Rampage at Apache Wells (1965)

Walter Barnes is Bill Campbell, a wagon master hoping he and the settlers traveling with him can swap provisions and animals for a prime piece of land from the Navajo and Utes.

But it just so happens there is oil on the land Campbell hopes to settle on, and a slimy businessman named Grinley, aka The Oil Prince, wants that land.

So he hatches a scheme to have the wagon train guide kidnapped and replaced with his own man so that the wagon train will wind up on the wrong piece of land.

Old Surehand (Stewart Granger) and Winnetou (Pierre Brice) uncover that ploy, but aren’t as successful at keeping the wagon train out of trouble.

That’s because one of the passengers has a sack of gold hidden in his wagon. Turns out, it was left behind by bandits during a stage holdup the passenger survived.

Grinley uses that to convince Indian Chief Mokaschi that the whites with Campbell can’t be trusted, and that they aren’t nearly as dirt poor as they’ve passed themselves off to be.

Add the death of his son at the hands of a white man’s knife, and Chief Mokaschi is ready to declare all out war on the settlers.

That means Old Surehand and Winnetou need to act quickly to determine the identity of the man who killed the chief’s son.

Review:

Another of the Winnetou films based on Karl May novels, chock full of action, chock full of heroics by Winnetou and a white frontiersman, with a greedy white man responsible for stirring up the trouble.

This marked the sixth film in the series and the second in which Stewart Granger plays Winnetou’s white friend, Old Surehand, sorta playfully, one might add.

It’s also interesting because a young Mario Girotti — later to adopt the stage name Terence Hill of Trinity fame — plays a key supporting role.

He’s a card player named Richard Forsythe who’s caught cheating and recruited to help double cross the settlers.

It’s a mission he’s far less enthusiastic about after falling for a pretty dark-haired lass named Lizzy (Macha Meril); her father is the man with the hidden sack of gold.

In one of the more interesting action scenes, the settlers are trying to cross a river to stay a safe distance from the Indians when the raft carrying Lizzy, Richard and a young boy breaks free, sending them cascading down the rapids.

Can Old Surehand and Winnetou save them?

Directed by:
Harald Philpp

Cast:
Stewart Granger … Old Surehand
Pierre Brice … Winnetou
Walter Barnes … Bill Campbell
Harald Leipnitz … Grinley / The Oil Prince *
Macha Méril … Lizzy
Antje Weissgerber … Mrs. Anna Ebersbach
Terence Hill … Richard Forsythe
as Mario Girotti
Milan Srdoc … Old Wabble
as Paddy Fox
Heinz Erhardt … Kantor Aurelius Hampel
Milivoje Popovic-Mavid … Mokaschi *
Gerd Frickhoffer … Kovacs
Slobodan Dimitrijevic … Knife *
Dusan Janicijevic … Butler
Davor Antolic … Paddy
Veljko Maricic … Bergmann / Birchman
Ilija Ivezic … Webster
Zvonimir Crnko … Billy Fornor

Runtime: 90 min.

aka:
Winnetou und der Ölprinz
Apache Wells

Music: Martin Bottcher

Memorable lines:

Old Surehand, catching his guards napping: “Aren’t you supposed to be on watch?”
Old Wabble: “Don’t worry, Surehand, nobody stole the sun.”

Grinley: “No more killing.”
Butler: “But if someone gives us trouble, how else am I supposed to teach them who’s boss?”

Grinley to Old Surehand: “It’s a bad time for good people.”

Mokaschi, the Ute chief, upon his son’s death: “Your book says an eye for an eye. Mokaschi says 50 eyes for one eye.”

Trivia:

Pierre Brice always attributed part of the Winnetou success to composer Martin Bottcher, who provided the music for nine of the 11 Winnetou films of the 1960s. “I must say that when I hear this music, I still have goose bumps,” he said. “It’s a very beautiful music, it’s like Morricone’s music in Italian westerns.”

Macha Méril was 25 when she appeared as Lizzy in “Rammpage at Apache Wells.” She had already appeared in several films and later married Italian director Gian Vittorio Baldi. Méril was still active as an actress into the 2010s.

If a Winnetou film starred Stewart Granger, Paddy Fox (Croatian born Milutin Srdoč) was sure to be on hand as his bumbling sidekick Old Wabble. Paddy wound up appearing in more than 125 films, but is best remembered for the three Winnetou movies he made with Granger. Ironically, his character gets a more formal introduction to viewers in a subsequent film, “Flaming Frontier.”

How popular is the Winnetou brand in Europe? A popsicle stick called the Winnetou that was launched in Switzerland in 1980 is still sold today, featuring a smiling Indian chief on the package and featuring a chocolate top and three flavors of waterglace: apricot, pineapple and raspberry.