Vintage Joe Dakota Belgium Movie Poster 🤠 1971 Spaghetti Western, Richard Harrison, Cosmopolis Films

Remember Joe Dakota? 🤠 An Original Belgian Sheet for Joe Dakota

Size: 14" x 22" ~ Unused archive stock. Little to no wear.

It's an original Belgian release poster for Joe Dakota, a 1971 spaghetti western, printed black on bright yellow in the small upright size Belgian affiches are famous for. Across the top it reads COSMOPOLIS FILMS presente, then JOE DAKOTA stacked in huge slab capitals, with RICHARD HARRISON, ANTONIO CANTAFORA and FRANCA POLESELLO billed underneath, REGIE: HAL BRADY, and EASTMANCOLOR / TOTALSCOPE printed at the lower left. The art itself is blunt and effective: a gunman in a wide hat and long coat standing over a man he's just knocked down, revolver pressed into him. Down at the foot, small and easy to miss, runs the printer's line: Imp. WAGRAM, Bruxelles.

🎬 Hal Brady Was Emilio Miraglia

Hal Brady, the director named on the poster, was really Emilio Miraglia (1924-1982), who that year and the next made the two gothic gialli people remember him for - The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave in 1971 and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times in 1972, his final film. Joe Dakota was written by Jean Josipovici and Miraglia himself, and it opened in Italy on 10 May 1971 as Spara Joe.. e così sia! - also circulated in English as Shoot Joe, and Shoot Again. The story is simple and mean: bandits hunting down a man named Joe who's holding the map to a fortune stolen from a bank. And no, this is not the 1957 Joe Dakota with Jock Mahoney and Lee Van Cleef. Same title, a different film entirely, made a generation apart.

🔫 Richard Harrison's Best Line

Top-billed Richard Harrison, born 1936, carries one story that's too good not to tell. As he always told it, Leone offered him the lead in A Fistful of Dollars, he passed, and he pointed Leone at a young American named Clint Eastwood. Harrison joked for years afterward that recommending Eastwood was his single greatest contribution to the movies, and it's hard to argue with him. By the time he made Joe Dakota he'd been working in Italian pictures for the better part of a decade - sword-and-sandal, Eurospy, and a long string of westerns.

🏢 Cosmopolis Films, Brussels

Cosmopolis Films distributed out of 4 rue des Palais in Schaerbeek, Brussels, right in the middle of the city's film-distribution row, with houses like Belga Films and Cine Vose Films on the same handful of streets. Belgian censorship records credit Cosmopolis on roughly 178 films, with dated release visas running from December 1947 into October 1987 - the better part of forty years in the trade. Their catalog leaned hard into exactly the kind of picture this sheet sold: sword-and-sandal epics, swashbucklers, Eurospy, a long run of spaghetti westerns, and later Japanese kaiju and Hong Kong martial-arts imports as those genres came into fashion.

It comes from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007. 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.

🌍 Belgium's Own Size

Part of why I love these: Belgium was the only country using movie posters this size, and theirs were wilder than anybody else's. This Joe Dakota is a good example - a two-color yellow-and-black sheet that grabs you from across a room. Collectors love them for the size and the art, and this one's a loud, fun bit of early-'70s Euro western history.

📦 Condition

Everything in this collection is stored in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled. Any age you see, it had when it got here - paper doesn't keep aging on my shelves, and yours will show up just the way it is now.