THE DARK VALLEY (DAS FINSTERE TAL) was recommended to me by a member of one of my silent film classes and was well worth the recommendation. He even provided the DVD which came to him courtesy of The Film Movement movie-of-the-month club. There have been German Westerns before (TREASURE OF THE SILVER LAKE, OLD SHATTERHAND) and the author Karl May (the German Zane Grey) was once very popular in his native country. So the seeds for making a great Western were already sown and that is exactly what director Andreas Prochaska has produced.
He has successfully borrowed themes from at least four other films (THE WAR LORD, PALE RIDER, DEATH HUNT, THE LAST VALLEY) and skillfully utilized them in this brooding, breathtakingly photographed (in the Italian Alps) story of a stranger in the mid 19th century who comes to an isolated Austrian mountain village ostensibly to make daguerreotypes of the valley and villagers who live there but who has actually come to avenge a wrong from the past and end an abominable practice.
The movie is more concerned with primal themes and their consequences than with being a traditional action piece like the Spaghetti Westerns of 50 years ago. Think of Clint Eastwood in PALE RIDER rather than A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. The Alpine village setting helps to give the story an added dimension making the movie resemble the Mountain genre of films made in Germany in the 1920s. British actor Sam Reilly, just before he made MALEFICENT for Disney, is a remarkable presence.
Like Eastwood, he’s a man of few words but speaks volumes with his eyes. He’s not a very good fighter but is able to do what he has to do. Incidentally, though British, Riley lives with his German wife in Berlin and isn’t dubbed. This brings us to the American version which is dubbed and should be avoided. The Film Movement DVD comes with the original German soundtrack and subtitles as well as the dubbed version. Use the former and avoid the latter. At 114 minutes THE DARK VALLEY is a little too long but other than that it’s a remarkable little film that stays with you.
The Capsule Critic 