This is one of the westerns that american singer/ actor Dean Reed made in the former east german republic DDR.
This guy apparently had leftist socialist beliefs and went to live there, after making
spaghettis in Italy for a few years.
You’d perhaps think that the old communist eastern europe was an unlikely place for making a western, but this is actually a really well-made and enjoyable film.
Apart from Reed, the film stars serbian actor Gojko Mitic, who made many westerns in east germany, and also the beautiful Gisela Freudenberg.
Blutsbrüder is basically a lovestory between a US Army officer and an indian girl. As you would expect it has some anti-american sentiments,but not in an excessive propaganda way.
It’s always nice to watch Dean Reed, he was good as Ballantine in Parolinis Adios Sabata for instance. He even performs a little song on the disc before the main film starts. This is part of the main film, a little introduction, he speaks a few words in german too.
The dvd has only german audio, but even if you speak no german at all you can pretty much follow the story.
I would recommend this film to all fans of westerns, if you’ve seen classical westerns and spaghettiwesterns, you should also see a ComBloc western
if we start including defa westerns, we start including all eurowesterns, and then the next guy comes a long and “why not include all westerns”. i think we should stick to spaghetti & pizza. maybe we can make one or two pages with an overview of eurowestern beyond italy or something but i guess more than that is too much. there’s still so much work to do with just the italian ones
Lindberg had send me copy of his DVD a while ago, and his introduction to the movie is adequate, although he seems to like it a bit more than I do. It’s not bad, but you sense it’s a propaganda movie, and it also feels a little corny here and there. There’s some influence of the Winnetou movies too (just look at the title: Blutsbrüder - Blood Brothers).
Like in Adiós Sabata, Reed gets a few opportunities to show his experience as a rodeo artist
@ ENNIOO : I’m afraid not, these films were probably made for the home (= communist) market, so it might be easier to trace a copy with Russian than with English subs
Well, the narrative is so straightfoward and simple, that you wouldn’t have much difficulty watching the film without understanding a word of the dialogue
.