Description

Remember Steve Reeves in Les Cosaques? 🐎 A Belgian Affiche for a Steve Reeves Adventure

Size: 14" x 22" ~ Unused archive stock. Little to slight wear does not affect the image, nor even close (see pictures). Every one is kept in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled – whatever age a sheet shows, it had that age before it ever reached me.

I have a soft spot for the Belgian affiche format, and this one earns it. Up top in warm sepia is Steve Reeves, bearded and broad-shouldered, between a blonde in a pale gown and a dark-haired woman in a jeweled collar, with his name in white at the top right. The bottom half switches to loose, energetic brushwork – a whole line of Cossack cavalry at the gallop, sabres raised, led by a rider on a rearing white horse. Between the two, in bold black type, runs the French title LES COSAQUES PASSENT A L'ATTAQUE ("The Cossacks Attack"), with (LA CHARGE DES COSAQUES) set just beneath it, and the Flemish title DE KOZAKKEN VALLEN AAN printed in red along the bottom. Two distributor credits sit at the very top of the sheet, one above the other: COSMOPOLIS FILMS présente and UNIVERSEL EXPORTATION présente. Down at the base are the cast credits avec G. Moll · R. Baldini, the director's credit mise en scène R. Freda, and the printer's line, Imprimé en Belgique, from Edicolor of Brussels.

🎬 The Film: The White Warrior, 1959

This is the Belgian release poster for Agi Murad il diavolo bianco, sold internationally as The White Warrior – a 1959 adventure directed by Riccardo Freda and loosely based on Leo Tolstoy's late novel Hadji Murat. Steve Reeves was Mr. Universe in 1950 before he ever acted, and his Hercules made him the hottest new name in European adventure films by 1959; here he's Hadji Murad himself, a 19th-century Chechen chief leading his people against Tsar Nicholas I's armies. The real Hadji Murad – the man Tolstoy wrote about – was an Avar leader from Khunzakh in Dagestan, one of Imam Shamil's commanders in the long fight against the Russian Empire; he fell out with Shamil and went over to the Russians in 1851, and was killed the next spring trying to escape them. Giorgia Moll and Renato Baldini round out the leads – the "G. Moll" and "R. Baldini" of the credit line – alongside Scilla Gabel and Milivoje Zivanovic, who plays the Tsar himself. It was an Italy–Yugoslavia co-production, distributed abroad by Warner Bros. and at home by Lux Film, and it did solid business in Italy (483 million lire at the box office) on the strength of Reeves's name. Behind the camera, a year before he directed Black Sunday, was a young Mario Bava, working here as cinematographer – and in the roughest stretches of the final showdown, Reeves had a stunt double, Alan Steel, doing the work for him. The movie's really about the Caucasus mountain fighters, not the Cossacks - the Cossacks rode for the Tsar - but the Belgian distributor picked the flashier title, and the painted charge on the poster gives you just what it promises.

🌍 Why a Belgian Poster

Belgium is the only country in the world to use posters of this size, and they were very flamboyant compared to their counterparts across the globe. Due to their desirable size, graphics, and limited availability, these are a favorite among collectors. This sheet also carries both of its titles side by side – French and Flemish – which is a habit particular to Belgium and part of what makes an affiche its own thing to chase. The French title was for Wallonia and French-speaking Brussels, the Flemish one for Flanders, so the same sheet could go up in a French-speaking town or a Flemish one. And that little bracketed line, (LA CHARGE DES COSAQUES), is the film's other French title – it went by both names next door in France, where it opened on 27 April 1960.

📜 Where It Comes From

This one comes from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007. Cosmopolis was a Brussels distributor at 4 rue des Palais that shows up in the film trade papers through the '50s and '60s; Belgian censorship records have it releasing pictures from December 1947 to October 1987, nearly forty years of everything from postwar Italian and French dramas to the sword-and-sandal and spaghetti western crazes. Movie posters weren't sold to the public - they went up in a lobby for a week or two and got thrown out when the next picture came in - so an unused sheet like this is a distributor's leftover that never went out. 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.