The Karl May Franchise

If you thought my inability to find the last two Ilsa films was embarrassing, well, I can’t find a single entry in this 23 movie series. But then again, we are talking about a series of B-movies from 1960s Germany, so this isn’t too surprising. Apparently some exist on VHS, without dubbing or subtitles, or translated into Czech, which is even worse! I’m not going to try finding those. And without content to bother with, I can instead do a bit of meta-franchise examination.

The story of the Karl May motion pictures starts long before motion pictures were a twinkle in the eye of Thomas Edison or whomever. For the Karl May pictures are a franchise derived from literature (a fairly common phenomenon), and as such we must first consider literary franchises. Actually, I would suspect there are far more franchises in book form than on film, for all it really takes to create a literary franchise is one author (or sometimes more) willing to stretch his stories out indefinitely, no matter how off-the-wall they may become. Compare that to film, which is beholden to budgets in the first place, and is also more dependent on audience box office receipts. Stories in a movie series thus must conform to audience expectations and not stray too far, while a lone author meanwhile may go crazy and publish increasingly unreadable tomes ad infinitum. Consider the “Dune” books.

Karl May was a German born in 1842 in Schönburgische Rezessherrschaften (I love that detail), and who was active in literature and even music up until his death in 1912. Two years later, World War One happened, entirely due to May’s absence. His most well-known books, and the ones that formed the basis for the later movies, were essentially westerns. You know, stories set in the western United States during the post-Civil War years. The western as a genre has enjoyed foreign, non-American appreciation for quite a while, and many of the greatest cinematic westerns happen to be of foreign origin – I am talking about Spaghetti Westerns primarily, specifically Sergio Leone’s magnificent films, though I’m sure nearly every country with a substantial film industry has contributed something to the western genre. What astounds me here is how old this tradition is. May was writing westerns before they had been codified as a genre, and so he may (uh) have had a impact on westerns in the U.S. This I cannot say, really, but it’s likely.

Of course, if I was taking this project seriously, I would have somehow been able to track down the Karl May movies. Maybe I should have gone to freaking Germany, like many a drunken American before me. Hell, at the very least, I should have put off this entire movie project until I had read every one of Karl May’s novels, in order to speak of them with the fullest scholarly confidence…To hell with that! Who knows what that would yield, and I have like 34 Godzilla movies to cover at some point. Seeing as it’s now June, I’ll just do what I can with May.


May’s novels, set in the (Old) West, are connected as a series by a consistent set of characters, including narrator and May alter-ego Old Shatterhand. May would write tales set in other exotic locales such as the Middle East and the Orient, and occasional characters overlap into these stories. It seems arguable that Old Shatterhand was the lead character of these semi-unrelated tales, as the narrators in each series share the same personalities (May’s), and are known by local nicknames. In the case of the westerns, Old Shatterhand is the German blood brother of Apache chief Winnetou, the other central figure of May’s literature. Though he hadn’t yet seen America while writing these novels, May claimed to have experienced all Old Shatterhand had, for May was also part of that silly Romantic spiritualist movement, of which we can also sadly count Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, once May finally made it to the States, he never made it past Buffalo, N.Y.! Old Shatterhand himself is a forerunner to the standard western hero archetype, and greatly influenced later heroes such as the Lone Ranger. You’re talking about a pretty old character when he predates the Lone Ranger.

Winnetou, for his part, is a proud member of that great white “noble savage” concept of natives. While today we’re all pretty well beyond this stereotype, this was not the case in the nineteenth century, and that goes double for Europe. With no Native Americans to directly observe, authors such as May had to build up Winnetou based on Romantic European ideals, reflecting very “period” notions about nature, civilization and Christianity. Throw in a little James Fenimore Cooper, and you’ve got yourself an iconic Injun.

