Chingachgook, The Great Snake (Chingachgook, die grosse
Schlange)
The next western from DEFA was based on The Deerslayer
by James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper, like May, wrote more from imagination than
experience. He wasn’t much of a writer (see Mark Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s
Literary Offences for more on that) yet his books are still popular today.
Perhaps because they told inarguably exciting stories. This film is considered
one of the better film adaptations of Cooper’s work.
When DEFA started making westerns (Indianerfilme), they
first looked to literature for stories. The only writer who was definitely off
limits was Karl May, the most popular writer of western fiction in Germany. The
fact that he was Adolph Hitler’s favorite author is usually cited as the reason
for the GDR’s rejection of his books. This attitude toward May was largely
provoked by Klaus Mann’s famous essay, “Cowboy Mentor of the Fuhrer.” In fact,
Albert Einstein was also a fan of May’s books. Probably a bigger factor in the
East German ban on May was the fact that by the time the GDR got around to
making their Indianerfilme, West Germany had already turned several May’s books
into movies (“Apache Gold”, “Shatterhand”, “Frontier Hellcat”, and many
others).1 The East Germans looked to other sources for inspiration. For their
first effort, The “Sons of the Great Bear” (“Die Söhne der großen Bärin”) by
the East German author Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich was chosen. Although Ms.
Welskopf-Henrich was not happy with the film—feeling that they took too many
liberties with the facts—the film did very well at the box office, and helped
define the direction that DEFA would take when it came to making these films
The good guys were always the Indians, and the U.S. and British Armies (or the
miners and cattle barons) were the bad guys. They also placed a stronger
emphasis than Hollywood and the other western countries ever did on the
accuracy of the costumes and tribal rituals.
So it was that “Chingachgook, The Great Snake” (“Chingachgook,
die grosse Schlange”)—the second Indianerfilm—came to be based on The
Deerslayer, by the American author, James Fenimore Cooper. It was an
interesting choice. Cooper bore many similarities to May. Like May, his
knowledge of the west was mostly anecdotal, having grown up in Cooperstown, New
York and spending much of his adult writing career in England (although it
should be noted, that the Cooperstown of his youth was very much a frontier
town). Also, like May, he was enamored of the concept of the noble savage and
always included both good and evil Indians and white people in his books. But
unlike May, the GDR authorities were okay with his work. Why this was so, given
the fact that he was an American author, is hard to answer. Mostly it seems to
be because he wasn’t May.
The years between the 11th Plenum and Honecker’s rise to
power were strange ones for DEFA. Overnight, the neo-realism, so beloved by
DEFA directors before the Plenum, was now shunned in favor of styles and genres
that we usually associate with Hollywood. Frivolous fun like Hot Summer would
have had difficulty getting past the authorities prior to the Plenum but was
now just what the doctor ordered. And the concept of the star system,
inherently antithetical to socialistic ideals, was now endorsed in the form of
Gojko Mitic, the hunky Yugoslavian actor who starred in nearly all the DEFA
westerns.
Normally, DEFA took greater pains to follow books as
closely as possible (or, at least, more closely than Hollywood), but they did
take liberties with Cooper’s book. In the book, Natty Bumppo—the “Deerslayer”
of the title—is the hero of the story, and Chingachgook is his Indian sidekick.
For the film, the focus is shifted almost entirely to Chingachgook and many of
the Deerslayer’s feats of derring-do (such as catching the tomahawk and
throwing it back at the attacker) are
attributed to Chingachgook. The character of Hetty, the sweeter but simpler of
Tom Hutter’s two daughters, is eliminated completely.
The book was the last of Cooper’s “Leatherstocking
Tales,” but is the first story chronologically. At the start of the film, we
see Chingachgook preparing to marry Wah-ta-Wah, the pretty daughter of a
Delaware chief when suddenly she is kidnapped by Hurons. While Chingachgook
paddles after his beloved in his canoe, Deerslayer and his traveling companion,
Harry Hurry, take a different path in search of the girl.
For this second Indianerfilm, DEFA once again called on
Gojko Mitic to play the lead. Originally a stunt man in West German/Yugoslavian
co-productions, Mitic’s good looks and dark features made him an ideal choice
to play a variety of Native American superheroes, from Chingachgook to Ulzana.
Although he speaks excellent German, his voice was dubbed for most of his DEFA
films to eliminate his Serbian accent. Also, back for a second time in an
Indianerfilm was Rolf Römer; this time, thankfully, not playing an Indian this
time, but the Deerslayer himself.
In a role as different as possible from the one he played
in Stars, Jürgen Frohriep plays Harry Hurry, one of the film’s main villains.
In Stars, Frohriep played Walter, the young German soldier who tries to save
the life of the Jewish woman he has fallen in love with. In Chingachgook, his
character is far less sympathetic; a rank opportunist who is not above scalping
women and children for the money. Frohriep made his biggest splash in East
Germany playing Kriminaloberkommissar Jürgen Hübner on the popular TV crime
drama, Polizeiruf 110. He played the character more than sixty times from 1972
until the Wende. After Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF)—the television equivalent of
DEFA—was dismantled. Frohriep found getting work difficult in the new Germany
and started drinking heavily, which eventually led to the dissolution of his
long-time marriage to the American-born actress, Kati Székely. Frohriep died in
Berlin in 1993.
Chingachgook featured the music of Wilhelm Neef, who also
did the music for “The Sons of the Great Bear”, and other DEFA Indianerfilme. A
Cologne-born composer, Neef settled in the east after the war. Like his fellow
composer, Karl-Ernst Sasse, he was primarily a classical musician, but unlike
Sasse, he rarely ventured outside of the traditional classical instrumentation
in his film scores. In 1972, he stopped composing films to work on his
classical pieces, penning his moving Violin Concerto (Violinkonzert) and Piano
Concerto #2 (Klavierkonzert Nr. 2), which were released in 1973 on Nova
records—VEB Deutsche Schallplatten’s label for “serious” contemporary music
(traditional classical music appeared on the Eterna label, and pop tunes on
Amiga).
Chingachgook was directed by Richard Groschopp, whose
previous films, “Die Liebe und der Co-Pilot” (“Love and the Co-pilot”) and The
Baldheaded Gang had been box-office hits. Chingachgook followed suit and was
the most popular DEFA film in the GDR in 1967. It was also Richard Grosschopp’s
swan song as a feature film director. After working on the popular TV
mini-series, ‘Geheimkommando Ciupaga’, Groschopp wrote and directed two more TV
movies and then retired. He died in 1996.
