Among the stars in S.O.S. Eisberg were Leni Riefenstahl, who had just made her directorial debut in The Blue Light (1932). Riefenstahl, in her last film as an actress, co-starred with Gustav Diessl and Ernst Udet in the German version S.O.S. Eisberg, and with Gibson Gowland and Rod La Rocque in the English version, S.O.S. Iceberg.[2] Ernst Udet, a former German ace in the First World War, in a cameo performance, flew in both versions.[3][lower-alpha 2]
Plot
At a banquet at the International Society for Arctic Research, the members toast scientist Dr. Carl Lorenz (Gustav Diessl), about to recreate famed explorer Wegener's ill-fated expedition. Lawrence's team consists of two scientists, Dr. Johannes Brand (Sepp Rist) and Dr. Jan Matushek (Max Holzboer), his friend, Fritz Kuemmel (Walter Riml), their financial backer, John Dragan (Walter Riml), and their pilot to the Arctic, Lorenz's wife Hella (Leni Riefenstahl).
After Hella drops them at their base camp, the men begin their long trek to recover Wegener's records and prove his theories on ice floes. As the weeks pass, Brand and the others fear they will not survive when the ice breaks up, but Lorenz scoffs and refuses to wait until winter.
Early one morning, Lorenz sets out on his own. His companions fear he is lost. They find a hut Wegener occupied and a note from Lorenz saying that he is trying to reach a native village. Suddenly, the break up of the ice leaves their sleds of food supplies tumbling into a ravine. The rescuers take refuge on a huge iceberg where they discover that Lorenz is there, dazed and uncommunicative.
Brand begins sending out an S.O.S. on his wireless and Hella immediately leaves to search for her husband. Disaster strikes, with Dragan going mad, and as Kümmel fights with him to prevent their dog, Nakinak, from being killed, Kümmel falls to his death.
When Hella finds the survivors, she misjudges her landing and crashes but is able to swim to the iceberg. Brand seeing they are drifting out to sea, dives into the water, and is picked up by another pilot (Ernst Udet) following Hella's flight path. The pilot flies Brand to the nearby Inuit village.
Matushek sees two polar bears fighting over a seal but is killed when he tries to spear the bears. Dragan then attacks Hella, but by then her husband has come to his senses, and she is saved. The iceberg begins to come apart, throwing Dragan into the sea.
Lorenz, Hella and Nakinak are rescued by the Inuit. The three survivors later are aboard a ship bound for home, but Lorenz is haunted by the deaths incurred in his misguided expedition.
The film was based on Alfred Wegener's Greenland expedition.[5] The Danish government, which banned film production in Greenland, allowed the production to film in Greenland under the protection of Knud Rasmussen. Fritz Loewe and Ernst Sorge, two members of the ill-fated expedition, served as technical consultants.[6]
Production started under the working title of Iceland. Prior to principal photography, pre-production development and location shooting took a year. Fanck became engaged to Elizabeth Kind on 2 May 1932, and brought her with him as a script supervisor. Fanch, Kind, Paul Kohner, Zoltan Kegl, Werner Klingler, and Gibson Gowland[7] left Copenhagen for Greenland on 20 May, and arrived at Uummannaq three weeks later.[8] $350,000 was spent shooting 350,000 feet of film, around 60 hours.[5] The interiors shot were filmed in a Berlin studio.[7]
A total of 38 men and women, three polar bears and two sea lions of the Hagenbeck circus making up the crew of the S.O.S. Eisberg boarded the Borodino at the end of June 1932. Filming was especially arduous with "Leni Riefenstahl, whose life he (Fanck) had often put in danger", after her repeated swimming in frigid waters, had to leave the production, "before the others, to be hospitalized in Copenhagen".[9]
None of the film's actors had doubles and actors endured extreme cold and performed dangerous stunts. Udet almost died when his plane's engine lost power and crashed at the base of an iceberg. Udet was rescued by the Inuit, but minutes later, the iceberg which was supporting some of the crew crumbled to bits, casting men and equipment into the water below. The production unit ship anchored nearby was so shaken by the event that it nearly capsized, throwing people on board the deck into the water. All were rescued, but considerable sound equipment was destroyed."[7] One member of the crew was lost for six days before being found, five people were burned, and two airplanes crashed.[10]
