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Mamba (1930)
Topic Started: Oct 25 2017, 07:59 AM (491 Views)
Fantomas
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MAMBA is a long thought lost film which just had its first New York showing in 87 years. A jungle drama in two-strip technicolor, it looks great. There's just one problem, which I'll get to in a moment. But first, a little history.

When films were sent for exhibition to Australia they were first shown in the more populous east, then made their way around the continent, ending in Perth or Adelaide, and from there they were sent back to the US. Well, a lot of those film reels never made the return journey, especially if the company they made the movie, in this case Tiffany, had gone out of business. The films were junked, or disintegrated; or, as with MAMBA, were found in amazing condition in someone's garage. Only MAMBA was a sound-on-disc film and they didn't have all the discs. But somewhere else in the world someone had all the discs but no film. Well, they got together, and all the pieces were, at some expense and effort, reunited.
This information comes from Paul Brennan, an Australian film historian who introduced the showing. But even he had to admit (and this is the one problem I mentioned) that MAMBA was an awful film. As he put it, "It's like the world's most beautiful picnic, only with disgusting food." The beautiful part was the technical quality of the preservation. The soft pastel colors really stood out, the sets were elaborate, there were hundreds of extras. It's just that the movie itself was rotten to the core.
The plot was the tired old story of the beautiful young girl forced to marry an evil sadistic lout and live with him in a colony in Africa. A handsome young officer, stationed in the colony, then falls in love with her. This is all handled in the tritest way possible, with large helpings of insane racism. At the climax, the soldiers leave to defend the border (World War I has broken out). Once the soldiers leave the colony, the "natives" revert to "savagery" (as a title card helpfully informs us). They rip off their western clothes, pick up their spears and shields, and start attacking. Luckily, another bunch of soldiers arrive, slaughter hundreds of natives, and everyone's happy. The whole ending seems inspired by the final reel of Birth of a Nation.
It wasn't dull, I'll give it that. It's a fascinating film, interesting to look at. But if it hadn't been missing for over 80 years, and hadn't been a rediscovery, no sane person would want to go near it.

"For life is short, but death is long."
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The Batman
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Looking forward to the DVD.


Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman!
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Frank Hale
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Good one, Mr. Bats.

I don't think I've ever actually seen a Tiffany film, but the company's reputation certainly precedes itself.

And hats off to whatever NYC film society stuck its neck far enough out to project the film.

Cicero: To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.
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Bert Greene
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Appreciate the input on this ultra-rare title. With all its faults, I'd still probably like the film. I tend to go for those vintage-style, pre-WW2 South Seas yarns. The pulps of the day, like "Action Stories" and "Thrilling Adventure" and the like always seemed to have a goodly supply of that kind of fare, and I usually enjoy reading those as well. The year 1930 also offered in similar vein films like "Hell Harbor" (1930-U.A.) and "The Sea God" (Paramount), both sporting some very flavorful locations work that made them mesmerizingly atmospheric. I particularly liked the latter (which utilized Catalina Island), with Richard Arlen and Fay Wray menaced by island cannibals. Great, old-time exotic fun. So yeah, "Mamba" would probably also be right up my alley.
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riddlerider
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I've probably mentioned here before that I spent an evening at Al Rogell's home back in '87 or '88. Previously he'd entertained my friends Bob Birchard and Dick Bann, who screened for him their 16mm prints of his films Thundering Hoofs (1924) and The Red Raiders (1927). The evening I joined them at Al's place, we ran Dick's print of Rider of Death Valley (1932) and my print of The Last Warning (1938), the Universal "Crime Club" picture Rogell directed.

Having ascertained that we were serious film buffs with a keen interest in his career, Al freely discussed the good old days with us. We got lots of great anecdotes out of him. But when I asked, "What about Mamba?", he replied: "What about it?" I said, "Well, I'm curious. Nobody seems to know much about that picture." With perfect timing he shot back: "Which is just as it should be." We all laughed, but I could tell it was one film he'd rather not discuss.
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Bert Greene
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Al Rogell? That's certainly a name that pops up a lot in my video collection. I didn't know he was the director of "Mamba." Nor that he was still around as late as the 1980s. He must have had some amazing stories, considering his career went all the way back to those Fred Thomson silent and such. I see that the setting of "Mamba" was actually East Africa? I was probably thinking of "Aloha" (1931), another Tiffany, which did have a South Seas backdrop. Think I recall running into a lobby card of it, and always mix it up with "Mamba." Apparently Al Rogell directed this one as well. I've never seen it. I hope it survives.

