1933 - SOS ICEBERG, more amazing on location filming from Arnold Fanck

More on location winter hell madness from  Dr. Arnold Fanck as he sticks the cast and crew on an iceberg that is slowly falling apart.

The story has something to do with a polar expedition looking for another polar expedition.  Expedition number two ends up stuck on an iceberg that is drifting out to sea.

The leader of the expedition is the fiancee of Leni Riefenstahl.  Riefenstahl takes off in an airplane looking for him and crashes her plane onto the same damn iceberg in a extreme example of plot coincidence.

As usual in a Fanck film it's all about spectacular sequences.  SOS Iceberg certainly has them.  Avalanches, glaciers falling apart, polar bears attacking people and lots of icebergs tipping over in the Arctic water.  Towards the end there is a large scale rescue scene with hundreds of Eskimos in kayaks rushing to save the cast before the iceberg falls apart, very impressive stuff.

This was an English/German co production which means that the film was shot simultaneously in both languages for world wide release.  Tay Garnett supervised the English language scenes but the good stuff is all Fanck.

Riefenstahl paying her dues as usual in a Fanck film

Fanck was known for putting his actors in extreme danger while filming on location in his mountain films in the 1920's.   He apparently hadn't changed his ways for SOS Iceberg.   At the end of the film the leader of the expedition intones, "let us remember our colleagues didn't die in vain."  The last line should probably have been "let us remember no actor died making this film."

76 minutes

1935 - CHINA SEAS, mash up of Dinner At Eight and Grand Hotel on a boat

From the Cadillac of film studios.  MGM sure pumped out a lot of stuff like this.   The very manly Clark Gable, is the manly captain of a ship sailing in the China Seas.  1930's sex bomb Jean Harlow plays a character named China Doll.  Wallace Berry is the passenger with funny business on his mind. American Rosalind Russell plays a very proper English woman named Sybil, who is involved with manly Clark in a love triangle with at times bra less Jean Harlow, and so it goes.

The screenwriter Jules Furthman was a go guy for making this pack of cliches interesting. The director Tay Garnett a very underrated film maker is skilled enough to keep this interesting and succeeds most of the time.  

The film has a lot going on.  There's a hurricane scene where a steamroller of all things, on the deck of the ship getting lose and rolling around flattening a few coolies.  Almost immediately after that pirates attack the ship but manly Clark Gable gets the upper hand with some kind of a cannon he just happens to have on board his ship. 

Have to give Tay Garnett credit, he slips in as much sex and sadism as he can get away.  During the typhoon scene, Harlow in an already tight gown gets soaked with water which leaves little left to the imagination.  Manly Clark Gable is tortured by some kind of gizmo called a "Chinese boot" something apparently invented for this film.  Garnett also isn't afraid to have a few bodies flying across the screen when manly Clark Gable starts blasting the pirates with his cannon.

A lot of MGM's reputation as the classy prestige studio rests on  films like Ben Hur, Mutiny On The Bounty, and Romeo and Juliet.  However films like China Seas is what the audiences came to watch and MGM knew it.

90 quick minutes.

1940, SEVEN SINNERS stars real life couple John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich?

John Wayne was personally chosen by bisexual actress Marlene Dietrich to be in her latest piece of fluff Seven Sinners, I doubt at the time  Duke was even remotely aware he was about to begin a 3 year love affair with Dietrich.

 

This movie is the type of goofy entertainment that Hollywood has completely forgotten how to make anymore. Mix lots of comedy, a love story, some songs and a big saloon fight at the end and you have 90 minutes of painless entertainment. The director was Tay Garnett, nobody has written lengthy film books about Garnett, but he was an extremely competent filmmaker in his day.

Probably one of the most interesting things about this movie is the involvement of Rudolph Mate, the Director of Photography on this picture. This was a guy who had come over from Europe and had worked with people like Fritz Lang on Metropolis and Carl Theodor Dreyer on The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr. He had also shot Hitchcock's film Foreign Correspondent. How Mate got mixed up in this is anyone's guess but a guy's got to eat. The movie looks great with lots of atmospheric black and white photography.

 

But really the movie is about Dietrich the legendary actress and screen personality. An interesting piece of 1940's fluff.

 87 minutes.