Vintage 1967 Les Longs Jours de la Vengeance Belgium Movie Poster 🤠 Giuliano Gemma Spaghetti Western

Size: 22 x 14 inches

🤠 What Do The Count of Monte Cristo and a Spaghetti Western Have in Common?

This film — and this striking Belgian poster made to sell it. This is the original Belgian theatrical poster for Les Longs Jours de la Vengeance, the 1967 Italian-Spanish spaghetti western known in English as Long Days of Vengeance. The sheet is dominated by a huge painted close-up of its star under a wide cowboy hat, and it carries both of its Belgian titles: the French Les Longs Jours de la Vengeance in blazing red, and the Flemish De Lange Dagen van de Wraak in yellow along the base. Printed and released by the Belgian distributor Cosmopolis Films, this is genuine new old stock — unused distributor archive paper — and everything here comes straight from the poster in the photographs.

🎬 A Revenge Western With a Literary Heart

The film is a classic tale of injustice and payback, and it wears an unexpectedly grand influence on its sleeve: its story is drawn from Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, transplanted to the American frontier. After three brutal years of hard labor in a desert prison — framed by three men for the murder of his own father — former sheriff Ted Barnett escapes and sets out on a long, patient reckoning with the men who destroyed him. It is the Monte Cristo engine of wrongful imprisonment and methodical vengeance, poured into the spaghetti-western mold, which is exactly why it plays as more than a simple shoot-'em-up.

🎭 Giuliano Gemma, and a Director's Only Western

The star painted across this poster is Giuliano Gemma, one of the true icons of the spaghetti-western boom — and, in the fashion of the era, the Belgian sheet bills him under his English stage name, "Montgomery Wood," right beside his real one. He is joined by the distinguished Spanish actor Francisco Rabal and by Gabriella Giorgelli. And there is a real piece of film-history trivia printed right on the poster: the direction is credited to "Stan Vance" — the international pseudonym of the respected Italian director Florestano Vancini. Vancini was known for serious dramatic cinema, and this film is famous among genre historians as the only western he ever directed, which gives the poster a genuine footnote-in-the-history-books quality that most westerns of the period simply don't carry.

🇧🇪 The Belgian Poster, a World of Its Own

Belgian film posters are collected as their own distinct category, and this sheet shows exactly why. Belgium is the one country whose distributors did not simply reprint the film's home-country artwork; they commissioned their own original local artwork and printed it in Belgium's own oversized format, a size used almost nowhere else. So a Belgian poster is frequently a completely different image from the Italian or Spanish campaign for the same film. This one also carries the format's signature dual French and Flemish titling — the unmistakable mark of a genuine Belgian original, and one of the quickest ways to recognize the type.

🎨 What the Artwork Shows — and What It's Printed On

The composition is bold and cinematic: a towering, sun-browned portrait of Gemma's gunfighter under his hat, his gaze fixed and hard, with a column of black-and-white scene stills — a railroad, a beating, a saloon standoff, a tender moment — running down the left edge like frames from the film itself. The billing is printed clean and clear: "Giuliano Gemma (Montgomery Wood)," "Francisco Rabal," "Gabriella Giorgelli," and "Regie: Stan Vance," with the Technicolor and Techniscope credits and the "Cosmopolis-Films présente" line at the top. Along the very bottom the sheet notes it was "Imprimé en Belgique" — printed in Belgium — the small confirmation of a genuine period print.

📽️ Out of the Cosmopolis Films Archive

This poster survives because it was never used. It comes from a single Belgian collection assembled in 2007 out of the surviving archive of Cosmopolis Films — the very distributor named at the top of the sheet — a body of unsold, unhung distributor stock preserved as a whole before it could be scattered and lost. Movie posters were printed to advertise films to cinemas, not to be sold to the public, so the vast majority were displayed and destroyed. The ones held back in a distributor's own archive are the rare survivors, and this is one of them: paper that went straight from the press into storage and stayed there.

📅 About the two dates: the poster was printed for the film's own cinema release. 2007 is only the year the surviving distributor archive was gathered and kept together - it is not a printing or reprint date.

