When my father was stationed in West Germany in 1970, we had no clue that the country would be our home until the summer of 1975. If we did, I’m guessing there would have been German lessons for me. Instead, my German vocabulary allows me to understand Sgt. Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. While we enjoyed the touristy aspects of being in the divide country, we didn’t partake fully of the culture since most of our social life took place on the U.S. bases that dotted the country. We didn’t go to the town movie theaters. We didn’t listen to contemporary German music even with Krautrock being at its peak. Dad never came home to tell us to load up into our red VW station wagon to see Kraftwerk and Neu at a nearby club. For us, there was a single channel from Armed Forces broadcasting that was only broadcasted in black and white. We did watch a bit of West German TV since it was in color. The only thing I remember seeing were The Mainzelmännchen. These six elf characters would run between the ads during the commercial blocks. West German TV wouldn’t allow commercials in the middle of TV shows. I mention all this because there’s a chance that I did come across a few of the films in Adventure Calls! Karl May at CCC. The seven action films from a legendary German novelist had to be crowd pleasures on the TV dial.
Karl May wrote a lot of books during his lifetime and sold over 200 million copies of them. He created adventure stories about the Wild West and the distant Orient. What was his secret at being so prolific? He appears to have done extremely little research and just created extremely fictional universes for his various heroes. He never visited the Wild West of America until long after his Shatterhand books had become bestsellers. West Germany’s Rialto Films began making Westerns based on May’s Shatterhand in the early ’60s. They starred Lex Barker as Shatterhand and Pierre Brice as Winnetou, an Apache. Brice was actually French. Lex Barker is best known for taking over the loincloth of Tarzan from Johnny Weissmuller. Art House attendees would remember Barker as the actor who punches Marcello Mastroianni for spending all night with Anita Ekbert in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Reader of this website will recall Barker appearing in Mabuse Lives! Dr Mabuse At CCC: 1960-1964 boxset. The duo proved huge in European cinemas in the pre-Spaghetti Western era. Thus Artur Brauner at CCC wanted to produce his own Shatterhand movie starring Barker and Brice. And he did.
Old Shatterhand (1964 – 121 minutes) has the cowboy investigating the murder of settlers. Signs do seem to point towards the Apache. Why would the tribe break their peace treaty? Shatterhand must find his Apache blood brother Winnetou to find out the truth before a massive war breaks out. There’s plenty of action on the wild frontier (of Yugoslavia). Winnetou and Shatterhand in the Valley of Death (1968 – 90 minutes) reunites Lex Barker and Pierre Brice in a mystery. Mabel Kingsley (You Only Live Twice‘s Karin Dor) is out to prove that her father had nothing to do with a gold robbery. Shatterhand agrees to help her find dad and what really happened to the gold shipment. He enlists Winnetou into the hunt. While there are people who will be upset at the Frenchman playing an Apache, remember that Karl May didn’t know any Apaches at the time. May probably imagined the Apache were like the French. Plus it’s interesting to see Apache speaking German.
CCC didn’t merely make the two movies about Shatterhand from Karl May’s fiction. They also got Lex Barker to play Kara Ben Nemsi, a Turkish adventurer. His comic sidekick is Hadschi Halef Omar (Ralf Wolter, who was in Old Shatterhand) joins him on the road. While the word “Orient” gets used during this series, they don’t ride all way to the Far East. The Shoot (1964 – 119 minutes) takes place in the Balkans. The area is being terrorized by a mysterious figure known as “The Shoot.” He and his gang are kidnapping and robbing all over the place. Kara’s in the region to protect a friend’s fiancé from being The Shoot’s next target. Through Wild Kurdistan (1965 – 103 minutes) has Kara hired to rescue a Shiek’s son who has been captured by Turkish troops. Can he do this without causing a massive war? In The Kingdom of the Silver Lion (1965 – 96 minutes) puts Kara on the trail of a kidnapped guardian of a major treasure. Can he find them before their kidnappers discover the location of a priceless collection of hidden wealth?
Barker played one more Karl May hero for CCC as Dr. Karl Sternau. The two films he made as this character were directed by the film noir legend Robert Siodmak (Criss Cross). The Treasure of the Aztecs (1965 – 101 minutes) and The Pyramid of the Sun God (1965 – 99 minutes) are two halves of a film. There’s even a cliffhanger at the end of Treasure that gets resolved in the opening of Pyramid. Don’t start the first movie without knowing you’ll be eager to his play on the second immediately. The adventure gets amped up when Dr. Karl Sternau has a meeting at the White House with President Abraham Lincoln. He’s given a letter of support to deliver to the leader of the Mexican revolution. America wants the European monarchy defeated. The stagecoach ride into Mexico is treacherous. This is where Sternau meets with cuckoo clock salesman Andreas Hasenpfeffer (Ralf Wolter). Eventually the two get involved with a Aztec princess who knows of a massive secret golden treasure. It’s more than enough money to fund the revolution. But will she allow such golden rarities to be sold for bullets?
