The Balkan Westerns of the Sixties (part 2)

 By Sergey Lavrentiev

Meanwhile, in Yugoslavia, the West Germans continued to actively develop their gold-mine, Winnetou. With Alfred Vohrer’s 1965 production of Old Surehand, which was successfully screened even in the Soviet Union, the franchise was well established and the films generally passed, for most of the inexperienced viewers in Europe, as genuine American westerns. Of course, as with the Italian ‘spaghetti westerns’, that was their main intended purpose. Stewart Granger, the ‘absolutely true, absolutely American’ star of Old Surehand, was an actor with a clear understanding of the nature of the genre – with him as a central figure what else could they need for convincing the audiences?

Stewart Granger, a star of the fifties – Beau Brummel (1954), Scaramouche(1952) – was not the only Hollywood actor to cross the Atlantic in the early sixties, to revive a genre that was all but dead in America. A little-known Clint Eastwood was another. Unlike Granger, who arrived with great ambitions to re-launch a once brilliant career, Eastwood went to Spain only to spend one summer and earn a little money. Instead, Sergio Leone made him one of the greatest cinematic figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Granger, though, was unable to repeat his triumph. European filmmakers were happy to have him in their movies, and the European audiences received him enthusiastically but for the Americans, he remained an artist “from the past.”

In 1965, Harald Reinl completed the movie Winnetou 3 in which he attempted to kill Winnetou, believing, apparently, that the series had exhausted itself. Artistically, this is definitely the best film in the series, and it has a well-accomplished look and feel even now, forty years after its creation. In the end, Winnetou sacrifices himself to defend the life of his pale-faced brother, shielding him from the treacherous bullets with his own chest.

The Soviet Purchasing Commission did not buy Winnetou 3 for distribution in the USSR. They may have disagreed with the final sacrifice of the native chief for the benefit of the white hero. Or it may have been for a different, more prosaic reason.

In the brief liberal period before August 21, 1968, two West German westerns, shot in Yugoslavia, had been purchased and distributed in the Soviet Union. It is quite likely that the distributors were planning to buy a few more films from the successful series and had no interest in purchasing the film in which Winnetou dies. However, in the late sixties the opportunity was foiled. And by the time the ban was lifted in the mid-seventies, a new artistic and ideological obstacle appeared.

Initially, East German “osterns” were produced at a quality that was comparable with that of their rival West German “westerns”. However, by the beginning of the seventies, the osterns from GDR became so tedious and anemic that they could no longer even remotely compare with their rivals. The result was that the evidently superior Winnetou series could no longer be shown without exposing the other – “ideologically correct” – osterns to ridicule.

In the end, Soviet boys never got to see Winnetou die. Not that the ones who did get to mourned him for long. The box office success of the film was so impressive that the producers decided to postpone the closure of the project and, in 1966, Harald Philipp released a very weak Half-Breed / Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi, followed, in the same year, by another Vohrer film Thunder at the Border / Winnetou und sein Freund Old Firehand. Harald Reinl was also convinced to return to the beloved hero with The Valley of Death/ Winnetou und Shatterhand im Tal der Toten, in 1968. Pierre Brice continued to play the Indian hero in all of these films, and they were all shot in Yugoslavia, the country that had, by then, been hosting ‘cowboys and Indians’ films for nearly a decade.

And there is yet another country that needs to be mentioned in the story of ‘red westerns’. In 1965, Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, who had been the Communist leader of Romania since 1947, died. In his place, the party chose a young dynamic leader, Nicolae Ceausescu who, for a few years, looked poised to become a second Tito. He proclaimed a policy of friendship with all the other socialist countries, ignoring the serious rifts that had, by then, appeared in the communist bloc, sent a friendly telegram to Brezhnev as he was “flying over the Soviet territory …” on his way to Beijing to meet Mao Zedong (when Sino-Soviet relations were frozen), met with Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, was a friend of Kim Il Sung … And he began to flirt with the West.

Around the years 1968-1970, the French and the West Germans teamed with Romanian studios to create their own adaptations of Fenimore Cooper’s novels. A number of TV movies were produced at that time: The Last of the Mohicans, Prairie, Adventures on the Shores of Ontario, Deer Slayer. Each film had two directors: one from the guests’ side, another from the Romanian. Both guest directors were French: Jacques Drevil (Adventures on the Shores of Ontario, The Last of the Mohicans) and Pierre Gaspard-Huit (Prairie, Deerslayer). Their Romanian counterpart was a novice: Sergiu Nicolaescu.

Being a self-taught filmmaker, Nicolaescu’s participation on these projects (as well as on Dacians and Battle for Rome) was a kind of film school. He had graduated from the Polytechnic Institute and then, in the early sixties, he landed a job at the Bucharest film studios at a friend’s recommendation, where he made a few documentaries and short films. His first feature length was Dacians, the big international co-production which effectively launched his career as the most successful Romanian film director of all time.

Nicolaescu quickly understood the essence of directing grand cinematic spectacles. The artistic quality of his films usually comes second to their entertainment value. Despite that (or maybe because of that), spectators in Romania, and in the Soviet Union, adored his films. In the 1970s and 1980s, Romania gradually fell under the spell of Ceausescu’s cult of personality and became an increasingly paranoid and isolated neo-Stalinist state. Perhaps much of Nicolaescu’s fame and fortune are also due to the lack of any serious competition, and to the people’s desperate need for Western-style cinematic entertainment, of which he became the sole provider allowed by the regime.

In any case, his career soared to heights that were incomparable with any of the later performances of his French colleagues with whom he co-directed the Fenimore Cooper adaptations. Jacques Drevil and Pierre Gaspard-Huit’s names do not remain associated with any important achievement in the history of film. Those co-productions themselves are now remembered only by specialists and enthusiasts of the European western.

The image of Ceausescu’s Romania and the Romanian cinematography doubtlessly benefited from this period of international co-productions. The western adaptations were successful at the time, especially in the other socialist countries. In the USSR, the black-and-white, abridged versions of Prairie and Adventures on the Shores of Ontario were received quite warmly in the context of the rather bleak offer of imported films distributed in 1972, even though the films had only been made for television and not for the big screen. Luckily, in the late sixties, video had not yet been invented and even the movies made for television were filmed on 35mm.

So this was the golden decade of the sixties, the golden decade of the Balkan western. During the last two decades of communism only Romania continued to produce ‘red westerns’; the Bulgarians and the Hungarians (after György Szomjas’ 1976 ‘goulash western’ The Wind Blows Under Your Feet) stopped making them. One much later exception is the 1996 film Pretty Village, Pretty Flame by the Serbian director Srdjan Dragojevic, a great homage to Yugoslav partisan films (the so-called “Gibanica westerns”). And, of course, one can also count Dragojevic’s last film The Parade (2011), a tragi-comical remake of The Magnificent Seven with the action set in Belgrade’s gay world. The Serbian director’s films give us a nice illustration of how it is still possible to escape from the Balkans through the western genre.