A Town Called Bastard
1971 film by Irving Lerner, Robert Parrish

A Town Called Bastard (also known as A Town Called Hell on DVD and Blu-ray) is a 1971 international co-production spaghetti Western. It was shot in Madrid with Robert Shaw, Telly Savalas, Stella Stevens and Martin Landau.
It was released on blu-ray on 18 August 2015. The film was retitled A Town Called Hell for US release as the word "bastard" was thought offensive.
Plot
In 1905 Mexico, a small town is presided over by a tyrant who commands a grizzled outlaw and his men. Also in town is a priest with a violent past, who has abandoned his clerical duties.
A widow arrives with her faithful servant promising to pay $20,000 in gold if the man who killed her husband is found and delivered to her. Further violence erupts when a brutal army colonel arrives on the scene searching for an elusive rebel leader. The colonel and the priest knew each other years before.
Cast
Production
The film was financed by Benmar, a wholly owned filmmaking subsidiary of Scotia Investments, the leisure activities group.
“A Town Called Bastard” enters the record as 1971 film by Irving Lerner, Robert Parrish. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Town, Called and Bastard can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“A Town Called Bastard” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Town, Called and Bastard provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3230889. 11 of 11 selected statements include explicit references; 11 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 2015 and 1905.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Town Called Bastard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.