Quote:
Originally Posted by Drake2222
And in addition to the previously mentioned White Hell of Pitz Palu (which i’ve long been familiar with), I just saw Kino’s 2005 dvd of S.O.S. Iceberg (1933), tremendous arctic adventure film starring actor Sepp Rist leading a group of three to rescue a missing scientist. Of course the real star is the man versus nature film that director Arnold Fanck was famous for. Icebergs, polar bears, freezing waters, very dramatic thrilling movie. Don’t be fooled by the misleading dvd cover though, while famous actors Leni Riefenstahl and Gustav Diessl are in the film, it is in extremely small roles.
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That depends on which cut you watch: Diessel doesn't even make it into the American version. Thankfully the Kino DVD - which, yes, would be great to have on Blu,perhaps in an Arnold Fanck boxed set - includes both the German and US versions. My review of both cuts:
While Arnold Fanck’s 1933
S.O.S. Eisberg (aka
S.O.S. Iceberg) may offer a change of location and a tighter running time, it still has many of the problems of his popular German mountain films: a thin plot, a repetitive narrative and an almost complete absence of characterisation. Luckily it still has the same strength, Fanck’s remarkable eye for spectacular and inaccessible locations, here the ice floes of Greenland where a rescue expedition finds itself trapped on an iceberg drifting out to sea and their would-be rescuer, Leni Riefenstahl’s pilot (and wife of one of the lost explorers) find herself trapped with them after a crash. Once she gets there she really has nothing to do except wait in a cave or strike the odd forlorn pose against the scenery, but unlike
The White Hell of Pitz Palu the characters here are at least actively trying to save themselves rather than just waiting to be rescued, and the lengthy scenes of them jumping across the pack ice are often breathtaking, with one sequence where Sepp Rist finds himself stuck on a small crop of rock as a storm brews up around him especially impressive. For the most part the location footage is seamlessly mixed with studio footage, especially some of the polar bear scenes that behind the scenes photographs reveal were shot in a studio tank. There’s also some impressive editing, both in the increasingly frenetic cutting as the lost expedition finally makes radio contact with the outside world and the exuberant sequence of Inuits coming to the rescue. You also get to see Walter Riml playing one of the less lucky members of the expedition just a couple of years before he gave up acting and became Riefenstahl’s cinematographer on
Triumph of the Will.
Fanck never quite develops the drama as well as he could, and things suddenly get very crazy towards the end as one man falls prey to a bear while two others fight to the death, and it’s never explained why real-life fighter ace and future Luftwaffe bigwig and Goering scapegoat Ernst Udet, playing himself as usual in Fanck’s films, suddenly comes to the rescue after we’ve been told all rescue attempts have been called off and all ships sent back. Luckily despite being lazy with the details it’s still got enough of a narrative spine to hold up for an hour-and-a-half even if it is more of an excuse to awe audiences with the landscapes than draw them into a story. Shame about the dog, though, but he at least fares rather better in the simultaneously filmed American version directed by Tay Garnett, which replaced Gustav Diessl with Rod LaRoque and kept the supporting cast and same general storyline but made some significant changes. One of a series of US-German co-productions with Universal that ended when the Nazis came to power, it’s included on Kino’s Region 1 DVD, and it’s an interesting comparison that works well in its own right.
The first 25 minutes of the film are almost completely different. Rather than a rescue mission, the five main explorers are all part of the same expedition, itself in search of the records of the real-life ill-fated Wegener expedition three years earlier. Where Fanck (credited here as ‘Expeditionary Leader’) was content to find his drama in the arduous physical nature of the expedition and the grandeur of the land and seascape, Garnett is more of a storyteller, focussing on the character conflict and constantly emphasising the danger of the unstable iceberg overturning. LaRoque isn’t the most likeable or responsible of expedition leaders, accusing his comrades of cowardice before going off on his own and needing to be rescued, while
Greed’s Gilbert Gowland, just another member of the expedition in the German version, here is its cowardly and increasingly unstable backer who dominates much of the drama in his absence. Sepp Rist remains the hero of the tale despite being dubbed like other German cast members, but Riefenstahl has even less to do in the American version than the German one, having little more than a bit part until the much more spectacular finale. Where Fanck was content to end with a joyfully kinetic sequence of Inuits kayaking to the iceberg, Garnett intercuts what’s left of the footage with Riefenstahl and LaRoque trying to escape from the exploding iceberg before it sinks and takes them with it.
It’s not the only change to the chronology or the plot: one character meets his end much sooner in the American version, most of the lengthy flying scenes have been heavily trimmed along with Udet’s already brief role and the second plane crash is entirely missing (while the first is curiously flipped in the negative). Most make sense on a dramatic level even if the film never much rises above the level of an average Hollywood drama with decent production values, but what’s missed the most is the sheer spectacle than Fanck’s version had. Rather than (occasionally gratuitously) showcasing the hostile environment and emphasising the epic duel between man and nature, the US version uses only what is necessary to move the story forwards, and doesn’t always use the most impressive footage, though it does add a lengthy section of travelling to the ice floe that sees them losing their dogs and most of their supplies down a crevasse. The fact that there’s surprisingly little shared footage at times turns them into very different films despite the shared cast members and general plot. Of the two Fanck’s is the better, but the American version is far from negligible even if it is much more of a melodrama, and thankfully Kino’s Region 1 DVD contains both versions in very decent prints.
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