Kritiken

Much of the action is highly cinematic, silences, shadows, menacing close-ups and cross-cuts. The opening sequence could almost be a pastiche of the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone) – except both films were released in 1968 with Güney’s possibly being the first screened.

This rural revenge drama is an “imperfect film” as director and actor Yılmaz Güney later confessed. Its Hollywood-style action scenes are over-stretched, and its characters are underdeveloped. However, with its realistic mise-en-scène, dramatic use of landscape, and elegant cinematography, it offers a striking mixture of social reality and fairy tale. Seyyit Han is a criticism of feudalism and traditions that silence women.

...Bride of the Earth (1968) and The Hungry Wolves (1969) conveyed a mythic sense of landscape and story, often using one to reinforce the other. Violent crowd-pleasers in the spaghetti western mold, both took place in desolate, godforsaken regions of Turkey that proved ideal backdrops for the elemental conflicts of cowboy movies...

The Bride of the Earth, though still in essence a rural revenge drama, contains surprising moments of quiet lyricism that suggest Güney was becoming familiar with the cinema of Satyajit Ray and Roberto Rossellini.