Adventure Calls! Karl May at CCC is a wild treat with Lex Barker playing three different heroes. He’s got a great rugged charm no matter if he’s a cowboy, adventurer or Presidential envoy. It shows he could do more on screen than swing on a vine. I don’t know if I actually saw snippets of the films when they played on West German TV. Seeing them now is more fun. Mainly because they didn’t have English subtitles back then. I was lost during the dialogue. I would have had no clue how goofy the characters of Ralf Wolter really were. Now I appreciate the escapist fun of these seven action heavy films. Adventure Calls! Karl May at CCC takes us back to a time when the screen exploded with the action found in a page turner novel.
The Video for all the films is 2.35:1 anamorphic. The restorations allow the colors on the screen to pop against the rough terrain of Yugoslavia. The Audio for all the films is German LPCM 2.0 mono. Old Shatterhand, Winnetou and Shatterhand in the Valley of Death, The Shoot have an English Dub in LPCM 2.0 mono
Introductions by Sir Christopher Frayling are featured on all seven films. He gets really deep into the movies and characters. You might want to skip the “introductions” until you’ve seen the movie since he does have spoilers. He’s the author of Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone.
Audio Commentaries on Old Shatterhand and The Treasure of the Aztecs by David Kalat. He’s very informative about the films and CCC’s involvement with Lex Barker.
Making Old Shatterhand (17:44) opens with a cruise to modern locations of the film in Yugoslavia. Arturs Brauner explains how he got the right to a book so he could use the character. The interesting thing is Lex Barker was playing Shatterhand for rival Rialto films. But he got them to let him use the actor to be in his movie that was like their Shatterhand movies. He said there wasn’t a negative aspect to making the film once it got rolling.
Daliah Levi Featurette (2:26) has the actress singing on stage. She wants to be a singer and an actress. She passed away back in 2017 in Asheville, North Carolina.
Interview with Bernhard Schmid (6:47), the co-editor of Karl-May-Verlag. He points out that the two films about the Aztecs weren’t too close to the original books. Ge gets asked about Lex Barker playing 3 different Karl May heroes.
Making Karl May’s Orient Cycle (21:15) is how Artur Brauer realized he could adapt another of May’s heroes to a film series. While the books are about the Middle East, CCC made the film in Yugoslavia like the Westerns. He made Lex Barker the non-cowboy Kara Ben Nemsi and Rolf Wolter as the comedic sidekick Hadschi Halef Omar. Robert Siodmak directed the first film The Shoot. Marie Versini talks about the dangers of playing Tschita. There is talk of the stunt crew that knew how to cliff hang. There’s coverage of the other two films in the series. This time they went to Spain using spot that were just used in Lawrence of Arabia.
Heroes On Horseback (15:29) has Dr. Alice Brauner talk about the period of time that her father Artur Brauner produced the series of movies based on Karl May books. CCC was at its peak at this time. CCC co-produced The Garden of the Finzi Continis by director Vittorio De Sica that won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Brauner knew there was a major audience for escapist adventure films and began to adapt Karl May’s works for the screen. Alice points out even in West Germany, kids liked to play cowboys and Indians. Old Shatterhand was unique since he was friends with Winnetou. Kids reenacting the film in the playground didn’t have to pick a side. The films were blockbusters at the time and still have a following around the world. Alice still loves these films.
Newsreel Footage (0:51) is Artur Brauner receiving the Golden Screen Award. Lex Barker shows up in a tux.
Prodigal Son (26:08) is a piece on director Robert Siodmak returning to West Germany. Sheldon Hall gives the history of the director who struck it big in Hollywood with Phantom Lady, The Killers, Criss Cross and Son of Dracula. We see clips of his early work in Germany before he fled when World War II was starting. His brother Curt Siodmak went with him and made The Wolf Man. Siodmak returned to Europe in the ’50s and ended up at CCC making Karl May films with Lex Barker.
Archival Restoration Featurette (3:08) shows how the films were restored for the previous DVD release in Germany. We get sense of how they replace bad spots in a frame using the frames on either side of the image. The prints had to be cleaned up before digitizing. A lot of work went into making the deserts look the proper level of sandy.
Trailers for Old Shatterhand – the English language release (3:34) Winnetou and Shatterhand In The Valley of Death (4:08), The Shoot (2:55), Through Wild Kurdistan (3:44), In The Kingdom of the Silver Lion (4:23), The Treasure of the Aztecs (4:05) and The Pyramid of the Sun God (3:33). The trailers are rather rough so you can appreciate the restoration work done to the feature films.
Perfect Bound 60 page Booklet with essays and illustrations.
Eureka! Entertainment presents Adventure Calls! Karl May at CCC. Directed by Robert Siodmak, Hugo Fregonese, Harold Reinl & Franz Josef Gottlieb. Starring Lex Barker, Ralf Wolter, Pierre Brice, Daliah Lavi, Guy Madison, Gustavo Rojo & Rik Battaglia. Boxset Contents: 7 films on 4 Blu-ray discs. Rating: Unrated. Release Date: April 28, 2026.
and now the The Mainzelmännchen