I always hear that Tiffany was the crème of the crop in terms of poverty-row (didn't Don Miller make that assertion?), but I can't say I've been overly wowed by their product. But they did seem to cast an unusually wide net in terms of variety of subject matter, in comparison to a lot of other poverty-row outfits, which tended to concentrate so heavily on the the genre-oriented trio of whodunits, westerns, and Madame-X type melodramas. Tiffiny's output seemed more aligned with what the bigger studios were doing. It was a pretty busy company in 1929 and 1930, and you'd think it might have had lasting power, like Columbia, which itself was pretty small-potatoes at the time. But Tiffany started petering out early on, around late-1931 and 1932. Their last release (I believe), "The Man Called Back" (1932), with Conrad Nagel and Doris Kenyon, was still a pretty solid production which you could imagine having come from a larger studio. I guess, overall, with Tiffany's talkie-era existence tied so strongly to those really early sound years of 1929/30, they probably just don't impress as well, compared to Majestic or Chesterfield/Invincible, which had their heydays a few years later. But, I have to give Tiffany credit for their efforts.
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The Batman
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Some interesting tidbits on Tiffany Productions, courtesy of Wiki:

One reason for Tiffany's failure was that it lacked a profitable distribution network.

The studio complex was later bought by Columbia Pictures and given to Sam Katzman and Irving Briskin as base of operations for their film units.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer purchased Tiffany's nitrate original film negative library and burned the collection during the burning of Atlanta sequence in Gone with the Wind.

After Tiffany filed for bankruptcy in 1932, the copyrights on most (if not all) of their films weren't renewed, and are now in the public domain.

In January 2012, the Vitaphone Project announced that the US premiere of a restored print of Mamba will be in March 2012 at Cinefest in Syracuse, New York.

Anyone verify or dispute these?

Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman!
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Fantomas
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I was just looking at the New York Times review of Mamba; and, my oh my, has the art of film criticism changed over the years. The review by Mordaunt Hall (and, by the way, why is it that parents no longer name their sons Mordaunt?) consists largely of a detailed description of the plot right down to the ending. Also he seems particularly impressed by the red wound on Ralph Forbes' shirt: "The color effects are capital." And that's about it. The best thing is the title of the review: "A Prismatic Melodrama."
"For life is short, but death is long."
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mort bakaprevski
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What years was John Stahl associated with Tiffany?
"Nov Shmoz Ka Pop."
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Frank Hale
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I've commented before about Mr. Hall. The poor guy never had a clue, and all his reviews were the same way: here is the plot so you can be spared the price of a ticket if it doesn’t appeal to you.

Bosley Crowther was a little more complicated, but in his own way, equally tone-deaf.

The second stingers like Frank Nugent, Andre Sennwald, B.R. Crisler were generally more plugged in.

But, hey, it was the NYT and I'm still a subscriber.
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riddlerider
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I don't believe for a New York minute that Tiffany's original negatives were among the mountains of nitrate film supposedly burned in GWTW's burning of Atlanta. In the first place, I'm not at all certain that M-G-M did buy the Tiffany library. Why would they? And if they did, why render it useless by destroying the negatives? In those days lots of negatives burned up, but usually accidentally in lab fires. The wanton destruction of nitrate negatives took place many years later, beginning with silent movies that, it was believed, had no further commercial value.

In the second place, 16mm prints of Tiffany talkies were not uncommon back in the day, and whether rental-library prints from the '40s or TV prints from the early '50s, they almost always turned up as optical reduction prints struck from the original 35mm negatives. Occasionally you'd come across one with some dupe footage, but that was usually attributable to damage or deterioration of the nitrate elements.
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mort bakaprevski
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For what it's worth, MGM didn't make GWTW, Selznick International did. I believe the burning of Atlanta. however, was filmed on the MGM lot (the studios were close together in Culver City & are now both owned by Sony)
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Laughing Gravy
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How bad could Mamba be? Stymie is in it!
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mort bakaprevski
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"It may choke Arti but it ain't gonna choke Stymie!"
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