This poster was used to advertise the Italian movie, ‘L'uomo dalla pistola d'oro’ (Man with the Golden Pistol), also known as ‘Doc, Hands of Steel’. Directed by Spanish filmmaker Alfonso Balcázar, the movie was one of the many Spaghetti Westerns shot in Europe, notably in Italy and Spain, during the genre’s peak in the 1960s and 1970s.The term ‘Spaghetti Western’ was initially used by American journalists in a negative sense to refer to what they saw as unauthentic Italian-made Westerns that attempted to copy the original Hollywood version. The term is now used more positively by film critics to refer to a sub-genre of Western films. Italian director Sergio Leone’s ‘For A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964), which starred a then unknown actor named Clint Eastwood, is usually cited as the film which brought the Spaghetti Western into the Hollywood mainstream.
