Film Nitrate

"Among us, the greatest attribute... is loyalty." There aren't too many films which can claim to have started an entire sub-genre of cinema. Dr. Arnold Fanck's The Holy Mountain , made in 1926, started a unique and wholly German type of film - the Bergfilm  (or ' Mountain Film '). Essentially, Bergfilme were films that were made in the stunning alpine scenery of Bavaria, aiming to capture on nitrate the grand nature of these epic, snowy landscapes. Fanck, who held a PhD in geology, had a background in making documentary films in mountainous areas, beginning with The Wonders of Skiing (1919), a film which tapped into Germany's affinity with the sport which was then still in its early days, and the film became an instant success in the country. Fanck continued to make similar documentary films through the 1920s, including the first film to be shot at altitude in the mountains, but it was The Holy Mountain ( Der heilige Berg ) that was to be his firs...

Because of the revolution in sound films that started with the first synchronised sound recording on T he Jazz Singer (1927), silent films over the next couple of years quickly became an endangered species. By 1930 virtually every film in the Western world was embracing sound, and silent films had soon gone from being a medium developed after three decades of experimentation culminating in some of the best cinema ever made, to being almost extinct. Due to the insistence of film studios that every picture was now to be made using sound (though some could later have intertitles added and turned into silents for foreign distribution), for the first and only time in its history cinema took a large step backwards. Suddenly filmmakers who had great confidence in their ability were finding themselves in an alien environment. All of the crew now had to be quiet on set or the background noise would be picked up by the primitive microphones. Sound also meant that clunky camera rigs of the ti...

Adventure films were big business in Hollywood in the 1950s. With all the trouble coming from the Cold War and the ubiquitous unsettling threat of a nuclear holocaust, people were only too willing to hand their money over at the box office to sit down for a couple of hours and watch a good old slice of escapist fun. There are few better examples of a adventure film than  The African Queen . The story, as with any good adventure film, is minimal. Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) lives on the African Queen, an old tramp steamer, working in East Africa during World War I. He makes his living by transporting supplies for the locals, as well as occasionally delivering mail to two missionaries, Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley) and his sister Rosie (Katharine Hepburn). Charlie is in the missionaries' village when the Germans appear, burning the village to the ground and fatally injuring Samuel. With nothing left in the ruins of the village for her, Rosie agrees to let Charlie take her...

"Ruggles, how are you about shocks?" Though I've been massively impressed with Leo McCarey's dramas such as An Affair to Remember  (1957) and Make Way for Tomorrow   (1937), it's for his comedies that he is most remembered today, so I approached his 1935 feature Ruggles of Red Gap with high expectations. Though it's not been widely distributed in recent years, a recent Blu-ray release has show that this is a film that's been neglected for too long. McCarey had received a lot of praise for the 1931 Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup , but  Ruggles comes at the start of what was to be a very prosperous time for the director, both commercially and critically, and the film itself was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film in 1936 (losing out to Mutiny on the Bounty , which incidentally also starred Charles Laughton). The film concentrates on the character of Marmaduke Ruggles (Charles Laughton). Set at the turn of the century, he is employed as ...

After his success in Germany in the early 1920s with silent films such as Nosferatu   (1922) and The Grand Duke's Finances (1924), German director F.W. Murnau was headhunted by UFA film studios, who were at the time the largest studios in Germany. They provided him with a modest budget of one million marks in order to make his debut feature for the company. By moving to UFA he was able to work with celebrated screenwriter Carl Mayer, demand for whose scripts had increased greatly since he co-wrote the screenplay to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The script for The Last Laugh  was actually in place before Murnau joined the project, but a falling out between Mayer and his usual partner Lupu Pick opened up a vacancy which Murnau was able to fill. Indeed the film is most remembered today for having hardly any intertitles (title cards with text telling the audience things they couldn't pick up from visibly watching the film, such as speech or background), and thou...

"That'll be the day." Of all genres of film, Westerns have generally been most susceptible to the capricious nature of the film-going public. While film-noir, for example, has maintained its consistent popularity for over half a century, certainly from the 1980s onwards there's been a lot of negativity towards Westerns - not helped by the changing view of America at this period in their history which, due to accusations of racism and suchlike, is subject to far more negativity that it used to be. Though films like the Coen brothers' well-received remake of True Grit (2010) show that there is still a market for a well-made Western, the lines between the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys' are a lot more blurred - a trend that was kickstarted in 1990 with Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves. So with such mixed opinion over Westerns, it takes a particularly good one to have increased in popularity over the last 50 years. Indeed, in the 2012 Sight...

Days of Youth is the earliest film by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu to survive, though in fact he had made a number of silent films in the two years before this was released. As he worked his way up to becoming a director at the Shochiku film studios, he found himself responsible for producing the studios' 'student comedy' films, which featured no big-name actors, and were modelled on similar movies being made in Hollywood and playing to enthusiastic audiences in Japan. This resulted in a very productive period in which he made 26 films in the 5 year period from 1927-32. Of these, only 8 survive in complete form. Though he would make his most critically successful work in the 1950s with films such as Tokyo Story and Early Summer , it's always interesting to look at a director's early work for signs and references that they would return to in later work, and though Ozu was turning these films around at a frenetic pace, it's encouraging to see that the quality...

The whole 'Universal Monsters' franchise, which spawned such revered films as Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933) and The Wolf Man (1941) began in 1931 when the studios' young new head of production Carl Laemmle Jr. authorised Todd Browning's adaption of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula . The Dracula novel had been put to film before, when F.W. Murnau made the eerie 1922 silent, Nosferatu . Stoker's widow successfully sued the film studio after they decided to save money by not paying for the rights to the novel, and it was ordered that all prints were to be destroyed. Fortunately, the film survived, and the popularity of the novel ensured that it would not be long until the production of another adaptation would be underway. As early as 1924, an authorised stage play adapted from Stoker's novel by Hamilton Deane was doing the rounds in London, after successfully touring England. America was not blind to the play's success, and in 1927 John L....