Before reading, try this quiz on European pop culture. It’s fairly difficult for Americans, but hopefully simple for Europeans (especially older ones).
One of my favorite discoveries from living in Europe is that there is a pan-European pop culture which is unknown to Americans but second-nature to Europeans (or at least those who grew up before pop culture fragmented into a million pieces). These weren’t just local pop stars, which every country has, but something more general. Yes, Europe has long been flooded by low-brow American imports, but it also has its own low-brow competitors.
Strangely enough, this European pop culture might be best known in Eastern Europe, even Russia. In fact, that is where I learned most of it. Before 1989, these countries were mostly cut off from the US due to the Cold War, but they could ideologically justify purchasing TV shows, films, and music from their Western European neighbors who weren’t quite so demonized.
The text below describes some of the highlights of this pan-European pop culture. While mostly an exercise in nostalgia, entertainment, and cultural slumming, there are a couple of takeaways. One is that Europeans are as good as Americans at producing shlock. Another is that they are happy to send it abroad, specifically to Eastern Europe if not elsewhere.
1. Winnetou: Der Deutsche Indian
Who is the most read and most translated German author of all time? It’s not Goethe. Nor is it Hesse, Mann, or Rilke. His name in fact is Karl May. But there is no shame in not knowing the answer. Your local German professor (but not your German immigrant neighbor) may have missed too. May was the German Louis L’Amour or Zane Gray. He wrote cowboy and indian novels that are today (and for the past century have been) read by children across the world. Except in the English-speaking world that is.
But first some background. Karl May was an unlikely writer. Born to a poor weaver’s family in Saxony in 1842, he only just made it through teacher’s college. His teaching career, however, was interrupted several times – first after he stood too close to his landlord’s wife during piano lessons and later after a number of more serious brushes with the law. Ultimately he served two prison terms for impersonating public officials. He apparently put the time to good use, studying the work of James Fenimore Cooper and ethnographic accounts of native Americans. Significantly, though, none of his knowledge of the Wild West came from personal experience; he did not actually visit America until his middle age.
After his release from prison, May began a long and prolific career as a writer, first of pulp fiction, then of more accomplished adventure novels describing the American West and the Middle East among other locales. His greatest success came with a series of works centered on the German “cowboy” Old Shatterhand and his Indian companion Winnetou. Like their American models, the Winnetou books present archetypal battles between good and evil.
Winnetou, first published in 1892, begins with the German immigrant Karl arriving in the Wild West. Though he has never visited before, like May himself, Karl quickly proves to the settlers that he is no “greenhorn.” He not only knows the local flora and fauna and several Indian languages along with old West slang, but he is also an expert at tracking and fighting. All this he learned, he explains, from reading encyclopedias.
In the first novel of the series, Karl is branded with the nickname by which he will be known throughout the series. He is dubbed “Old Shatterhand” (this is not a translation, it is the name by which he is known the world over) because of his ability to knock out enemies with one blow of his fist. He also meets his future companion, the noble son of an Apache chief named Winnetou. After passing the tribe’s test of strength – he swims underwater to an island as the chief throws tomahawks at him – the two become blood brothers.
Together Old Shatterhand and Winnetou use their varied talents to defeat a variety of villains in prototypical good versus evil scenarios. The one twist from the American western is the identity of their foes. As Cracroft (1999: xxi) tells us, “In May’s scenario, this noble Teutonic/Indian duo emerged triumphant over the inferior Yankee/American – thereby inverting and subverting an almost sacrosanct myth and causing May’s western books to ring strangely and falsely in the North American ear.” Their foes in fact are frequently presented as Mormons who when proselytizing in Germany complain about negative reactions from admirers of May (Frayley 1981: 108).
Surprisingly, given Germany’s future, the novels are far ahead of their time in breaking free of racial stereotypes. It is the Indians who are noble – though they are still in need of European (read German) culture – and the whites who are cruel and destructive. Old Shatterhand even befriends American blacks and earns the ire of the Ku Klux Klan. Among the other recurring themes of the novels are Old Shatterhand’s Germanness – he always drinks German beer and reads German newspapers. May’s brand of Christianity also crops up frequently. Old Shatterhand never shoots to kill and thus encounters the same enemies over and over. When Winnetou dies at the end of the last volume of the trilogy, his last words are, “I believe in the Saviour; Winnetou is a Christian. Farewell!”
