The Balkan Westerns of the Sixties [Part3 of 3]

 

By Sergey Lavrentiev

1/12/2013

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.

In August 1968 (unheard-of insolence!) he refused to participate in the occupation of Czechoslovakia, denying Soviet troops the right of passing through Romanian territory. This move certainly enhanced his prestige in the eyes of Western champions of freedom and democracy. Loans, investments and other favors were not slow to appear.

The late sixties and early seventies were perhaps the best times for Romanian cinema during communism. A lot of films were produced, and there was even some allowance for criticism of classical Stalinism. Films which were banned in Bulgaria, Poland, East Germany, or Czechoslovakia (after 1968) were sometimes shown in Romania. Many westerns also, even some which had been deemed malicious by Soviet film censors could be seen in theaters in Bucharest.

Like Tito’s Yugoslavia had done before, Romania also opened its doors to co-productions. Blessed with exquisite natural conditions – mountains, valleys, a wonderful coastline – no worse than in Yugoslavia, the possibility of obtaining virtually free labor and extras (the army was often used for this), Romania became a paradise for Western producers who wanted to get solid results with minimal financial investment.

It all began with historical super-productions like Dacians (Dacii, 1967, incidentally, a film which features Pierre ‘Winnetou’ Brice in the part of Septimius Severus, a Roman officer), The Column (Columna, 1968), The Battle for Rome (Bătălia pentru Roma, 1968), and then came the turn of the ‘westerns’.

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.