Spaghetti westerns earned their name because they generally premiered in Italy and the studios that financed them were usually Italian, but the films were often predominantly shot in Spain. The climax of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with its unforgettable three-way gunfight between Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef, was shot outside the town of Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain, in the province of Burgos, in a unique circular cemetery put together by set builders. In the script it was called the Sad Hill Cemetery. After the shoot Sad Hill was abandoned, and soon nature began to overtake the set.

That would have been the end of the story, but a group of film fans calling themselves the Sad Hill Cultural Association decided Sad Hill was a historic film treasure deserving of resurrection, and pledged to rescue it from oblivion. Toiling in their spare time, they labored with pick, hoe, and shovel to clear the site. They needed money to accomplish the work, so they set up a crowdfunding campaign with a unique enticement—those who contributed would have their names inscribed on the restored grave markers. The restoration efforts are finally complete, and the famous graveyard has been returned to its former state.

Spanish filmmaker Guillermo de Oliveira shot a documentary about the salvation efforts, and hopes to release a film titled Sad Hill Unearthed. He's now trying to raise money to pay for the rights to clips and music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with the plan to premiere thefinished product at film festivals and share the restorer's unique dedication with the world. Meanwhile Sad Hill will become not only a tourist attraction for people passing through the province of Burgos, but a destination for those who contributed to its renewal. As Oliveira commented, “It’s the only cemetery in the world where you can visit your own grave.”

Squirrelly young criminal Lightfoot, played by Jeff Bridges, is just the kind of guy you want to smack. Always running his mouth, never paying attention, totally wrapped up in himself. He picks up John Doherty, played by the older Clint Eastwood, and the two form a bromance. During their travels, Lightfoot learns that Doherty is a famed bank robber known as the Thunderbolt, for his usage of an anti-aircraft cannon to penetrate a bank vault. Thunderbolt has two ex-partners on his trail who are seeking a cache of hidden money from a previous job. The money is hidden behind a blackboard in an old, one-room schoolhouse, but when Thunderbolt and Lightfoot travel to the site of the school it's been replaced a modern new building.

Jeff Bridges' Oscar nominated performance is a reminder that Millennial, Generation X, Beat Generation, et al, are just marketing terms used for social engineering. Every young generation is infuriating to the older ones. It's genetic, not social. Lightfoot is impatient, oblivious, andrude—like someone raised on mobile devices, only decades before those existed for people to focus their ire upon. A constant underlying concern is whether he will finally go too far and get his ass seriously beaten, or maybe even get killed. He's likeable, of course, but he's also a protagonist. If you met him on the street you'd wonder if he was ever dropped on his head as an infant—and then proceed to drop him on his head. And no—he doesn't turn out to be secretly a criminal genius. He's exactly the constant annoyance he seems.

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.

While we’re on the subject of screen legends, here’s one from a different era—Clint Eastwood, on a Japanese poster for Magnum Force, second installment in his five-part Dirty Harry franchise. Having watched Eastwood’s middle-aged disciplinarian Harry Callahan bust caps on various hapless San Francisco miscreants in installment one, seeing him begin to understand in chapter two that corruption starts at the top feels like witnessing major personal growth. It’s just the realization you’d expect him to have given the time period—America’s cherry had been popped by Watergate and Callahan now personified the country's fresh understanding of reality. The series would eventually loose steam, but Magnum Force strikes a balance between the old reactionary Callahan and the new mature one that makes the film the best in the franchise, in our opinion. It opened in the U.S. thirty-seven years ago this month. 

Above is the entire series of Dirty Harry book covers, nicely capturing Clint Eastwood’s famous don’t-fuck-with-me glint. The series, which is known collectively as The Further Adventures of Harry Callahan, was authored from 1981 to 1983 by several people using the psuedonym Dane Hartman.

Assorted album sleeves from Argentine soundtrack maestro Lalo Schifrin, circa 1970s.