The success of May’s books was enormous. Nine million copies of his work had appeared by 1945, rising to 25 million over the next twenty years and doubling again in the seventies. Today the publishing house Karl-May-Verlag claims to have passed the 100 million mark, and since the copyrights have expired they are no longer the only publisher. The German fans of May’s work include such diverse personalities as Konrad Adenauer, Albert Einstein (“My whole adolescence stood under his sign. Indeed, even today he has been dear to me in many a desperate hour”), Herman Hesse, Adolf Hitler (Thomas Mann’s brother Klaus wrote an essay about May entitled “Cowboy Mentor of the Fuhrer”), Albert Schweitzer, Erich Honecker, Helmut Kohl, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In 1962, the Winnetou phenomenon conquered a new medium. The German director Harald Reinl decided to put May’s work on the screen. (He was not the first. Adaptations had been made in the twenties and thirties.) Starring the American Lex Barker (who had previously played Tarzan and had a role in La Dolce Vita) as Old Shatterhand and the Frenchman Pierre Brice as Winnetou, The Treasure in Silver Lake became the biggest screen hit of the postwar era in Germany with 3 million in paid admissions. The German encyclopedia Die Chronik des Films writes that Silver Lake “finally brought recovery to the ailing German movie industry.” This success was followed by others – 18 adaptations were shot in the next six years – with stars like Stewart Granger and Klaus Kinski.
Made at the height of the era of European co-productions, the films were shot in the beautiful Plitvice Lakes (later a prime battleground in the Yugoslav wars). More significantly, they served as the inspiration for the spaghetti western. In Sergio Leone’s words, “it was because of the success of the German “Winnetou” series, directed by Harald Reinl, that the Western began to interest Italian producers” (Frayley 1981: 115).
Cancel culture has recently caught up to Winnetou. A new Winnetou film hit theaters this past summer, The Young Chief Winnetou (Der junge Häuptling Winnetou, 2022). The publisher Ravensburger issued new volumes to accompany the film, but in response to public outcry, they decided to withdraw them. As they put it, “In view of the historical reality, the oppression of the indigenous population, a romanticized picture with many clichés is drawn here." The parallels to American culture are easy to see.
2. Terence Hill and Bud Spencer: Buddies Italiano
When you see the names Terence Hill and Bud Spencer on a film’s credits, you might assume that they are American actors. Or at least Americans with stage names. In fact, they are both Italians. But as far as fame goes, they could just as well be the Lone Ranger and Tonto. The two starred in dozens of cowboy and Indian and cops and robbers films beginning in the late sixties. During the seventies and eighties their work dominated the box office in Western and Eastern Europe.
Terence Hill was born Mario Girotti to a German mother and Italian father and began his acting career under that name. The stage name he later chose is a combination of his American wife’s last name – he met her in his search for an English teacher – and his favorite Roman poet Terence. His partner, Bud Spencer, was christened Carlo Pedersoli and had won a silver medal in water polo at the Helsinki Olympics before also opting for an American-sounding stage name.
They began their rise with the spaghetti Western. Though kicked off by Reinl’s Winnetou films of the early sixties, it was the Italians who refined and exploited the genre. Sergio Leone is the best known for his spare and gritty aesthetic, but many of his countrymen jumped on the bandwagon. And Italians were not alone. Spaghetti westerns were joined by paella, sauerkraut, camembert, and even curry and chop suey westerns. Indeed, between 1960 and 1975, Europeans made almost 600 cowboy films with production peaking at 72 in 1968 (Nudge N.D.).
By the early seventies, however, the genre was running out of steam. Like all new ideas this one drifted into formulaism. As Nudge (N.D.) writes, “…plots became more contrived… [stock] characters such as Sartana and Django teamed up with increasing frequency and originality in story and characterization gave way to tedium.” Declining popularity might have spelled the end of the spaghetti western.
The genre, however, awaited one more twist. Released in 1971, They Call Me Trinity extended the western’s shelf-life for another half decade. Directed by the cameraman Enzo Barboni, who preferred to go under the pseudonym E.B. Clucher, the film found new life in the western by combining cowboys and Indians with wacky slap-stick comedy.