Let us briefly consider a few of May’s titles in his western series, and excuse ze occasional German:

Deadly Dust (1880)
Ein Oelbrand (1882/83)
Im »wilden Westen« Nordamerika's (1882)
Winnetou I (1893)
Winnetou II (1893)
Winnetou III (1893)
Old Surehand I (1894)
Old Surehand II (1895)
Old Surehand III (1896)
Satan und Ischariot I (1896)
Satan und Ischariot II (1897)
Satan und Ischariot III (1897)
Gott läßt sich nicht spotten (1897)
Ein Blizzard (1897)
Mutterliebe (1897/98)
Weihnacht! (1897)
Im Reiche des silbernen Löwen I (1898)
Winnetou IV (1910)

I love how unimaginative those titles are, even in German! He actually uses numbered titles! This is actually a great find for me, as it reveals a certain sequel titling trope has existed for far longer than I’d expected. Why didn’t all those “Return of...” movies from the 40s employ this Roman numeral trick?

Karl May’s works were sort of the airport paperbacks of their day, I gather, simply meant to be adventure yarns. Great literature has come from similar aims, though – consider Robert Lewis Stevenson! May’s aims were distinctly pro-German, to create German heroes such as Old Shatterhand and also Old Surehand (May’s heroes were all Old S—hands). It seems Germany has always lacked the cultural frivolity we Americans treasure so, since May was pretty much the only German in history who actually wanted to create fun German literature with a fun German hero. This did temporarily elevate the German temperament, made them a more confident people, and sadly led to Naziism. No, I’m serious! One of May’s greatest admirers was Hitler, though surely we can’t blame May for that. Hell, May spoke of the Jews in a way that could be called sympathetic for a nineteenth century German. Of course the Nazis went about and totally reedited those passages.

The Ilsa films a recent memory, I tire of discussing the Nazis. And so that brings us, after all this time, to discussing the movies – the reason I even bothered researching a little May in the first place. As with the novels, I am too lazy to discover any plot summary or review or...or...Um...Oh hell, here’s all the titles:

1. On the Brink of Paradise (1920)
2. Caravan of Death (1920)
3. The Devil Worshippers (1920)
4. Through the Wasteland (1936)
5. Die Sklavenkarawane (1958)
6. Der Löwe von Babylon (1959)
7. The Treasure of Silver Lake (1962)
8. Apache Gold (1963)
9. Old Shatterhand (1964)
10. The Shoot (1964)
11. Last of the Renegades (1964)
12. Frontier Hellcat (1964)
13. The Treasure of the Aztecs (1965)
14. Pyramid of the Sun God (1965)
15. Rampage at Apache Wells (1965)
16. The Wild Men of Kurdistan (1965)
17. The Desperado Trail (1965)
18. Flaming Frontier (1965)
19. Fury of the Sabers (1965)
20. Legacy of the Incas (1965)
21. Half Breed (1966)
22. Thunder at the Border (1966)
23. Winnetou and Shatterhand in the Valley of Death (1968)

The dates tell a tale, and allow for quite a bit of detective work on their own. First of all, we have a trilogy of connected films from 1920, a one-off from 1936, and then a great series of constant releases (19 in all) for a decade from 1958 to 1968. From a series standpoint, I would hesitate to call these all one franchise. These films are initially from literature, remember, and one cannot consider every Sherlock Holmes movie ever made to be in the same series, right? Or hell, every time Dracula appears randomly as the villain in the final moments of some awful Euro horror flick? So no, for a film series derived from literature, there must be some other element apart from characters or source to define continuity. It could be a consistent producer, or star, or a continuum or producers and stars that maintains an identity, such as with the James Bond films. As such, I would not consider the Karl May movies to be a series until the 1950s – but then we still have a 19 movie film franchise, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

As for those three films from 1920, there’s little to say about them. They are silent films, black and white, of course. They are also lost, so no one has seen them in, oh, I’d guess 90 years. What is knows is that they star Carl de Vogt as Kara Ben Nemsi – that’s May’s non-western hero from his Middle Eastern stories, who may or may not actually be Old Shatterhand. So...yeah. These are even less tangentially connected to the 60s May western than I thought they were. These films also starred everyone’s favorite Hungarian morphine addict (and future Dracula) Bèla Lugosi.

