unveröffentlicht, ca. 2000

The East Disguised As the West

In the 1970s, when the American actor and singer Dean Reed (1938-1986) took up residence in the GDR, this provided an occasion for DEFA to shoot Westerns with him. Colorado-born Dean Reed was better known in the USA - even more so in South America - as a rock'n'roll singer. In the 1960s he evolved into a protest singer who supported Allendes Unidad Popular in Chile and became a committed opponent of the Vietnam War. In Europe he played in a couple of Italo-Westerns, once alongside Yul Brynner, before settling in the GDR and marrying a German.

Dean Reed's first box office hit in the GDR was Konrad Petzold's adaptation of Jack London's "Kit & Co" (1974). Set in Alaska as an adventure tale, the film co-starred Armin Mueller-Stahl and Rolf Hoppe, the latter usually cast as a popular "heavy" in Indianerfilme. Dean Reed directed himself in the Western parody "Sing, Cowboy, Sing" (1981), and he wrote the script for "Blutsbrüder" (Blood Brothers, 1975), loosely related to Arthur Penn's "Little Big Man" (USA, 1970), in which he played a white soldier who is disillusioned by the Indian conflict and marries an Indian squaw.

(Excerpt from the non-edited article "The East Disguised As the West" by Frank-Burkhard Habel, concerning the East German Western - the so-called "Indianerfilme")