As important as the formula were the stars. The film discovered a winning team in Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. Though Hill had acted before (in fact, in a number of Winnetou films and Visconti’s The Leopard) and the two had worked together in the cleverly titled God Forgives, I Don’t (1967), they hit big time with They Call Me Trinity. Like many a comedy team before, they worked off of their differences. Hill is an average-sized blonde with a boyish face and catchy smile. Spencer, by contrast, is a modern-day ogre, with thick black hair, a full beard, and beady eyes.
As in the classic Shane, They Call Me Trinity features Hill and Spencer (as Trinita and Bambino) defending a group of farmers from predatory horse ranchers. The similarity ends there. Fights in this film do not end with both parties bloodied, but with Spencer knocking his foes out with his trademark conk to the top of the head (shades of Old Shatterhand). Barroom scenes include their share of belching and bodily noises. The climax of the film comes when the peaceful settlers (again Mormons, a European obsession) rise up for a final slapstick fight with the bad guys.
Largely due to the comic (and acrobatic) skills of the stars and strong pacing, the film deserves comparison with Mel Brooks, National Lampoon, and the Farrelly brothers. The Trinity films – They Call Me Trinity was followed three years later by My Name is Still Trinity (1974) – set box office records throughout Europe and brought the duo international celebrity. It also enabled them to extend their collaboration to other roles as cops, truckers, and drifters. Altogether they teamed up in eighteen films, most of them box-office, albeit not critical, successes.
They did it by sticking to the tried and true. As the critic at Unknownmovies.com puts it in his review of Crime Busters (1976): “…although the locations and names would change, the formula would stay the same: The lean Hill would play a forever smiling, quick-witted and conniving fellow who would bump into the fat, bearded Spencer, a grouchy loner who just wanted to eat and be alone and have nothing to do with this annoying fellow. Circumstances (and Hill’s persistence) would team them together, and during their shenanigans, they would get into several slap-and-kick fights with various people, climaxing in one big fight.”
Thus, in Watch Out, We’re Mad, (1974) the two play race car drivers who share first place in an off-road race whose prize is a red dune buggy (“with a yellow top” as it is frequently described). Forced to share the prize, the two decide to settle their differences in a hot dog eating and beer drinking contest. This is inexplicably interrupted by a group of gangsters who bust up the bar they are sitting in and destroy the dune buggy. Hill and Spencer now join forces and give the crooks an ultimatum to replace the car. “You’ve got until noon, or we’ll get mad.” And from there the race is on, chock full of slapstick fights and bodily groans.
Producers tried to cash in on Hill’s talents in a couple of American films, including Mr. Billion (1977) where he co-starred with Valerie Perrine and Jackie Gleason. But without Spencer and with mediocre scripts, the films went nowhere. If Hill remains unknown in the States, his Q-scores go through the roof in Europe. Just ask any Czech, Pole, or Hungarian (not to mention Italian) about the duo.
3. Louis de Funès and Pierre Richard: Jerry Lewis a la France
The Hollywood style of the films I have mentioned above may be excused. Italians and Germans are well known Americophiles, partially a result of their large emigrant populations who sent money and news back home. One would expect the French to thumb their nose at these inferior forms of culture. After all, they have been leading the battle against American entertainment, passing laws limiting non-European and non-French content on their airwaves.
It’s a minor surprise then to look at France’s most popular exports to the East. At their head is the comedian Louis de Funès. Bald and standing only 5 feet 4 inches (162 cm), de Funès had to make his way on pure talent. That talent was an amazing repertoire of facial grimaces, expressing everything from smug satisfaction to pure terror, but most frequently exasperation with his inept subordinates. The source for many of his faces, de Funès once admitted, was ironically enough Donald Duck.
His first success was a stage farce (and later a film) called Oscar that achieved public acclaim in the provinces before capturing Paris. The story centers around the businessman Bertrand Barnier who in the course of one day learns his daughter is pregnant, his top employee has been embezzling, his maid has quit, and his personal trainer is in love with his daughter. The feared critic Jean-Jacques Gautier described de Funès performance as Barnier in this glowing review:
He blinks his eyes. One eyebrow frowns, the other rises up to his hairline. He grimaces. He feints… He shakes. He accumulates exasperated, infuriated, and fanatical expressions one on top of another…He contorts his face like it was made out of rubber. He spins on his axis. He bites his lip. He flares his nostrils. He prances. He bounces along as if on a spring. He invents tics. He turns up his lip. He stamps his foot. He sticks his finger in his ear and then poses like Napoleon…
How much the piece depended on de Funès and his gallery of expressions can be seen in the complete failure of Sylvester Stallone’s remake.
