Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand
Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand is a German movie from 1966 by Alfred Vohrer based on motifs by Karl May ( Karl May film ). The leading roles are cast with Pierre Brice , Rod Cameron and Marie Versini as well as Todd Armstrong , Harald Leipnitz and Victor de Kowa .
The plot is only vaguely based on Karl May's novel and actually only has the names of the main characters in common. Even the atmosphere of the previous films is not desired, but the strip is similar to the now become popular spaghetti westerns . The Yugoslav Jadran-Film in Zagreb could be won again as an additional donor. The premiere of the film was on December 13, 1966 in the "Universum" in Karlsruhe .
The subject of the film takes up the story of the film The Seven Samurai ( Shichinin no samurai ) (1954) by Akira Kurosawa and thus approaches the Western The Magnificent Seven (1960) by American director John Sturges .
action
When Winnetou and his sister Nscho-chi round up wild mustangs with warriors of the Apache tribe, they are attacked by the bandit Silers and his cronies and have to flee. The Indians get help from the fur hunter Jason Waade , known as Old Firehand , and his friends Tom, Caleb and Moses.
When Winnetou wants to call for help against Silers in the small town of Miramonte, he and Old Firehand get involved in further disputes with Silers. His brother Billy-Bob is in the local prison, and the Sargento Mendozza is pressured by the local residents to release him in order to avoid Silers' vengeance. Firehand can be moved to defend the village, not least because he met his old love Michèle there, who has a son Jace from him, but who does not know that Old Firehand is his father. Michèle is being courted by the eccentric English gentleman Ravenhurst , but his advertising has not yet given in.
After Billy-Bob Silers was killed while trying to escape, Silers slaughtered a wagon wagon with fleeing local residents in revenge, loads the wagons with dynamite and sends them back to Miramonte. They explode in the middle of the place. Winnetou wants to get help from the army, but on the way meets Capitano Quilvera with his Mexican bandits. These push the Indian into a ravine where he lies unconscious. Only after a while does he come to again. Quilvera and Silers team up and attack the city together. A priest who approaches them with a raised cross is shot dead by Silers against Quilvera's protest.
Residents fight back bitterly under the leadership of Old Firehand, and the attackers slowly back away. Winnetou succeeds in sending horses laden with dynamite into the group of bandits and blowing up most of them. The remaining bandits are pursued by the townspeople and are surprised by Firehand and the town's farmers during an argument between Silers and Capitano Quilvera. The trapper and his friend Tom pursue the fleeing Silers, but Tom is mortally wounded by Silers and dies. Firehand is of the opinion that a bullet is too good for Silers, so he can be handed Winnetou's bow and arrow, with which he then first nailed Silers to a tree trunk and then shoots.
background
With this production, producer Horst Wendlandt sought to build on the successes of the spaghetti westerns and wanted to focus on the Karl May figure Old Firehand, which had not previously appeared in any film. After rejecting two scripts written for this purpose (one by Fred Denger , the other by the writer duo Johanna Sibelius and Eberhard Keindorff ), he acquired the rights to the western material from American writers David deReszke and C. B. Taylor, whose script went under the name Thunder on the border ( Thunder at the border had already appeared) as a novel. He had the script revised by Harald G. Petersson, who made the main character Jason Waade Old Firehand and added Winnetou and Nscho-chi as secondary characters.
The new film music by Peter Thomas (including: music for space patrol and various Edgar Wallace films ) should signal a new beginning. Accordingly, Wendlandt did not entrust the Constantin company with the film distribution for world sales as before , but rather the American Columbia .
The action takes place in front of Winnetou I , at the end of which Nscho-chi is known to be shot, but Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand already refer to Winnetou as the "chief of the Apaches", although his father Intschu-chuna was actually still at that time who is only killed at the same time as Nscho-chi in Winnetou I.
The role of Old Firehands should be played by an experienced western actor. Wendlandt first negotiated with Robert Preston , Van Heflin was also in discussion. Finally he had success with the 56-year-old Canadian Rod Cameron, who was only known to older moviegoers in Germany.
The actor Viktor de Kowa played his last film role here. Rik Battaglia , who shot dead as Rollins Winnetou in Winnetou III the year before , this time arguing at the side of the Indian chief. Also duration Rogue Ilija Ivezić was exceptionally on the side of good.
