Eastern Trails – The Western at DEFA (1967-75): go east, young man!

In many ways, the Western was always a propagandistic art form. America was still a relatively young country when cinema began, and it needed a national founding myth. The story of brave white men heading west, civilising a savage land and finding gold in them there hills fitted the bill perfectly. You don’t, of course, have to be lock-step with every aspect of Manifest Destiny in order to love Westerns. Joseph Stalin famously liked to kick back with a John Wayne movie after a hard day’s terror. But that was a private passion, and the Communist system demanded something more ideologically acceptable to show in public.

In East Germany, this meant the kind of Westerns collected in Eureka’s fabulously offbeat new box set Eastern Trails – The Western at DEFA. DEFA, short for Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, was the state-owned production company founded straight after World War II. The breadth of its activity might be a surprise to those who associate Eastern Bloc cinema with stolid Soviet Realist propaganda; their musicals were the subject of a 1997 documentary, the wittily-titled East Side Story. Eastern Trails is a compilation of four films in which DEFA tried to bring anti-imperialist class consciousness to the German love of Westerns. This unlikely love affair had begun in the 1880s, with Karl May’s stories of the gunslinger Old Shatterhand (he shat a what?!). May’s pacifism offered a more acceptable way of looking at the Western for East German directors. Shatterhand was an ally, not a killer, of the Native tribes, and the four films in this box set have a similar focus.

Despite these good intentions, you may hear some warning bells here. All four of the films in this set star the Serbian actor Gojko Mitić, whose tanned, square-jawed features earned him a good living playing Native Americans in European movies. Today we’d call it redface, although there is a more forgiving way of looking at the casting here. We’ve all sat through modern Hollywood movies which have laudable minority representation, yet shamefully leave the foundations of capitalism unscathed. We’re happy to praise the progressive aspects of those films – why can’t we do the same for movies that have the exact opposite set of strengths and weaknesses?

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Admittedly the box set begins by putting its least steady foot forward with Richard Groschopp’s Chingachgook, The Great Serpent. Despite being named after its Mohawk central character (played, naturally, by Mitić), this spends an awful lot of time on the white characters who swindle them out of their treasures and land. It’s based on the work of James Fenimore Cooper, whose portrayal of Natives required some updating when Michael Mann adapted The Last of the Mohicans. In the context of an actual socialist film, it’s extremely outmoded, and that starchiness is matched by the rest of the film. It has to be said that, despite being made in the 1960s and 70s, these films are very traditional Westerns in their style and pacing. The Italian revolution in Western film-making – a revolution that led to some notably politically charged films being made – did not reach DEFA, who seem to have been happy carrying on as if A Fistful of Dollars never happened.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Skipping ahead slightly to the third film in the set, 1973’s Apache, you can see that DEFA were capable of doing a better job at the classic Hollywood style than Hollywood had managed for the preceding decade or so. Directed by a man with the unimpeachably German name of Gottfried Kolditz, Mitić stars as the legendary Apache chief Ulzana, a role he reprised in an unrelated film of that name the following year. It’s a real movie-star role for him, with a focus on Ulzana stoically resisting whippings and refusing to flinch at gunshots that recalls Marlon Brando’s masochistic directorial effort One-Eyed Jacks.

More importantly, Apache sees the style and substance of these films working in harmony. It kicks off with a fabulous theme tune and an extremely cute prairie dog, and pays an almost forensic attention to the business of tracking and hunting. It also offers a more rounded, human characterisation of its Apache characters than Chingachgook did its Mohawks, while maintaining the earlier film’s focus on the Europeans’ dehumanisation of them. The white men looking down the list of prices for scalps – $100 for a warrior, $50 for a woman, $25 for a child – recalls Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish Western novel Blood Meridian. The film can’t match up to that book’s notorious level of brutality – the box set has a 12 certificate – but these films are often a touch bloodier than their old-fashioned style might lead you to expect, and Apache is the roughest of the lot.

The most action-packed might be the second one, Konrad Petzold’s Fatal Error. This 1970 film begins with a touch of dark comedy as a Native chief’s agreement to share the treasure of their land with white men crashes straight into the title card. The treasure in question is oil, making this unexpectedly reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and also guaranteeing a literally explosive climax. The heroic role is split between Mitić’s Shoshone chief and his half-brother, a mixed-race gunslinger played by a young Armin Mueller-Stahl. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that the latter character comes to identify more with the natives, but his dilemma makes the film’s ideological content more dramatic and interesting. Set in Wyoming, its rocky German mountains do a surprisingly good job of standing in for Annie Proulx country.

Fatal Error is marred by being slightly overlong; the shortest film in the set, Werner Wallroth’s 1975 Blood Brothers, is maybe the oddest, if only for its historical context. It’s a vehicle for Dean Reed, the “Red Elvis” who jettisoned a singing career in the States in order to defect to the Communist bloc. The story was co-written by Reed, and it’s a pretty clear parallel for his own life, following an American soldier who defects to the Cheyenne. So far, so Dances With Wolves, but Wallroth and Reed are very good at portraying the ideological shifts not just in their protagonist, but in the Cheyenne who have to learn to trust one of the soldiers who just slaughtered their people. (Reed was an attentive student of anti-imperialist history, and based his story on the real-life Sand Creek massacre of 1864, one of the bloodiest episodes in the Indian Wars)

Reed is now remembered as a historical curio, but Blood Brothers makes the case for him to be taken more seriously. He’s a handsome, understated leading man who’d probably have done well in the ’70s New Hollywood had he been able to tolerate living in America. He’d also worked in Italian Westerns before his defection, notably co-starring with Yul Brynner in Adios, Sabata, and he brings some of their hipper, sparer style to DEFA with him. Too little, too late, perhaps – Enzo G. Castellari’s Keoma, widely cited as the last great film of the Spaghetti Western era, would be released just one year later – but it’s a suitable ending to a box set of films with a more flexible, interesting relationship to international Western film-making than you might expect.

The picture quality and subtitle quality in this set is a massive leap forward from the mostly cruddy, often dubbed prints that have made their way across the internet previously. There’s also a video essay looking at how DEFA represented American history by Jenny Barrett on the first disc, and a lot of impressive stuff on the second: Michael Brooke does a commentary for Apache, Sean Allan explains the strange story of Dean Reed, and there is an archival musical performance from Reed himself. The cover art, always a strength of Eureka’s, is by Colin Murdoch, and it’s lovely.

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