Flaming Frontier (1965)

To me, this movie is perfection.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

"Old Surehand" is a co-production between West Germany and Yugoslavia and this resulted into a German-language movie from 1965, which means it had its 50th anniversary last year. Of course, if you look at the fact that the title character is played by a British actor or at Italian actor Mario Girotti (before he became Terence Hill) or at all the Yugoslavian actors, you will understand immediately that almost everybody in here is dubbed. But this is nothing new when it comes to Karl May's Winnetou films. Or I could also say also say Alfred Vohrer's as he and his writer Fred Denger worked on quite a few of these adaptations. It runs for slightly under 90 minutes and as such is among the shorter films from the series. Lex Barker is not in here, but Pierre Brice gets some screen time as usual when they are trying to get smaller characters famous. I guess the idea was people with little interest in Old Surehand to say that they still wanna see it at the theaters because of Brice. But here, it did not work out as this film did not result in a sequel although the title suggests it will. There was simply not enough interest by cinema-goers.I may be a bit biased here as I like westerns, but these Winnetou movies do very little for me. On a positive note, Granger is not that bad and definitely better than Brice in his films, but this is not really due to Granger being memorable, just because of Brice being a very underwhelming actor. As for the story here, it is the same like in the other films: one hero, EWinnetou as his loyal friend, a bad guy, a side kick to the hero who brings in some comedy etc. But it is nothing new or creative at all. As with basically all the other Winnetou films, the biggest weakness here is the lack of shades. The characters are either 100% good or 100% bad, nothing in-between. The character elaborations are very underwhelming. The bad guys simply shoot some innocent buffaloes, so we get to hate them. Not good enough. And the main antagonist, to be honest, is completely bland and forgettable. He never seemed dangerous at all, not even when he is about to shoot a friend of the good guy at the very end. They had to include that because the hero of course does not shoot at good guys. And of course, the good guys (Surehand and Winnetou) are masters when it comes to shooting and never miss a target while the bad guys basically miss every target. Yawn. The more I think about it the more I guess 4 stars out of 10 is still too high of a rating. So lets not think about it any further. I suggest you watch something else instead.

Wow, I can't believe that anyone would give this movie a good review. There are so many problems with it I don't even know where to start. The dialog is so laughable, each scene so preposterous, it is just bizarre.Just as an example, in the waterfall scene, a mans starts to go over the waterfall in a raft but is saved by a lasso from Stewart Granger and pulled off the raft at the last second; in the next shot Stewart Granger is pulling in the rope with the man attached and behind and above him is most of the waterfall. The whole movie is like this, with dialog that has no pretext and scenes that have no context, so many goofs and continuity issues it would take longer to write about that than the movie itself.The plot is not bad, it was just so poorly written with such absurd dialog that it has to be a foreign-made or produced film. No accomplished western producer could have made such a laughable excuse. I feel for Stewart Granger that he was part of such a ridiculous movie. And the way he had the rifle cradled in his left arm in every scene regardless of the setting made me want to giggle uncontrollably.Old Surehand. Might as well have been named old dumb*ss.

The movie was originally entitled „Old Surehand I", because famous German novelist Karl May wrote a trilogy around the Old Surehand character. Yet movie no.1 was not followed by any sequel. Stewart Granger had played the same role before in „Der Ölprinz" and „Unter Geiern", though, and his portrait of a tricky, tongue-in-cheek westerner was loved by many fans, though others argued his Old Surehand was a completely new creation, not one of May's novels.The movie tells how the son of an Indian chief is murdered. A villain simply called the General (Larry Pennell) is responsible for this - and much more. Old Surehand (Stewart Granger) tries to stop the Indians from attacking the innocent settlers.Among the cast, you will notice a very young Terence Hill, still under his real name Mario Girotti in 1965. Also Milan Srdoc deserves mentioning. He portrays Old Wabble, Surehand's friend, as a nervous coward with an unexpected tragic edge. Overall, the movie is well paced, funny and tremendously entertaining. Many scenes stick to my memory: the precise shot from long distance which saves the passengers of the train in the opening scene, the night at the station when bandits try and poison Surehand and certainly the most unusual „battle" between the army and the Indians, while Pierre Brice as Winnetou and the great landscape of Slovenia and Croatia are strong and trusted trademarks of the series.

This complex-plot action Western offers Stewart Granger all possibilities to show his talent. The officer-actors try hard to fulfill it. A good budget enabled the director to build a great natural thriller-western. The fist-fights ought to be in the dark, the brightness-button doesn't fit it, but the whole story!