Clint Eastwood cannon from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly traced to Spanish museum

Six decades after Clint Eastwood nonchalantly used a cigar to light a cannon’s fuse in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to fell a fleeing Eli Wallach , the Manchester-made weapon has been rediscovered in a museum in south-east Spain. The artillery piece was tracked down by the Sad Hill Cultural Association , a group of volunteers dedicated to restoring the graveyard near Burgos, northern Spain, built for the climax of Sergio Leone’s seminal spaghetti western. After coming across images of the cannon in a book on the film, the association set about trying to trace some of the weapons used in preparation for the 60th anniversary of the movie’s release later this year. The 75mm cannon, made in Manchester by Whitworth in 1873, was one of the antique arms lent to Leone’s production team by the Spanish military. After filming it was returned to the army museum in Madrid. There it languished on outdoor display until 2010, when the museum and its collection were moved to Toledo. A few months ago, Diego Montero, treasurer of the Sad Hill Cultural Association, visited the Toledo museum to look for the cannon. Further research led to the south-eastern Spanish city of Cartagena, where Montero discovered a group of retired soldiers had been restoring a 19th-century British cannon from the local military history museum . The cannon before restoration, in the military history museum in Cartagena, south-east Spain. …