Karl May movies

Karl May movies are movies based on novels and stories by German author Karl May (1842-1912).

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In most cases the novels were reworked to a great extent for filmisation, some movies even only used names of some characters invented by Karl May. So in the book "Der Schatz im Silbersee" (The treasure of Silver Lake) the main character was called "Old Firehand" - in the movie it was "Old Shatterhand" (played by American actor Lex Barker). The movies "Old Shatterhand" (Apaches Last Battle) and "Winnetou und sein Freund Old Firehand" (Thunder at the Border) don't have any novel at all as basic literature. They were completely invented by the movie's writers. Several TV-productions were much more close to the novels, such as "Das Buschgespenst" and "Kara Ben Nemsi Effendi".

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In foreign distributions most of the movie names were not translated directly into the respective other language, but new movie titles were made up. In American distributions the makers of the movie posters also "invented" some new color formats such as "Flaming Arrow Color" for the movie "Der Schatz im Silbersee" http://www.martin-boettcher.net/clip03a.jpg and "Apache Color" http://www.martin-boettcher.net/clip04a.jpg for "Winnetou 1. Teil" (called Apache Gold in America).

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The silent movies of the 1920ies are considered lost.

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For 11 movies of the 1960ies German composer Martin Böttcher wrote landmark German filmmusic, whose success also helped the movies being successful internationally and by this helped the Italian movie business to make western-movies of their own and create a whole new movie-category, the Spaghetti western (whose most successful composer Ennio Morricone achieved his fame just after Martin Böttcher).

Related Topics:
Martin Böttcher - Spaghetti western - Ennio Morricone

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