“Open your mouth or I’ll scalp you,” growls a villain with a drawn revolver at trapper Sam Hawkens. But he lifts his wig unperturbed, shows his bald head and gently murmurs back: “Unfortunately you’re too late…” Indians had, we know that from the Karl May mythology, even if we no longer read the novels ourselves read, Sam scalped, since then he’s been wearing replacement hair. As Sam Hawkens, witty sidekick of Old Shatterhand, Ralf Wolter has become legendary in countless Karl May films, and he was so successful that he starred in the Karl May films, which were not set in the Wild West but in the wild Kurdistan or in the “Realm of the Silver Lion”, then Hajji Halef Omar was also allowed to play, the other sidekick, Kara Ben Nemsi’s – like Shatterhand, embodied by Lex Barker.
Ralf Wolter has played around 250 roles in German cinema and television since the early 1950s, and has also done a lot of theatre, mostly tabloids. One of his last films was “Dinosaur”, 2009, clothes from an old people’s home by Leander Haussmann. Ralf Wolter was one of the rebellious seniors who deflated stupid bureaucrats.
That voice announcing someone who always seemed to be on the alert
Often he had roles so tiny that it was easy to overlook them – a guy at the muster opposite Felix Krull in the film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel, an eager Prussian corporal in Helmut Käutner’s “The Goose of Sedan”. And many of his films had titles like “Otto is keen on women”, “Tante Trude from Buxtehude”, “Frau Landlady also has a niece”. What kept him from being overlooked, when his presence announced itself in the tone, was that whining, drawn-out, droning voice that announced someone who always seemed to be on the alert. “If I’m not wrong…” was his tried and true line as Sam Hawkens.
Again and again he was hired by great directors, played in ” Eine Liebe in Deutschland” for Andrzej Wajda, “Das Schlangenei” for Ingmar Bergman, “Cabaret” for Bob Fosse. And shortly before Karl May’s breakthrough in 1961, he was one of the three Russians in Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three” with whom James Cagney has to negotiate in East Berlin and in whom a tremendous love of life awakens when Lilo Pulver is on the table in front of them begins to dance. Ralf Wolter is a Khrushchevsky official who, entranced, finally takes off his shoe and bangs it on the table. Ralf Wolter has now died in Munich at the age of 95.