Old Surehand Review

From The Spaghetti Western Database

1965

Dir: Alfred Vohrer

Cast: Stewart Granger, Pierre Brice, Larry Pennell, Terence Hill, Paddy Fox, Leticia Roman, Jelena Jovanovic

Music: Martin Böttcher

Despite the addition 1. Teil (first part) in the original German title, Old Surehand was the third movie to feature British actor Stewart Granger as Old Surehand. It was also the first Karl May movie that was not awarded a Goldene Leinwand for attracting more than 3 million people to theatres in Germany. Granger and Brice, who had never liked each other, were on the worst imaginable terms by now, so the producers called it a day as far as Old Surehand was concerned. Granger felt so ashamed about the movie, that he apologized for it to his British and American colleagues. Ironically, this is probably the best of the three Surehand movies.

Like in the previous two movies, Granger’s Old Surehand has little in common with the tormented soul created by Karl May. But Granger has grown nicely into the part and lends the character a bit more dignity and gravitas here, even if he still wears Sunday trousers under buckskin and is still such a fabulous shot that he can shoot his opponents over hundreds of meters with his Winchester . No big deal? But he manages to do this without aiming, and shooting from his hip. As more often, the script is not based on an existing Karl May novel, but nevertheless tells an over-familiar story: bandits commanded by a villain called ‘The General’ rob a train and steal an army payroll. A little later two members of the gang provoke a small group of Comanche Indians to persecute them and attack the farm were they have taken shelter, all this in order to put the blame for the train robbery on the Indians. When the son of the Comanche chief is killed in town by a sniper, only Old Surehand and Winnetou are able to prevent a war between the tribe and the town’s people. We’ve seen those thing many times before, but the film is seasoned with a dose of quite potent spaghetti violence, and a second storyline has Granger as an avenger, a man looking for the murderer of his brother. Of course the murderer is no other than this ‘General’, the leader of the bandits terrorizing the surroundings.

The two previous Surehand movies had been small affairs. They lacked the large scale pretentions as well as the picturesque beauty of the Winnetou/Old shatterhand movies directed by Harald Reinl. For Old Surehand, director Alfred Vohrer clearly had a fairly high budget at his disposal and uses the Croatian landscape to much better effect, resulting in a few large scale action scenes that work pretty well and some of the best location work of the entire series, especially during the grand finale, set among the characteristic white rocks of the Split region. Winnetou and Old Surehand have preciously little scenes together (for obvious reasons) and Larry Pennell is a rather bland villain, but Terence Hill’s part as the stubborn young Toby, afraid of nothing, is particularly well written. His fiancée Judith is played by voluptuous blonde Leticia Roman, a then notorious starlet of German and Italian productions of dubious contents, who adds a welcome touch of eroticism to the movie, along with voluptuous brunette Jelena Jovanovich, another starlet of that genre. Of course the film is marred by the same silliness and often ridiculous comic relief as most other films in the series, but the script is so tight, and the pace so high, that it seems less detrimental here. Moreover Paddy Fox is far less irritating as Surehand’s sidekick Old Wabble than the assorted bunch of stereotyped lunatics that populate the other movies. With lots of innocent people shot and two sex-pots in the cast this is one of the more adult oriented Karl May adaptations. It’s not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s good fun, and warmly recommended to fans of the series.