A Town Called Hell / A Town Called Bastard (Robert Parrish, 1971)

“hell” is primarily the US release title, is that correct?

I believe so … but it wasn’t released there first, nor is it an American film … as it says on wikipedia the name was changed for release in America, because the word ‘bastard’ was seen as offensive … but as this is a British / Spanish co-production the original name should be listed first.

In that case I agree we should list it with it’s Bastardy title and I shall implement that later

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… interesting to see this one at it’s time of release with ‘The Samourai’ playing as 2nd feature … probably an English dubbed version, but ‘A Town Called Bastard’ is now a forgotten movie for many and ‘Le Samourai’ is considered a masterpiece.

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Which is very very reasonable for both.

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Are we in agreement for once!

That’s the reason I made the point about this strange coupling of movies - Distributors must have been very shortsighted to put these two together, especially in that order … but at this time very few French movies would be shown in Britain outside of a tiny number of ‘arthouse’ cinemas … so for ‘Le Samourai’ to be part of a mainstream release was quite unusual.

Mainland Europe were and are much more inclusive about the films they show, I suppose because they would be dubbed.

The only other non UK and USA films released at this time approximately would be ‘The Burglars’, ‘The Sicilian Clan’ and ‘The Legend of Frenchie King’ … but these were all made in two versions, for the French speaking audience and the English speaking International market .

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I wrote about this in a review of the German BluRay if Burglars once. Fascinating tactics then to just film everything twice instead of once and dubbing

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Yes … but much more expensive - However, these films mentioned were backed by distribution deals with major film companies - Columbia for ‘The Burglars’, Twentieth Century Fox for ‘The Sicilian Clan’, Hemdale (who no longer exist) for ‘Frenchie King’ … also, Paramount, ‘The Brain’ / Le Cerveau (1969) with JP Belmondo, David Niven, Eli Wallach etc also filmed in 2 versions … The advantage is that the original actors dub their own voices, although Lino Ventura in 'The Sicilian Clan was redubbed by a voice actor even though he is speaking English dialogue … too thick an accent perhaps.