This is quite a trip down the memory lane: way back in the '60s of last century a series of movies plied their way through the Soviet bloc, in which Winnetou was the noble & brave & wise Apache chief & warrior. His equally impressive sidekick, a white cowboy going by the quaint ridiculous moniker as Old Shatterhand (he was famed for his one-punch K. O. ability), was played by an American actor Lex Barker, while Winnetou was played by a French actor Pierre Brice. The movies were made by an East German production company, shot mostly in Yugoslav locations (not unlike Sergio Leone's spaghetti Western shot in Spain & Sicily). Dialog tracks were dubbed in German, but for local distribution in specific Eastern Bloc countries they got subtitled. The movies and the main characters were based on a series of books written in the late XiX c. By one Karol May, a German pulp writer who had written them mostly while dodging the law, as he was quite a scam artist most of his life. The movies (and the books which were widely available in translations throughout the Soviet Bloc) were a welcome - though quite silly - entertainment fodder in the region where genuine Westerns from America were rarely allowed for distribution, for both monetary and ideological reasons. It was quite funny listening to dialogs between characters spoken in German, and watching the secondary characters (the Apache tribesmen) played by swarthy Serbs and Macedonians.
Review of Der junge Häuptling Winnetou
