Vintage Johnny Yuma Belgium Movie Poster 🤠 1966 Spaghetti Western, Mark Damon, Cosmopolis Films

Size: 22 x 14 inches, landscape ~

🤠 An Original Belgian Sheet for Johnny Yuma

I get a kick out of these Belgian releases every time one comes through, and this one is a good example of why. This is an original Belgian-format poster for Johnny Yuma, the 1966 spaghetti western, printed horizontally on a 22 by 14 inch sheet. Across the top it reads COSMOPOLIS-FILMS, with "présente" in script underneath. The artwork is a lone gunfighter standing dead-centre on a desert road, a huge white sun blazing behind him, and the title JOHNNY YUMA built right into the design — a revolver worked into the J, a rifle worked into the Y. Along the bottom the credit line reads Eastmancolor / Deltavision 70, "Régie: Romolo GUERRIERI" (French for "directed by"), and the cast in a row: MARK DAMON, LAWRENCE DOBKIN, ROSALBA NERI, LUIGI VANNUCCHI.

🎥 The Film

Johnny Yuma is an Italian spaghetti western from 1966, directed by Romolo Guerrieri, the working name of Romolo Girolami. Fernando Di Leo was one of the writers on it, alongside Sauro Scavolini, Giovanni Simonelli, and the director himself, credited as a writer under his birth name, Romolo Girolami. Italo Zingarelli produced, and Nora Orlandi wrote the score. It is a nasty little revenge plot even by the genre's standards: Samantha Felton has her own husband murdered, only to find his nephew and heir, Johnny Yuma, riding in to claim what is his. She hires a gun named Carradine to kill him — and when she tries to double-cross Carradine too, he switches sides, sabotages her water in the desert, and leaves her to die of thirst out there. That is the picture this sheet was painted to sell.

🎬 Who's On the Poster

Mark Damon plays Johnny, and his own story is honestly wilder than the movie's. He was born Alan Harris in Chicago in 1933, won a Golden Globe as New Star of the Year opposite Vincent Price in Roger Corman's House of Usher in 1960, and then — by his own account — went to Italy at around 28 to star in westerns having never once sat on a horse. Johnny Yuma and Ringo and His Golden Pistol, both from 1966, were part of that run. He did not stay an actor: he left the screen in 1975 to join an Italian distributor, then founded Producers Sales Organization in 1977, later running Vision International and MDP Worldwide. He is the man who sold Das Boot, The NeverEnding Story, 9½ Weeks, Monster, and Lone Survivor to the world — they called him "the king of Cannes," and more than one obituary credited him with inventing the foreign-sales business as it now works. He died in Los Angeles in May 2024, at 91.

Lawrence Dobkin, billed right under him, plays Linus Jerome Carradine — Samantha's former lover, hired to do her killing for her. He is a gunslinger with history with the widow, not a stranger for hire, which is exactly what makes his double-cross land so hard. Off camera, Dobkin (1919-2002) was an Emmy-nominated actor and a working TV director — he directed Star Trek's very first-season episode "Charlie X," and a quarter-century later came back in front of the camera to play Kell on The Next Generation.

Rosalba Neri, born in 1939 and listed third on the sheet, plays Samantha, the scheming widow at the center of it all. In 1971, credited as "Sara Bay," she played Tania in the cult favorite Lady Frankenstein. Luigi Vannucchi rounds out the cast as Pedro — sometimes credited as Louis Vanner.

📛 A Name Already Famous

Here is a coincidence worth knowing before you hang this one: "Johnny Yuma" was not a new name to American audiences in 1966. Nick Adams had already played a Civil War veteran by that name on ABC's The Rebel, which ran 1959 to 1961, with Johnny Cash singing the theme song. Whether the Italian producers had The Rebel in mind or not, the same name landed twice, a few years apart, on two very different sides of the Atlantic.

🎞️ Two Deltas, Side by Side

One more curiosity printed right on the sheet: the process line reads Eastmancolor and Deltavision 70, and the film's own Italian distributor was a company called Delta. Delta, Deltavision — sitting that close on the same poster, it is hard not to notice.

🇧🇪 Not the Poster You Know

If you know this film from the American campaign, this will look like a different movie entirely. The US release went out under a tall one-sheet of its own, with its own tagline — "Seduction her game, Murder her aim!" — nothing like the desert-and-gunslinger scene here. This Belgian sheet, laid out wide instead of tall, with its gun-lettered title and its Cosmopolis-Films credit up top, is its own design, made for its own market.

🗄️ From the Archive of Cosmopolis Films

This sheet came out of the archive of Cosmopolis Films, the now-defunct Brussels distributor whose name runs across the top of it. Cosmopolis kept its office at 4 rue des Palais, in the Schaerbeek stretch of Brussels where nearly every Belgian film distributor had a door - the address turns up in the American trade almanacs in 1953, 1957 and 1963 - and the Belgian censorship records show it bringing films into the country for about forty years, from 1947 to 1987: Italian dramas, sword-and-sandal epics, Zorro and pirate pictures, Eurospy, a whole run of spaghetti westerns, even Godzilla. The company is long gone. I bought its poster archive in 2007 because Belgian poster art is like nobody else's - its own artwork, its own wide format, its own titles - and I didn't want it lost. It has been kept together as one collection ever since. Nobody else lists this Belgian Johnny Yuma, so it's a rare one - and once these are gone, they're gone.

📦 Condition

I am holding a small stack of these, unused archive stock, and they vary a little one to the next: bright, clean color, cream paper margins, and the ordinary light handling of vintage stock.

A genuine piece of how one film got sold on one side of the Atlantic, with a cast list that turns out to be a lot more interesting than the poster alone lets on.