The Balkan Westerns of the Sixties [Part 2 of 3]

 

By Sergey Lavrentiev

1/12/2013

The Sons of Great Bear was the screen adaptation of a novel by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, in which the Indians are portrayed as noble, while the whites are all bloodthirsty. This was, of course, an absolute must for the script to be approved. Ironically, the white villain’s name was Red Fox, but he was not that important. The important thing was that the noble Indian, played by the young, beautiful athlete Gojko Mitić, provided the youth of the socialist bloc with a credible star of their own: Mitić became the instant idol of millions.

The success of The Sons had satisfied the authorities. Of course, in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the film distribution system was wide open for ‘Western westerns’, the film could not compete with other American films of the genre. But in the other, more ‘ideologically unblemished’ states, the box-office results were encouraging.

The main difference between The Sons and the pictures made at the Jadran studios by the West Germans was in the central element of the plot structure. Winnetou is brave and noble, but he remains in the shadow of his pale-faced brother who is the main hero. The screen adaptations of Karl May’s novels are all about the good white guy who helps the Indians fight against the bad whites. In parentheses it should be noted that while the Ostern Sons was shot in Yugoslavia, Old Surehand became the first film of its rival West German series to be purchased for distribution in the USSR, during the short period of liberalization between October 1964 and August 1968 (the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia). Changing the title of the film, the Soviets accidentally emphasized its ‘white-guy bias’, naming it The Faithful Hand, Friend of Indians. Needless to say, the film was a big hit and made a lot of money for the Soviet distribution system, back in 1968.

Despite its reasonable success, the production of The Sons of Great Bear marked the end of an ambitious attempt by the East to beat the capitalists at the western genre. After that, the East Germans ceased to travel around the world in search of spectacular locations for big productions aimed at international audiences (The Sons never managed to find an audience in the West), and began to stamp their ‘right westerns’ for its own audience, as well as for the benefit of their most friendly markets: the post-1968 ‘normalized’ Czechoslovakia, the USSR, Bulgaria, and Mongolia.

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. The 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.

[To be continued]