There are precious few movies that truly age well, and far fewer series. But like the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western series colloquially known as the Man with No Name Trilogy, these Japanese posters have stood the test of time. From top to bottom they are for A Fistful of Dollars, aka Koya no yojimbo, For a Few Dollars More, aka Yuuhi no ganman, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, aka Zoku yuuhi no ganman. There are some who say Eastwood’s character actually has a name in these films, but we beg to differ. In the first he’s referred to once as Joe, which is a name, yes, but more likely is a tag, like calling him “hotshot,” or “buddy.” In the second he’s referred to as Manco, which colloquially means “one armed” in Spanish. And in the third film he’s referred to as Blondie. But whatever his real name was, probably everyone thought of him the same way—as trouble. 

While we’re aware that web searches generate different results depending on the where and when, we were still a bit thrilled when we did a random search today on Italian poster artist Sandro Symeoni and came up as the number one result. That has to do with having featured his art in three different posts over the last couple of years. Today, we have another rare Symeoni, a piece of production art he painted for the Clint Eastwood western A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. It’s truly brilliant. We also located several more of Symeoni’s posters and uploaded those below. Symeoni died in 2007. There was a posthumous exhibition in Italy last year that raised his profile a bit, and we suspect collectors will focus on his work even more in the coming years. If you want to see a bit more on him, definitely do so at our previous posts here, here, and here.

Back in April we showed you a nice poster for the Italian sexploitation documentary Inghilterra nuda, and talked briefly about the proliferation of such films during the ’60s and ’70s. The promo art was painted by the legendary Sandro Symeoni, an Italian illustrator who has more than 3,000 posters and record sleeves to his credit. Below is a small collection of this master’s work for your Sunday enjoyment. If these pique your interest, a cursory search on the web will turn up many more pieces.