Your Daily Dracula – Turgut Özatay as ‘Kazikli Voyvoda Vlad’, Kara Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi (1972)

Your Daily Dracula – Turgut Özatay as ‘Kazikli Voyvoda Vlad’, Kara Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi (1972)

This is the first in a series of Turkish swashbucklers based on a comic strip starring local superstar Cüneyt Arkın as Kara Murat, an adventurer in the service of the Ottoman Empire.  He is surprisingly unmoustached but has that regulation open-neck shirt with plot-significant fish medallion and great hair typical of a Turkish action hero (a look not confined to Turkey in the 1970s).  Of course, his original nemesis is the Wallachian Kazikli Voyvoda Vlad’, a troublemaker on the border of the Empire who is given to random atrocities (not confined to impaling people).  Kara first encounters Vlad as a child when the cackling baddie forces him to chop off his older brother’s arm and leg.  He returns Wallachia as a grown-up in search of a mcguffin scroll which must be important (I saw the film in untitled Turkish so I don’t know why).  Kara has a small band of pals – most of whom get killed off, suggesting that being in his gang is as dangerous as signing on for one of Sinbad’s voyages – and is here assisted inside Vlad’s palace by the blonde Anjela (Hale Soygazi), whom he keeps having to rescue from lecherous swine, and turncoat Vlad minion Popescu (Yusuf Sezer) who defects to KM after being beaten in a wrestling match.  Also in the mix is Vlad’s seductress wife Kralice (Mualla Omay), who literally stabs her lovers in the back and has eyes for the hero.

Kara Murat is a laughing daredevil sort who does a lot of leaping over flustered enemies and slashing about with his sword.  He’s a bandit rebel by instinct but a devout Muslim and servant of the Sultan (Bora Ayanoglu) to give him official back up in his adventuring.  Wicked Christian Vlad makes Muslims kiss a silver cross.  The film depicts the Ottoman Empire as a wholly good thing and Vlad as a simple bad guy who needs to be put down.  It’s about as nuanced a version of imperialism as, say, all those British films about fanatic rebel tribesmen, Thuggee cultists and mad mullahs being defeated by heroic Bengal Lancers.  In the end, Kara Murat not only beats Vlad in a swordfight but tosses him onto one of his own stakes and is seen in the happy coda riding home with the tyrant’s head stuck on his sword (this is possibly historically accurate – it’s said Vlad’s head was taken to the Sultan).

Özatay’s Vlad is a generic swashbuckling rotter – one of several such depictions of the character in Turkish cinema.  Atif Kaptan, the best-known Turkish screen Dracula (from Dracula Istanbul’da) has a supporting role as an Ottoman courtier.  It’s a bright, colourful film on a par with the quickie swashbucklers William Castle made in the early 1950s: lots of roistering, extras on horses dashing across the screen or waving swords at each other, a pop-up belly dancer, a minimum of skulking, and some nice locations (the flooded palace cellars, the grand hall, a castle).  Plot and character suggest a film aimed at children but it has fairly extreme gore – with many people impaled or mutilated.  The original release of Kara Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi plagiarised great swathes of the Alex North score from Cleopatra – which is scraped off the currently available version, sometimes leaving silent stretches, sometimes with classical music laid over the action.  Directed by Natuk Baytan.

A real ‘Kara Murat’ (Black or Courageous Giant) was an Ottoman soldier who lived a century and a half later than Vlad; the comic strip by Rahmi Muratoglu (Rahmi Turan) and Abdullah Turhan was based on a historical novel M. Turhan Tan’s Akından Akına (From Raid to Raid, 1936).

Here’s a cover of the comic strip version of this adventure.