Vintage 2 Freres Appeles Trinita Belgium Movie Poster 🤠 1972 Comedy Spaghetti Western, Cosmopolis Films

Remember Trinity's Two Brothers? 🤠 A Format Only Belgium Used

Size: 14" x 22" ~ Unused archive stock. Little to slight edge wear. Doesn't affect the image or even close.

I say it every time one of these comes through: nobody but Belgium printed posters this size, and they went all out - way showier than anybody else's. Between the size, the graphics, and how few of these survived at all, Belgian posters have become one of my favorite corners of this business, and collectors chase them for exactly the same reasons.

It's 2 Frères Appelés Trinita - 2 Broers Genaamd Trinita in Flemish - the Belgian release poster for a 1972 film, from the distributor named across the top, Cosmopolis Films.

🖼️ What's Printed On the Sheet

Top left, in small block type: COSMOPOLIS FILMS Presente. Under that are the two brothers - a tall man in a black frock coat holding a red Bible with a cross on it, and a grinning cowboy in a tan suit and red vest sitting on a barrel, hat in his hand and rifle standing in front of him. Behind them, a swarm of small yellow cartoon vignettes fills the upper corner: two brawlers stripped down to their underclothes trading punches, a robed figure caught by the collar, riders on horseback with a whip raised, and a fellow tumbling head-first out of a wooden wash-tub with his legs in the air — the comic tone of the whole picture packed into one corner of the sheet. RICHARD HARRISON and DONALD O'BRIEN run down the left side in blue block letters. The title sits boxed in orange — 2 FRÈRES APPELÉS TRINITA — with ANNA ZINNEMAN and GEORGE WANG billed underneath it and the direction credited to REGIE J. LONDON, EASTMANCOLOR printed above the box, and the Flemish title, 2 BROERS GENAAMD TRINITA, banded in blue below it. Down at the foot, in small type, sits the printer's own imprint: Imp. Wagram, Brussels.

🎥 Two Brothers, One Inheritance

Jesse & Lester — Due fratelli in un posto chiamato Trinità in Italian, and Two Brothers in a Place Called Trinity in English — reached screens on 27 April 1972. Richard Harrison, who also co-wrote, co-directed, and produced the picture, plays Jesse, a womanising gunslinger. Donald O'Brien is his half-brother Lester, an honest Mormon; Anna Zinnemann - spelled Zinneman with one N on the poster - plays Elena Von Schaffer; and George Wang fills out the cast, the same George Wang who turns up in Tuez Django! The two brothers inherit a piece of land together, and the joke is that they want completely different things done with it: Jesse wants a bordello on it, Lester wants a church. That tug-of-war, riding the wave of the "Trinity" comedy-westerns of the early '70s, is what this poster was printed to sell.

🎬 Two Names, One Director's Chair

The sheet's own director credit reads "Regie J. London"; the film itself is credited to Renzo Genta, working alongside Richard Harrison. Here's the fun part: there was no J. London. On screen the picture is credited to "James London," and that's Richard Harrison himself, directing under a made-up name. Harrison said that directing and starring under his own name would have "cheapened the film," and the story goes he borrowed the surname out of a lifelong admiration for the writer Jack London. The way Harrison told it in an interview, he let Genta go three days into shooting and took over the directing himself. So the man whose name runs down the left side of this sheet turns up a second time in the corner of the title box, just wearing a borrowed name - I get a kick out of that every time I look at it.

⭐ The Man Who Said No to Sergio Leone

Richard Harrison has a bigger place in movie history than this picture - he's the one who said no to the lead in A Fistful of Dollars and sent Sergio Leone to a young TV cowboy named Clint Eastwood. That one decision helped spark the entire spaghetti-western boom that a picture like this was still riding a decade later. By the time Jesse & Lester came around, Harrison wasn't just fronting the picture — he was co-writing it, co-directing it, and producing it too.

🗄️ Where This Came From

This poster comes from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007. Cosmopolis operated out of Brussels, and trade records place the company there from the late 1940s clear through the 1980s. I keep the whole archive dark and climate controlled - steady 72°F, under 40% humidity - so any age a sheet shows, it brought with it. I haven't seen another copy of this Belgian printing offered anywhere, so it's a rare one - and once these are gone, they're gone.