(Extra material from our trip to London.)
I found these three posters in an Italian restaurant in London. I took a few quick snapshots because, I figured, they’d one day be worth sharing. My apologies for the reflections. There was a stairwell and bad lighting and actual food to eat.
It isn’t the most influential spaghetti western, but For a Few Dollars More is a direct descendent. And this is a ridiculously good poster and, no matter the language, you probably know exactly what film this is for:
Released in 1965, the film became the highest-grossing film in the history of Italian cinema. It came to the U.S. a few months later and made millions more.
The Deerhunter, and so now you know that the poster acquirer — shut up, that is too a real profession — for this restaurant has taste:
Ferruccio Amendola did the Italian dubs for Robert De Niro’s Mike Vronsky. He did dubs for more than 30 years, usually carrying big, domineering characters.
Sorry for the angle here, but The Hustler poster was hanging too high:
Totally worth it.
Play this while you read below:
Happily, the Italian dubs for Fast Eddy in both The Hustler and The Color of Money were done by Giuseppe Rinaldi. That’s no small thing. He’s considered the greatest voice actor in Italian history. He dubbed more than 200 foreign actors in about 500 films. Hudson, Sellers, Sinatra, Lancaster, Douglas, Peck, Martin, Dean, Poitier. Were you a leading man in the second half of the 20th century? Chances are that, in Italy, you sounded like Rinaldi. He worked for almost 40 years, until 1997, and passed away a decade later.
Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats was played by Carlo Romano, who was an incredibly accomplished voice actor as well. He appeared in 86 films and did voicework for a few hundred more foreign actors. I can’t find him in that role on YouTube, but there are examples of Romano’s other work. He was no Gleason.