Although "conceived and started by Germans", S.O.S. Eisberg was "turned over to Universal when the originators were unable to carry it through."[7]Tay Garnett was sent to Germany by Carl Laemmle to salvage the film. Garnett decided to make the film seven reels long, but needed a story and only found 30 minutes of the footage to be usable. Edwin H. Knopf was hired to write a script around the footage that was shot. Garnett and Fanck filmed additional scenes in Switzerland, which were silent so that Udet and Riefenstahl could dub over in English.[11] The score for the film was composed by Paul Dessau and performed by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.[7]
The highlights of the action included air crashes; the aircraft in S.O.S. Eisberg were:
Aviation film historian James H. Farmer in Celluloid Wings: The Impact of Movies on Aviation (1984) noted, "... some outstanding, though brief aerial sequences are featured."[12]
Release
The preview version of the film was 121 minutes long.[7]S.O.S. Eisberg, the German version of the film with a runtime of 103 minutes, premiered in Berlin on 8 August 1933. S.O.S. Iceberg, the English version of the film with a runtime of 70 minutes, premiered in Berlin in September.[13] A shorter version of S.O.S. Iceberg was released by Castle Films in 1951.[7]
Reception
Variety in their contemporary review of S.O.S. Iceberg noted, "The result is an authentic and authoritative series of polar pictures which scarcely need the pressbook assurance that no miniatures were used to supplement the straight shots."[14] The New York Daily News gave the film three and a half stars.[15]
Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl was a German film director, photographer and actress known for producing Nazi propaganda.
Ernst Udet was a German pilot during World War I and a Luftwaffe Colonel-General (Generaloberst) during World War II.
Georg Wilhelm Pabst was an Austrian film director and screenwriter. He started as an actor and theater director, before becoming one of the most influential German-language filmmakers during the Weimar Republic.
Arnold Fanck was a German film director and pioneer of the mountain film genre. He is best known for the extraordinary alpine footage he captured in such films as The Holy Mountain (1926), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Storm over Mont Blanc (1930), The White Ecstasy (1931), and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933). Fanck was also instrumental in launching the careers of several filmmakers during the Weimar years in Germany, including Leni Riefenstahl, Luis Trenker, and cinematographers Sepp Allgeier, Richard Angst, Hans Schneeberger, and Walter Riml.
Roderick Ross La Rocque was an American actor.
Uummannaq is a town in the Avannaata municipality, in central-western Greenland. With 1,407 inhabitants in 2020, it is the eighth-largest town in Greenland, and is home to the country's most northerly ferry terminal. Founded in 1763 as Omenak, the town is a hunting and fishing base, with a canning factory and a marble quarry. In 1932, the Universal Greenland-Filmexpedition with director Arnold Fanck released the film S.O.S. Eisberg near Uummannaq.
Gibson Gowland was an English film actor.
Paul Kohner was an Austrian-American talent agent and producer who managed the careers of many stars and others—like Ingrid Bergman, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, John Huston, Liv Ullmann and Billy Wilder—of the golden age of Hollywood, especially those who came from Europe before World War II. He was married to the Mexican-American actress, Lupita Tovar. His brother was Frederick Kohner, a novelist and screenwriter, his daughter was the actress Susan Kohner. His grandsons are the filmmakers Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz.
Gustav Diessl was an Austrian artist, and film and stage actor.
The White Hell of Pitz Palu is a 1929 German silent mountain film co-directed by Arnold Fanck and G. W. Pabst and starring Leni Riefenstahl, Gustav Diessl, Ernst Petersen, and World War I pilot Ernst Udet. Written by Fanck and Ladislaus Vajda, the film is about a man who loses his wife in an avalanche while climbing the Piz Palü mountain, and spends the next few years searching the mountain alone for her body. Four years later he meets a young couple who agree to accompany him on his next climb. The White Hell of Pitz Palu was filmed on location in the Bernina Range in Graubünden, Switzerland.
