Submitted by
Neal Lofthouse
Bringing the Alps to Denham
by Freda Bruce Lockhart
from Film Weekly of 25th December 1937
Last week you read in 'Film Weekly' Robert Douglas's own account of his
mountaineering adventures when London Films sent him to the Matterhorn to
play Whymper in 'The Challenge'.
This week I had a look at the way they've brought the Swiss mountains to
Denham.
In Switzerland they filmed all the perilous climbing by Whymper and his
Italian rival, Carell, and the fatal accident to Whymper's companions.
The studio setting is for the more domestic scenes in the Italian inn where
Whymper convalesces from a broken ankle after his first unsuccessful climb.
Domesticity includes some romance between Luis Trenker and Joan Gardner
and some comedy of smuggling. Trenker told me he made a silent film of the
subject nine years ago.
It was never shown outside Germany because Whymper's relatives objected
vehemently to the disreputable "love - interest."
This time no chances have been taken. The romance is a respectable one between
Carell and the innkeeper's daughter.
Mountain Backcloths
Large painted backcloths of snowy mountain-tops were the only sign of the
inn's geography. And very fine they looked, seen through the window.
The inside of the inn, too, was a conginial hostelry. Outside, it is just
bare boards. For the Riffelberg Inn, near Zermatt, was used as its exterior.
So, when you see Joan Gardner go in at the inn door, carrying her pitcher
of goat's milk, she'll be in Switzerland. But coming through the same door
into the inn, she'll be at Denham. So simply does the cinema solve the higher
problems of space and time.
A most noxious sight was Tony Sympson, the smuggler. Last time I saw Tony
he was a dapper figure, wearing a spotless white towel to keep the grease-paint
off his collar. Here he had a red beard of three weeks growth, and a shirt
which he told me proudly "was clean when I put it on on July 23 and hasn't
been washed since."
Authentic local colour was brought in by Luis Trenker and his henchman,
Hugo Lehner, both Tyroleans born and bred. Trenker is in an odd position
here. He has just finished directing the German version, and here he is
just an actor being directed by Milton Rosmer.
"There is very little difference between the two versions," he said. "Mine
has more outdoors and less in."
Trenker's Stories
Trenker has a fund of exciting stories about his adventures as an Austrian
soldier, a mountain guide, a writer, and an actor and director in Germany,
Italy and Hollywood. He tells them in voluble, very bad English to an accompaniment
of energetic pantomime, and has never been known to repeat one.
At lunch he had no patience with formalities, geting up to fetch plates
from the waiters' sideboard and serving meringues from the trolley himself.
In appearance and manner he's a real man of the mountains and it was funny
to see him wrestling with English income-tax papers. I assured him the English
don't understand them either !
One knotty problem is the business of matching studio shots exactly with
the same scenes in Switzerland. Phyllis Ross, the continuity girl who has
been right through the whole expedition, was in constant demand to decide
if the bandage on Whymper's ankle was the same as before, or whether he
was wearing a sock or not. Her main worry was in case anybody should notice
that Joan Gardner was wearing high heels in Switzerland and flat red slippers
now.
Only one little Alp has actually been reproduced. Douglas, Joan Gardner,
Trenker and Sympson took me off to see it, but it was already in the process
of demolition. The snow was gone, leaving only some soil scattered over
a built-up mound of boards.
The fine pine trees in the background proved on closer inspection to be
seasonable Christmas trees in tubs, not at all safe for climbing.
The free-and-easy ragging that goes on between these four made me feel this
company had got to know each other, as people do on a foreign holiday, much
better than most players in a film.
Mary Clare, the innkeeper's wife, ought to feel quite at home in the Tyrol,
after 'The Constant Nymph' . Others who were out on the spot are Frank Birch
and Ralph Truman.
"This feels rather dull after the fun we had out there," says Douglas. But
he's not bored, being one stage actor who's a serious convert to the films.
And the only person I felt sorry for was Cyril Smith. As a suspicious customs
officer he has to drink mine host Fred Grove's goat's milk, because it smells
of tobacco. Not surprisingly, since the smuggled tobacco is fed to the goat.
With retakes, Smith consumed four tumblers of milk - and didn't like even
one of them.
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