During the filming, the film team stayed in the city of Split in the Hotel Marijan . Many photos were taken in the vicinity of Vrlika , in a valley Vladimir Tadej had set up the ruined hacienda of the bandits. The death of Silers occurred in the same place where the Rollins' Swift Panther is killed in Winnetou 3rd part . Tadej built the Mexican settlement Miramonte in a stone quarry at the main location in Stobreč . There were also a few scenes in Solin and near Omiš . The interior shots in Haus Mercier were taken in the CCC studios in Berlin.
Thomas Danneberg was the voice actor for Pierre Brice as Winnetou . A unique and therefore unfamiliar pairing for the actor. In the other Karl May films, Thomas Eckelmann (7 ×), Christian Wolff (2 ×) or Herbert Stass (1 ×) were his German voice.
The concept of combining a classic Winnetou film with a tough spaghetti western did not work. The audience response was unusually weak. There was general criticism that the film no longer had anything to do with Karl May. In addition, the fans complained that Winnetou only appeared in a few scenes. Producer Horst Wendlandt told Peter Hajek in the courier on January 17, 1967 that the film's failure was due to the fact that Winnetou did not appear. He announced two new Winnetou films for 1967, but Pierre Brice also wanted more influence on the scripts in the future. An agreement was not reached, whereupon Wendlandt stopped all preparations for further films.
The distribution policy of Colombia meant that this film was extremely rare for a long time. The television premiere did not take place on ORF until 1993, and the film was only released on video in 1994.
criticism
“The exciting music (Peter Thomas) is more reminiscent of the ORION spaceship than of the land of red skins. Winnetou rode away from his father Karl May. He rides for the European Western. "
“The film is called a little carelessly 'first German Karl May Western'. He has just as little to do with Karl May as a luxury car with an ox cart. The only thing the film has in common with the enduring values of the fascinating folk writer is that it borrows the names Winnetou, Nscho-chi and Old Firehand, but without even remotely touching their characters. "
“A new western of the Karl May class. The Yugoslav landscape is impressive, there is often a blaze of fire, and the close-range battles are not without temperament. Since sentimentality is also cultivated, Western hardness and sensitive edification are equally provided. "
“Cameron rides through the mild west as Old Firehand like a fairy tale, suggested by the director Alfred Vohrer, 51, by means of three cacti in Tito's Dalmatia. The 15th [sic!] Film in the Karl May series is colorful and conservative again, but like in May only the heroes are left - the plot is fictitious. "
"Unfortunately by no means a youthful Indian film, just a bad and extremely brutal western with fleeting borrowings from Karl May."
"A great achievement by pyrotechnician Erwin Lange and otherwise the absolute low point of the Karl May series."
“Made-up western entertainment with a lot of lead, blood and emotion. Only the figure of the noble Apache chief has something in common with Karl May's works. "
" Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand [...], with whom the Karl May wave slowly ebbed to finally make way for the surging spaghetti westerns, consists only of pathetic game scenes that are squeezed between powerful explosions without any apparent need. After all, an impressive pyrotechnic achievement; but the film has nothing left of the occasional atmospheric combination of adventure, romance and fairy tales that make up a Karl May subject. "
media
- VHS: Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand .
- DVD: Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand .
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Music: Wild West - Hot Orient. Karl May film music 1936–1968. Bear Family Records BCD 16413 HL, Hambergen 2001, 8 CDs with 192 pages of film book.
Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand. Tarantula Records FIC SP 10001.
literature
- Michael Petzel: Karl May film book . Karl-May-Verlag, Bamberg / Radebeul 1998, 2nd edition 1999, ISBN 3-7802-0153-4
Web links
- Winnetou and his friend Old Fire Hand in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand in the German dubbing file
- Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Pierre Brice. In: synchronkartei.de. German dubbing index , accessed on March 24, 2017 .
- ↑ Once in May . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1966 ( online ).
- ↑ Winnetou and his friend Old Firehand. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 13, 2016 .
- ↑ Alexandra Seitz: The German Karl May Films. In: Bodo Traber, Hans J. Wulff (Hrsg.): Filmgenres. Adventure film (= Reclams Universal Library, No. 18404 ). Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-15-018404-5 , pp. 148–151, here 150.