Giuseppe Becce was an Italian-born film score composer who enriched the German cinema.
Hans Ertl was a German mountaineer and Nazi propagandist. He is most known for being the father of Monika Ertl, the Communist guerrilla who assassinated Roberto Quintanilla Pereira, the man responsible for chopping off Che Guevara's hands.
The BFW M.23, sometimes known as the Messerschmitt M 23, was a 1920s two-seat sporting aircraft designed by Willy Messerschmitt, and produced by Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (BFW). Examples won several prestigious races in 1929 and 1930.
Walter Riml was an Austrian cameraman and actor.
The Blue Light is a black-and-white 1932 film directed by Leni Riefenstahl and written by Béla Balázs with uncredited scripting by Carl Mayer. In Riefenstahl's film version, the witch, Junta, played by Riefenstahl, is intended to be a sympathetic character. Filming took place in the Brenta Dolomites, in Ticino, Switzerland, and Sarntal, South Tirol.
The Ufa-Palast am Zoo, located near Berlin Zoological Garden in the New West area of Charlottenburg, was a major Berlin cinema owned by Universum Film AG, or Ufa. Opened in 1919 and enlarged in 1925, it was the largest cinema in Germany until 1929 and was one of the main locations of film premières in the country. The building was destroyed in November 1943 during the Bombing of Berlin in World War II and replaced in 1957 by the Zoo Palast.
German: Stürme über dem Mont Blanc is a 1930 German film written and directed by Arnold Fanck and starring Leni Riefenstahl, Sepp Rist and Ernst Udet. The film is part of the German film genre of "mountaineering", popularized by Fanck. The story revolves around a man who works alone at the Mont Blanc weather station gathering data. His only contact with the world below is via Morse code signals. He is joined by a woman friend, who helps him survive a terrible storm over the mountain. Ernst Udet is featured as a pilot who is involved in a dangerous mountain rescue.
The Eternal Dream is a 1934 German historical film directed by Arnold Fanck and starring Sepp Rist and Brigitte Horney. The film's sets were designed by the art directors Robert Herlth and Werner Schlichting.
Ernst Petersen was a German architect and actor. Although Petersen was very successful as an architect and several of his buildings are now listed as historical monuments, he achieved greater fame in the short period of time as an actor in mountain films alongside Leni Riefenstahl.
Fritz Loewe was a German polar explorer, glaciologist, geophysicist and meteorologist.
↑ Wolf's involvement in S.O.S. Eisberg was uncredited because he was Jewish and a member of the Communist Party of Germany, a fate that befell others, after the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933.
↑ Ernst Udet scored 62 aerial victories, the second-highest German ace in the First World War, then became a "stunt pilot, explorer and hunter" after the war.[4]
Fanck, Arnold. S.O.S. Eisberg. Mit Dr. Fanck u. Ernst Udet in Groenland. Die Groenland-Expedition des Universal-Films S.O.S. Eisberg. München: F. BruckmannAG, 1933. OCLC 219890420.
Farmer, James H. Celluloid Wings: The Impact of Movies on Aviation. Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania: Tab Books Inc., 1984. ISBN978-0-83062-374-7.
Paris, Michael. From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism, and Popular Cinema. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995. ISBN978-0-7190-4074-0.
Pendo, Stephen. Aviation in the Cinema. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1985. ISBN978-0-81081-746-3.
Riefenstahl, Leni. Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir. New York: Picador, 1995. ISBN978-0-31211-926-3.
Riefenstahl, Leni. Kampf in Schee und Eis. Leipzig: Hesse und Bacher Verlag, 1933.
Sorge, Ernst. With Plane, Boat, and Camera in Greenland: An Account of the Universal Dr. Fanck Greenland expedition. London: Hurst & Blackett, Ltd., 1935.
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