Winnetou and Old Shatterhand help out a young woman who is trying to clear the name of her father, who has been accused of stealing some gold. However, things are not simple and not long before a few other people want the gold for themselves.
We have the lush music and vast landscapes which are a good start for me. But then we jump to some torture and someone calling someone a fucking arseole in the english subtitles. Surprised at this for a 1968 western. So we have a mixture of stuff going on, and a few weird scenes aswell. One of those involves a load of snakes and another scene with natural gas explosions ( and I do not not mean someone having a big fart ). Oh and lets not forget the trainspotter style guy who collects plants, and did not expect him to be dressed up as an indian in one scene. Film kept me interested as did not know what to expect at times.
One of the two films I haven’t reviewed yet for this site. I watched it a while ago, and didn’t really like it. Felt a bit like a patchwork movie, with some scenes featering Winnetou taken from a completely different movie.
Those late Karl May movies often fall between two stools: they are too childish to compete with the spaghetti westerns, but at the same time they lack the naive poetry of the first movies. The problem of the May stories is that they belong to a different world, a pre-modern, christian era, when indians were still thought of as noble savages. If you want to sell such a story, or message, you got to play it straight, you can’t mix it with spaghetti western ingredients, that simply won’t work
Like the books, the first movies were aimed, in the first place, at children, so that might be a handicap, but they have decent stories and the acting isn’t too bad. I have never been very fond of Brice, but Lex Barker is a very credible Old Shatterhand (he would have done well in a SW too, I suppose; I guess he was overlooked because he was too much identified with the Karl May movies). For me both the books and the films are a good childhood memory, which helps of course.
I don’t think so.
The books were in my childhood mainly bought by teenagers, but they were written by May for adults several decades earlier. And I’m sure that the films were back in the 60s also aimed at adults, or let’s say made for the whole family, for everyone who went into a cinema.
Would probably be interesting to check the original FSK ratings.
[quote=“Stanton, post:5, topic:2467”]I don’t think so.
The books were in my childhood mainly bought by teenagers, but they were written by May for adults several decades earlier. And I’m sure that the films were back in the 60s also aimed at adults, or let’s say made for the whole family, for everyone who went into a cinema.
Would probably be interesting to check the original FSK ratings.[/quote]
I was about 10-14 years old when I read the novels; I had a cousin who was a few years older than me and, like me, a great reader; he owned a dozen of novels but had stopped collecting and reading them when he was about 14-15 years of age. I bought the novels for ten guilders a three pornographic magazines I had laid my hands on. I still have most of those books (God knows what happened to the magazines), they’re still in good condition and unabridged (most later prints were abridged considerably). I don’t know for what audience May originally wrote the novels. An adult audience? If you say so … Well, the times they are a’changing …