Now why didn’t that one lone movie from 1936 engender a series? I don’t know. Perhaps there was something more important going on in Germany at the time.

And now we move on to 1958, and the real start of a Karl May film franchise! Actually, even now things aren’t quite as simple as all that. Though these are all westerns, all starring Karl May characters, there were rival productions. Information in English is scarce, but this is what I could piece together:

Certain producers had the legal rights to Karl May’s westerns, and started making movies out of them. Apparently the plots have very little to do with May’s original novels, but simply use them as a familiar starting point to justify a few generic Eurowesterns with an Old Shatterhand character. Again, isn’t it nice to see that the old “use the title, ditch the plot” ploy existed long before we started blaming our own contemporary movies? And you know, it makes sense that the Germans of the late 50s needed a populist hero like Old Shatterhand to wash out that awful taste of, well, that whole World War Two thing.

Starting in 1962 with The Treasure of Silver Lake, American actor Lex Barker started appearing as Old Shatterhand as part of producer Horst Wendlandt’s “official” series for the Rialto Film-Kompany. CCC-Film-Kompany rival Artur Brauner envied the apparent success of these films, so he did the obvious thing – also make Old Shatterhand movies starring Lex Barker. Wow, it’s like the exact same thing! Except Brauner did not have the rights to May’s novels. This doesn’t matter, because apparently Old Shatterhand and Winnetou were already in the public domain at this point, so he could simply make movies with them anyway, and cite them as being “inspired” by Karl May. Forget era or nation, the movie business remains ever the same!

All told, Lex Barker appeared as Old Shatterhand in seven films for these various producers. Further complicating matters, he appeared in two other May movies from 1965, The Treasure of the Aztecs and Pyramid of the Sun Gods, playing as Dr. Karl Sternau. Even more confusing, other movies in this “series” star Steward Granger as Old Surehand. That’s Surehand, not Shatterhand, even though those characters are interchangeable and Shatterhand enjoys far greater name recognition. Maybe Granger did this for vaguely understood legal reasons. At any rate, he is reported to have starred in “several” Surehand films, all still a part of this increasingly muddled series.

So of the May films of the 60s, there are at least two series here. Consider, one actor (Lex Barker) playing the same character in two different continuities for different producers at the same time. Yeesh! It seems what some would call a series was really just a compressed, all-purpose May-nia resulting in a pseudo-subgenre of Karl May-esque Sauerkraut Westerns throughout the 1960s...Right. Also, there was an unrelated Karl May TV series at the same time, which never counted in the first place. It’s a good thing Uwe Boll didn’t exist back then, and Karl May didn’t make video games.

So here’s something concrete I can say about some of these films. For ten of them (maybe for the same producer, but maybe not, since Lex Barker clearly was a whore) composer Martin Böttcher produced highly notable scores. His scores remain one of the things this May phenomenon is still fondly remembered for, and it is an accomplishment totally independent of May’s literature. I have actually been able to find some of this music. Compared to the Spaghetti Western scores by great Italian composer Ennio Morricone, Böttcher’s work sounds underwhelming. It more greatly resembles the classical scores from Hollywood westerns of the preceding decade. Still, his early May scores are supposed to have paved the way for Morricone. And if that’s even remotely true, we can all be profoundly grateful to these films.

All in all, the Karl May films are a part of the greater European western movement of the time, of which the Spaghetti Westerns were another distinct phenomenon. Hell, pondering these German flicks from a distance is the closest I’m going to get to reviewing Spaghetti Westerns – that is, unless I decide the 78 unlicensed Django knock-offs somehow constitute a series. As the Spaghetti Westerns were mostly filmed in Spain, the Mays were made in Yugoslavia, ‘cause nothing says “Old West” like Yugoslavia! And...well...that’s about as much B.S. as I can conjure about a film series when I can’t even find reviews.