🖼️ Ways to Live With It

• 🖼️ Frame it and let that towering gunfighter portrait anchor a wall on its own.
• 🤠 Group it with other spaghetti-western or classic-western memorabilia for a themed room.
• 🎬 Hang it in a home theater or den devoted to the golden age of Italian westerns.
• 🐎 Pair it with rustic or Western décor — leather, wood, and warm earth tones set it off.
• 🎁 Give it to the western-film lover or the Giuliano Gemma fan who will know the name at a glance.

🎁 Who Collects These

This poster finds its people among spaghetti-western collectors, devotees of Giuliano Gemma, admirers of the director Florestano Vancini curious about his lone venture into the genre, and Belgian poster specialists who prize the format for its locally commissioned artwork and bilingual design. The bold portrait artwork also gives it easy appeal as striking graphic wall art in its own right.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

What film is this poster for?

The 1967 Italian-Spanish spaghetti western Les Longs Jours de la Vengeance (I lunghi giorni della vendetta / Long Days of Vengeance), starring Giuliano Gemma.

Who directed it, and why does the poster say "Stan Vance"?

"Stan Vance" is the international pseudonym of the Italian director Florestano Vancini. This is famously the only western he ever directed.

Why is Giuliano Gemma billed as "Montgomery Wood"?

"Montgomery Wood" was the English stage name Gemma used on many of his early westerns; the Belgian poster prints both names together.

Why does the Belgian poster differ from the Italian one?

Belgium commissioned its own original artwork and printed it in its own oversized bilingual format, so the Belgian sheet is frequently a different image from the Italian or Spanish campaign.

Is this an original or a reprint?

An original piece of unused new old stock from the film's Belgian theatrical release — distributor archive paper, not a modern reproduction.

🌵 Giuliano Gemma and the Spaghetti-Western Boom

To place this poster properly, you have to place its star. Giuliano Gemma was one of the defining faces of the spaghetti-western explosion — an athletic, charismatic leading man who, alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood and Franco Nero, helped turn the Italian-made western into a global phenomenon in the 1960s. Early in that run he was often billed under the American-sounding stage name Montgomery Wood, a marketing habit of the era meant to make these Italian productions play like Hollywood pictures abroad — which is exactly why this Belgian poster prints both names together. To a western collector, a Gemma title from the height of the boom is prime material, and his painted portrait dominating this sheet is the reason it commands attention.

🎬 A Serious Director's Only Western

The credit that makes this film a genuine footnote in the history books is "Stan Vance." Behind that Anglicized pseudonym stood Florestano Vancini, a respected Italian director best known for serious, socially engaged dramatic cinema — a filmmaker of real critical standing who dipped into the popular western only this once. That makes Long Days of Vengeance a genuine curiosity: the single genre western made by a director otherwise associated with prestige drama, which lends the film a craft and structure that genre historians single out. Paired with a story borrowed from Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, it is a western with unusually literary and artistic bloodlines for its kind — and this Belgian poster is where all of that history is printed in one place.

🎨 A Portrait Built to Command a Wall

It is worth appreciating this poster purely as an image. The design is dominated by a single, towering painted portrait — Gemma's gunfighter under his wide hat, sun-browned and hard-eyed, filling most of the sheet — balanced against a neat column of black-and-white scene stills down one edge, like frames lifted straight from the film. That contrast of one large, warm, painterly face against a strip of crisp little photographs is a classic and effective poster composition, and it makes the sheet read powerfully from across a room while rewarding a closer look. As graphic art it stands entirely on its own, quite apart from the western it was drawn to sell.

✨ Why It Matters

This is a spaghetti western with real depth behind it — a Monte Cristo revenge story, a bona-fide genre icon in Giuliano Gemma, and the singular distinction of being the only western a serious Italian dramatic director ever made — all captured in Belgium's own bold, locally commissioned, bilingual artwork, printed by Cosmopolis Films and preserved unused out of that distributor's archive since 2007. The entire surviving supply of this material sits together in one place, and the copies guaranteed a future are simply the ones collectors take home. Own this one, and you are keeping a genuine, unrepeatable piece of western-film history.