The Treasure of the Silver Lake (German: Der Schatz im Silbersee) is a 1962 Western film directed by Harald Reinl, loosely based on German author Karl May's 1891 novel of the same name. It was the first in a highly-successful series of films based on May's works by the West German studios Rialto and Constantin Film, starring American actor Lex Barker as the frontiersman Old Shatterhand and French actor Pierre Brice as the Apache warrior Winnetou.
Filmed on-location in Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia) as a co-production with Jadran Studios, the film was released in West Germany on 14 December 1962. It was the highest-grossing German-language film of that year, and its success demonstrated the viability of European-produced Western films, laying the groundwork for the Spaghetti Western.
Plot
Fred Engel's father is murdered by Colonel Brinkley in order to acquire a treasure map, however the Colonel only acquires half of it, the other half is held by Mrs. Butler. Discovering the scene of the crime, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou help Fred bring his father's murderer to justice and locate the treasure of Silver Lake.
The rights to Karl May's bestselling novels were purchased by producer Horst Wendlandt, who hired writers Harald G. Petersson, Gerhard F. Hummel, and Hans Wiedemann to develop treatments based on the first three Old Shatterhand-Winnetou novels.[1]
The film was a significant financial investment for both Rialto Film and Constantin Film, with a projected budget exceeding that of most West German films at the time. As a cost-cutting measure, the films were co-produced with the Yugoslavian company Jadran Film. It was also thought that filming on-location in Yugoslavia (primarily Croatia) would be a better fit for the film's Southwestern American setting, as well as the large amount of period costumes and experienced stuntmen.
Expatriate American star Lex Barker was cast as Old Shatterhand, and French actor Pierre Brice as Winnetou. As neither was fluent in German at the time, their dialogues were dubbed, Barker by Horst Niendorf and Herbert Stass. Most of the Yugoslav supporting cast was dubbed as well.
The film was a phenomenal success, predating that of Sergio Leone's films. This helped provide a cultural and financial context for the later Spaghetti Western films, many of which had West German co-producers and financial interests.[2]
Box office
The Treasure of the Silver Lake was the highest-grossing film of 1962 in West Germany, selling 10 million tickets and grossing €8.6 million[3] ($9 million).
In France, it was the 29th top-grossing film of 1963, selling 1,656,736 tickets.[4] This was equivalent to an estimated $1,030,000 in gross revenue.[a]
In the Soviet Union, the film sold 39.8 million tickets in 1974.[5] This was equivalent to an estimated $19 million in gross revenue.[6]
This adds up to a total of 51,456,736 tickets sold worldwide, grossing an estimated $29 million in worldwide revenue.[citation needed]
Sequels
The success of the film spawned 10 direct sequels starring Barker and/or Brice, released between 1963 and :
Apache Gold (1963, de: Winnetou or Winnetou – 1. Teil)
^Kramp, Joachim (2001). Hallo! Hier spricht Edgar Wallace. Die Geschichte der legendären deutschen Kriminalfilmserie von 1959–1972. Berlin.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^"Cinema Going". The Asian Messenger. 1–4. Center for Communication Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong: 2. 1975. Archived from the original on 18 January 2023. Retrieved 18 July 2020. More Russians (4.5 billion) go to the movies more times (an average of 17.7 times per person) each year than people in any other country, according to UNESCO statistics for 1973, the last year for which figures are available. Tailing the Russians are Singaporeans, 17.1 times a year, and Hong Kong people, 15.1 times a year. Italians go 10 times, Britons 2.4 times and Frenchmen 3.5 times a year. The high frequency of movie going in Russia is attributed to the low price of movie admission, the drab quality of Soviet TV and the difficulty in getting seats at a restaurant or other places of entertainment. In Russia, where a movie ticket costs about 47 US cents, there are 154,200 cinemas.
