Vintage Shanghai Joe Belgium Movie Poster 🥋 1973 Kung Fu Spaghetti Western, Chen Lee, Cosmopolis Films

Size: 14 x 22 inches, portrait ~

🥋 The Belgian Sheet for Shanghai Joe

This is the Belgian release poster for Shanghai Joe — Il mio nome è Shanghai Joe in the original Italian — put out by the Brussels distributor Cosmopolis Films. It's part of a whole Cosmopolis archive I picked up back in 2007 specifically because Belgian posters kept turning up with their own artwork, their own compact upright shape, nothing like what you'd find from the same film's American or Italian campaign. That pattern is a big part of why I went after the archive in the first place rather than let it get scattered — Belgium is its own little pocket of film-poster history that most collectors outside Europe never see.

🖼️ What's Printed on It

It's a painted action montage, portrait format, blank on the back. Top left reads COSMOPOLIS FILMS presente; top right, CHEN LEE. A black-haired fighter in a blue tunic comes flying fist-first through a wall of shattering stone across the top of the sheet, reaching toward a huge sun-browned hand gripping a lever-action rifle at the right edge, with a second hand caught mid-gesture just below it. Lower down, a man in a conical straw hat and blue tunic is going down mid-fall, and in the bottom left corner a mustached man with a topknot levels a revolver straight out at you against a slash of red. The title runs in big red letters at the bottom — and Belgium spelled it with the diaeresis, SHANGHAÏ. TECHNICOLOR · TECHNISCOPE is printed along the foot, and tucked into the bottom left corner is the print shop's own line, Imp. Wagram, Brussels, with its own old telephone number under it. Everything on the sheet is in French — no Flemish half-title the way some Belgian sheets carry.

🎬 The Film

Shanghai Joe went out internationally as The Fighting Fist of Shanghai Joe, also released as To Kill or to Die and The Dragon Strikes Back — a 1973 kung-fu spaghetti western, directed by Mario Caiano, who wrote the script with Fabrizio Trifone Trecca, with a score by Bruno Nicolai. It opened 28 December 1973. Chen Lee plays Chin Hao, the immigrant who becomes Shanghai Joe: he lands in Texas looking for honest work, runs straight into raw racism, and ends up taking on the slave trader Spencer, played by Piero Lulli, freeing the Mexican slaves Spencer is running. Klaus Kinski plays Scalper Jack — one of his nastier supporting turns, and worth the price of admission on its own. Gordon Mitchell plays Buryin' Sam, Robert Hundar plays Pedro the Cannibal, and Katsutoshi Mikuriya plays Mikuja, and Carla Romanelli is Cristina, the one who catches Joe's eye.

There's a coda worth knowing: a 1975 follow-up, Return of Shanghai Joe, directed by Bitto Albertini, brought Kinski back — but only because Scalper Jack doesn't survive this first film, so he came back playing somebody else entirely. It's a sequel in billing only, not in story.

🏢 Cosmopolis Films, Brussels

Cosmopolis Films was a real working distributor out of 4 rue des Palais in Schaerbeek, sitting right in the middle of the Brussels film-distribution district alongside houses like Belga Films and Columbia Films on the same few streets. Belgian censorship records put the company active from December 1947 through October 1987 — the better part of forty years — moving everything from postwar Italian and French dramas through the peplum boom, spy pictures, spaghetti westerns, Japanese kaiju, and Hong Kong martial arts imports. This is a genuine, long-running house, not a name slapped on for one release.

These sheets were never sold to the public — they were trade material, shipped to cinemas, put up for a run, and thrown out afterward, which is the fate almost every one of them met. What I'm holding is archive stock that simply never got thrown out: it stayed together as one collection from the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept that way since 2007, rather than going up on a wall and coming back down in the trash.

📦 Condition

I hold a stack of these from that same Cosmopolis run, so think of condition as a range across the stack rather than a grade on one sheet — unused, never hung, with the ordinary handling that comes of half a century as trade stock. Everything here has been kept dark, under 40% humidity, at a steady 72°F since it came into my hands, so nothing has been quietly aging on a shelf — it reaches you in the same shape it arrived in.

A genuinely obscure corner of movie-poster collecting — a Belgian sheet for a film most people only know, if they know it at all, because Klaus Kinski is in it. Good company for anything spaghetti-western, kung-fu, or just gleefully strange on the wall.