The Vengeance of Rome
- Автор: Муркок Майкл
- Серия: Between The Wars #4
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Vengeance of Rome». Краткое содержание книги:
In Winnetou: Der Rote Gentleman, I extolled the virtues of the natural life and the open air while Desmond Reid learned the lore of the West at my side and fell in love with my adopted sister Nosha Tishi, who was actually the only white survivor of a Kiowa raid which killed her parents. She had been rescued by Winnetou’s father and raised as his own daughter until she ran away to find herself and become, in the course of time, White Queen of the Kakatanawa Apache. This last was an Ingram touch. He said that an American audience could not accept a love interest between a white man and an Indian, unless she was aristocracy and really white.
Ingram’s next act was to change the names of Sam Hawkens, Dick Stone and Will Parker to Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and Calamity Jane, names which would mean more to Americans. We should note that Old Shatterhand’s rifle was named Henry, after the famous buffalo gun. Creighton had no problem with his new name, though he was not the Crockett later reinvented by Disney’s Fess Porker, a smooth-faced Valley boy who would have looked better advertising hair oil. Carson, too, was more hirsute than he is nowadays depicted, and Calamity Jane was a buxom local character actress who specialised in playing comic parts. Her oddly accented English made her even funnier. Since she had an unpronounceable native name, Ingram rechristened her Bessie Bunter. Plump and content as a pumpkin, Bessie appeared on the screen under that name. She played the comic love interest against the serious romantic story of Mrs Cornelius’s unspoken love for Old Shatterhand. Kit and Davy became in Ingram’s expert hands a kind of Laurel and Hardy in identical coonskin hats, forever getting into hilarious scrapes, both rivals for the favours of Calamity Jane. He convinced us this was a necessary element in any successful adventure film. For a while he toyed with putting Bessy in blackface to play against Mr Mix, but her make-up somehow clashed with her accent. Mr Mix had to be content with a smaller part as the funny cook.
So that summer, while the NSDAP made wonderful gains across the country and Hitler became a name on everyone’s lips, we all moved down to the Dalmatian coast and the fairy-tale town of Split, with its views over the Mediterranean. Dr Hugenberg had still not joined us, but telegrams arrived regularly. The political situation demanded his full attention.
In Split we put up by the station at the Bellevue, a popular five-star hotel only a short walk from Diocletian’s Palace. Now a bizarre quarter of its own, its rooms and corridors had been added to over the centuries until the entire complex was a teaming warren of resident families and bawling merchants. Founding the settlement when he had divided the empire into three, Diocletian retired here not far from where he was born. As he sat dreaming in his vast palace, the empire broke into warring factions. In Rome his own daughter was despoiled and destroyed and the true Church exiled to Byzantium. In a fit of conscience, knowing that he had set the scene for centuries of conflict, that his own failure of responsibility would mean Chaos descending like a black fire upon Europe, Diocletian took poison not a quarter of a mile from our hotel. Rex Ingram was intrigued by the story. He started to make notes for a script and planned to talk Hugenberg into financing another film once the Winnetou pictures were in the can.
Split would be the base from which we would shoot our location scenes for Winnetou: The Red Gentleman and two planned sequels. Hugenberg saw no point in spending money on a similar trip for every movie. The rest of the films would be made either in the studio or in closer Bavarian locations where the German Alps could substitute for the Dinaric Alps, in turn substituting for the Texas Mountains. Split, while scarcely more convenient than Zagreb, had the advantage of good hotels, decent restaurants and fresh sea breezes. When we were not filming, we found it extremely easy to relax there. Ingram, Reid and myself spent several happy evenings in the company of the youngest of the city’s rather attractive whores. But gradually fun turned into obsession as Ingram began to display iron control of his camera, which needed little sound work in these scenes. All the dubbing would be done in the Berlin studios, which had the most advanced sound effects equipment.
The movie we eventually shot starred Desmond Reid as the greenhorn ‘Old Shatterhand’, Gloria Cornish as Nosha Tishi, Winnetou’s adopted sister (and actually the Baroness Henrietta Stark), Lon Creighton as Davy Crockett and Seryozha stained a dark red and in full war paint as Winnetou’s Kiowa enemy, Chief Tangua, who also becomes Old Shatterhand’s enemy. Thankfully, Seryozha’s vanity still gave him a muscular appearance. Stripped and with his hand movements restricted, he was perfect for his part. Even Mr Mix, Ol’ Shine, the comical Negro cook, made his role into a substantial one.
In real life Seryozha also doubled as our SS guardian angel, having been given the authority by Himmler. Heaven help us, I thought, if he were called upon to use a real revolver in our defence! With luck he would be the first to be shot!
The second film was to be called Winnetou: Prince of the Sacred Land. The same character actors continued their ongoing subplots, but now Winnetou, Old Shatterhand and his beloved Nosha Tishi must face more Eastern invaders, rascally speculators whipping up trouble among the Kiowa and Kakatanawa in the hope of starting an Indian war which would bring the army in and allow them to steal Winnetou’s traditional tribal homelands. By the end of the film our band of brothers, standing side by side, had driven out the Eastern invaders, shown them for the scheming crooks they were and reclaimed their whole tribal homeland. Something about this story struck a deep chord in my soul. I gave what were without doubt my greatest performances as the philosophical Apache warrior, whose simple words carry profound wisdom. Here was the epitome of the natural man, the soldier-poet of the plains, a samurai of the rocky deserts. Through all his vicissitudes, you were constantly aware that Winnetou was the superior human being.
At Nuremberg Doctor Hugenberg was later to suffer accusations of racism. Evidence was given in his favour, however, that he had encouraged his company to depict a Red Indian as an example to young German manhood! A strange and complicated form of racism, I think! Similarly there was not a hint of caricature in the depiction of Ol’ Shine. The Germans had no tradition of casting darkies in demeaning roles.
What so few people seem to understand is that those who warned of the Jewish threat were not racists. They had nothing against the Turks or the Japanese. Why should they have? The Turks and the Japanese had not taken over their culture and their financial institutions, sending a generation to die in the trenches in order to line its own pockets. Mr Kamitami had not changed his name to Mr Campion, and Mr Atatürk was not demanding that we call him Mr Atkins. I am not an anti-Semite - I am an anti-hypocrite!
By July we had completed most of our location work. The weather was becoming too hot to work. Doctor Hugenberg had failed to join us. We shot some interiors in Split and the villages of the hinterland and then took the train back to Zagreb and from there via Vienna to Munich where we immediately began the sound scenes. Many of these were set against subtle back projections of waterfalls, forests and scrubland, so that while the camera itself had little movement, there was always action in the backgrounds, themselves often reflecting the moods of the characters. Hugenberg, making a dashing visit down to Bavaria, was delighted. Ingram was a master of layered visual narrative and silent meaning. Many of his highly developed skills were now useless to him, yet he did his best and it was wonderful to see him work. I began to entertain thoughts of directing my own film one day. This, of course, led me to consider a new kind of projector and camera, and my brain raced off along another inventive road!