De Funès then moved from theater into film. He had two of the biggest post-war hits in France with The Sucker (Le Corniaud, 1964) and Don’t Look Now We’re Being Shot At (Le Grande Vadroille, 1966) where he co-starred with the popular comic Bourvil (Nowell-Smith 1996). In the former de Funès plays a rich gangster who persuades the witless Bourvil to drive his Cadillac from Naples to France. What Bourvil does not know is that he is helping to smuggle diamonds hidden in the roof of the car. He nevertheless manages to inadvertently foil the gangster’s plans giving de Funès numerous opportunities to show displeasure.
It is this style that made him, according to The International Film Encyclopedia “…next to Fernandel… the French screen’s most popular comedian in the 50s and 60s” (Katz 1979: 458). Indeed, his low-brow style endeared him to ordinary Frenchmen. His audience was in the words of his biographer Jean-Marc Loubier (1995), “small-town folk, the middle class, adults confronted with their traditional moral values.”
His best-remembered films – as any Eastern European will attest – are a series of turns (there were six altogether) as the French gendarme, Maréchal des logis-chef Ludovic Cruchot. In the first installment, entitled The Gendarme of St. Tropez (1964), de Funès wages a constant war with nude bathers. As he fights for propriety, his daughter, trying to impress the same nude bathers, claims that her father is a millionaire and even persuades him to go along with her scheme. This leads de Funès into a nest of criminals whose plans he inadvertently foils. To get a better idea of the film, imagine Barney Fife in charge of the beach patrol. De Funès explains the popularity of these films in this way: “The gendarmerie is the whole human race. You kiss the ass of your superior and kick the ass of your inferior.”
It was precisely this sort of light entertainment that appealed to audiences in Eastern Europe and was not considered threatening by the communist regime. De Funès’ films thus found a place in movie theaters and on television screens throughout the communist bloc. In an article on de Funès in the Czech weekly Reflex, Jiří Žák (1999) notes, “To write about the Gendarme of St. Tropez would be like carrying coals to Newcastle. There is hardly a person who has not seen it. For thirty-five years the scenes with the nudists, the crazy chases, the gags straight out of the American silents, and the absurd situations have set off salvos of laughter throughout the world.” These coals still need to be carried to the English-speaking world.
Part of the appeal was the ease of translation. De Funès’ elastic face was a universal language. As he puts it, “I’m not a comic of words, but of gestures, action, and situations.” As an example, de Funès cites a classic scene where he stands in the shower next to a body builder and hams it up without saying a word.
While one could say more about de Funès’ career and his exportability, I will add only two more details for the sake of completeness. One is his recurring role in a series of films about the master criminal Fantômas. Long before Patricia Highsmith and her Mr. Ripley, the French had their own criminal-hero in a series of books written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcell Allain just before World War I. The books were serious enough to inspire a number of surrealist artists, though de Funès added a lowbrow comic element (probably inspired by the success of the Pink Panther films around the same time) that assured the films of success and frustrated his co-star, Jean Marais.
The second is the one film that appears to have achieved notoriety for de Funès across the Atlantic. It is called The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973), or later The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob. The film, which broke box-office records in France, features de Funès as a bigoted Frenchman on his way to his daughter’s wedding. Forced by a series of improbable circumstances to disguise himself as a rabbi, he ultimately ends up in the middle of a demonstration of Arabs. This slapstick premise did not prevent it from arousing controversy. Its release was unfortunately timed – it coincided with the 1973 Yom Kippur War – and it actually inspired a fatal hijacking when the wife of the film’s publicist took over a plane and threatened to crash it into a nuclear power plant unless the film was banned (the plane landed safely, but the hijacker was killed).
To drive home the points I have made above, and to further trod on the French self-image, it is worth quickly perusing the career of another Frenchman popular in the communist world, Pierre Richard. Richard is a talented comic actor who could be doing better things. A tall lanky blonde with Einstein-like hair (he could almost pass for Gene Wilder), he made his name in the film The Tall Blonde with One Black Shoe (Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chaussure Noire, 1972) where he played a bubble-headed violinist who is identified by the head of the French secret service as a master spy. As competing agents try to knock him off, Richard sleepwalks his way past bullets, managing not only to survive, but also to find love and eliminate his pursuers.
