern European art.

“The Polish Poster School is really the natural inheritor of the Russian avant-garde,” says Mulroy of these often strangely beautiful posters in which saddles sprout wings, Indians become birds and hands turn into guns. As he points out, metamorphosis is one of the poster artists’ favorite themes.

In some cases, visitors to the show will have the opportunity to compare the Polish poster to the American one for the same film. According to Mulroy, works by some of the finest artists of post-war Poland are among the 115 posters in the show, which continues through Jan. 30.

Jan Lenica, one of the Polish artists represented in the exhibition, has compared the Polish poster to the Trojan horse. In at least one instance, that is no hyperbole. One poster in the show changed history and is guaranteed to give you goose bumps.

As Mulroy explains, a still from 1952’s “High Noon” was appropriated by the supporters of Solidarity and became the image around which the Polish independence movement rallied in 1989, as the nation faced its first free elections in more than 40 years.

The poster makes the satiric political images of Los Angeles’ Robbie Conal look like kids’ stuff. Designed by Polish artist Tomasz Sarnecki, the poster features Gary Cooper’s Sheriff Kane as he strides fearlessly to face his enemies. In the Polish version, the sheriff holds a ballot in his hand, instead of a gun, and he walks in front of the word “Solidarity.” The bottom of the poster announces: “It’s High Noon, June 4, 1989.”

Plato advised, “Poets have power. Kill them.” Visual artists have power, too, especially when their subversive work is plastered on the walls of cities where the state controls the vast majority of images.

Printed in Italy, the “High Noon” poster was air-dropped on Warsaw, Mulroy says, “and on election morning, an army of Gary Coopers, pasted overnight by Solidarity supporters opposite Communist Party headquarters, greeted officials as they left the building.”

People who were there have no doubt that the “High Noon” poster helped the good guys win.

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Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.