Item:  Western film / movie, “Abilene Town”, poster printed in Rome, Italy, 1960.  The poster was definitely used for advertising the movie and it’s tattered but otherwise the black and white image here is stunning. When most people started getting television sets (half of all people in the USA had one by 1955), westerns became popular shows or programming.  It wasn’t just in the USA… people in Germany and Italy loved westerns too.  As you probably know, movies of the genre started being made in Italy (actually, it was usually Spain, believe it or not!) and called Spaghetti Westerns.  My guess is that the poster offered here, even though it was printed 14 years after the movie came out in the USA, may have been advertising the movie’s showing in Italy for the first time. People in Italy would have been big fans of Westerns by that point and may have had a little catching up to do. Unframed poster currently has a cardboard backer and clear plastic over it, so you’ll need to frame it under glass at some point so you can enjoy it on the wall.  PLEASE SEE MY OTHER EBAY LISTINGS FOR A NICE SELECTION OF ART, ANTIQUES AND COLLECTIBLES !!

About the movie:  Abilene Town is a 1946 American Western film directed by Edwin L. Marin and starring Randolph Scott and Ann Dvorak. The movie is set in the Old West years immediately following the Civil War, in the cattle town of Abilene, Kansas. The story was adapted from Ernest Haycox's book Trail Town. In the years following the Civil War, Kansas is in the middle of a difficult time. Homesteaders are moving into the West, trying to start new lives, and are going head to head against cattlemen who have been settled in that territory for years. In Abilene, one of the biggest cattle towns of the west, the town is on the brink of a confrontation between the cattlemen and the homesteaders. Marshal Dan Mitchell (Randolph Scott) has the job of keeping the peace between the two groups. For a long time, the town has been divided, with the cattlemen and cowboys having one side of the main street to themselves, while townspeople occupied the other side. Mitchell liked it this way, it made things easier for him, and kept problems from arising between the two factions. However, when homesteaders decide to lay stakes on the edge of town that balance is upset, and leads to a deadly showdown. The leader of the homesteaders is Henry Dreiser (Lloyd Bridges), a young man with good common sense, and the local sheriff is Bravo Trimble (Edgar Buchanan), a lawman who would rather play cards than be involved in any confrontation. Mitchell not only has the difficult job of juggling the upcoming confrontation, but also his love life, which is divided between Rita (Ann Dvorak), a showgirl who works on the cowboys' side of the street, and Sherry (Rhonda Fleming), the churchgoing daughter of a shopkeeper on the other side of the street.