The idea was good enough that American film executives borrowed it and put Tom Hanks in the title role. The French themselves capitalized on the film’s success with a sequel The Return of the Tall Blond (Le Retour du Grand Blond, 1974). Though sequels are synonymous with Hollywood commercialism, in fact they are just as common around the world and equally popular with audiences. All of the stars described in this chapter have been persuaded to reprise their roles, once, twice, or even five times.
In the eighties Richard went on to co-star with Gerard Depardieu in a series of three enormously popular comedies, all directed by Francis Veber. The first of these, The Goat (Le Chevre, 1981), features Depardieu as a detective hired to find the accident-prone daughter of a wealthy industrialist. At the end of his rope, Depardieu reluctantly engages the equally accident-prone Richard whose missteps lead them in the right direction. In one famous scene, Richard proves he is a klutz by sitting on the one broken chair in a room full of good ones.
Following this was The Co-Fathers (Les Comperes, 1983), about a woman who persuades two men to track down the son she claims both fathered with her. It became the third-biggest box office hit of the eighties. They ended their collaboration with The Fugitives (Les Fugitifs, 1986), where Depardieu plays an ex-con who wants to go straight and is forced back into crime by the witless Richard. French critics called it “the height of film comedy.” If Depardieu’s participation in these films seems out of character, remember that he is known in France both as “a star of mainstream French comedy and the tormented ‘suffering macho’ of auteur films” (Nowell-Smith 1996: 525).
That this crazy comedy appeals to the French is no surprise when one recalls the national cult of Jerry Lewis. It’s easy to imagine Lewis in Richard’s role in Le Jouet (The Toy, 1978) where he plays the live toy of a millionaire’s son. (It was actually remade in the US with Richard Pryor in the title role.) The titles of his films alone remind one of Lewis: Mustard Is Rising Up My Nose (its international title was Lucky Pierre); I’m Shy, But I’m Recovering; It’s Not Me, It’s Him; and The Door on the Left as You Leave the Elevator. Richard’s forte, a character “who unknowingly complicates life and from an excess of good will commits indiscretions for which others suffer” is a stock type the world over (Fikejz 1996: 505).
This may account for the fact that Richard made a big impression in the communist bloc. As he commented in an interview, “In France, people tend to pigeonhole me. I try my hardest to resist that but everyday I bump into really sweet people who ask me: "So, when's your next film coming out?" (meaning a film like La Chevre or Lucky Pierre). I had a great time shooting with Frances Veber and Gerard Depardieu and I wouldn't say anything bad about those films – they enabled me to be known throughout the world, particularly in the USSR.”
Again, both de Funès and Richard are fixtures in Czech television listings. If we add in the wacky comedies and American-imitation detective films of Jean Paul Belmondo, then you can catch one almost weekly. It is also worth noting that the main references to de Funès and Richard I found in the English-language press were an article from The New Republic about Uzbekistan which described two Uzbeks arguing over who was the better actor – de Funès or Belmondo – and an interview with Richard in The Moscow Times.
4. Conclusion
Taking a closer look at these stars, in fact, overturns some conventional views of globalization and the influence of American culture. First, together they are proof that cultural imperialism (for lack of a better term) is not just an American phenomenon. Even though they profess to fear it, Europeans can do it as well. France has traditionally been the world’s second largest exporter of films, and most are not of the highest cultural merit. In fact, their anger may stem from the fact that while they found a large market in the past, in the last few decades they have started to lose out. Indeed, South Korea consciously decided to turn middlebrow TV series and music into an export commodity (Hong 2014).
Second, they show that European pop culture does not float on a higher plane than its American equivalent. Whether you consider theme, plot, or dialogue, it is hard to tell the difference between them except that the nasals and gutturals sound more intellectual than the American drawl. The Europeans are not exporting Godard and Fellini – at least not in bulk – but local versions of Police Academy and Bonanza. The only difference may be the absence, with a couple of exceptions, of big budget action/adventure films in the European lineup. As the writer Mario Vargas Llosa entitled a speech on globalization: “Not Karl Marx, but Karl May.”