Itami Mansaku (Peter High's Excellent Book)

[mccaskem at georgetown.edu]

Dear FB,

I just read the pages you refer to, in my copy of Peter High's book. It's excellent 
information, and I was surprised to find that my bits and pieces fit well into the 
bigger picture. I should have looked there sooner, rather than assuming there 
wasn't much available in English.

I never knew that the Itami version was shown in theaters in Japan. That must 
have been very interesting!

As for Fanck, I may be wrong, but I think he was a naive person who liked to do 
outdoor filming. Most of his films are Berg-Film/Mountain Film, in which the 
scenery is almost more important than the actors.

Leni Riefenstahl began acting in Fanck's mountain films early on. Fanck did not 
like using doubles, and wanted his actors to do all the climbing, slipping, and 
hanging in space themselves. Hitler saw her onscreen in one of them later, and 
that's how she got mixed up with Nazis.

Fanck really just wanted to make another mountain film, starring a volcano in 
Japan. In the long finale of the film, Hara Setsuko and the male lead do a very 
long and slow trek, one trying to catch up with the other, over fissures with 
steam coming out, etc. Hara is supposed to be trying to jump in the volcano's 
core because her "fiance" maybe doesn't care for her, and he schlepps through 
all perils to save her and prove his love for her.

I'm not sure anyone in Japan had tried much to make this kind of outdoor film. 
Fanck was famous for them in Germany & Austria, and it was his main talent.

Apart from this film, Fanck had a fairly dreary career under Nazi Rule. 
Riefenstahl & Goebbels always hated each other, so Fanck's connection with LR 
didn't help him so much in the big picture.

After the war, unlike Harlan Veit, a notoriously Nazi director through and 
through, who resumed his bigtime career in the 1950s in W. Germany after a 
discreet hiatus, and later died while vacationing in his villa in Italy. Fanck instead 
ended up with a new kind of mountain gig, cutting down trees for a living for a 
while. Later mountain film nostalgia helped him economically.

http://www.nevasport.com/nevablogs/retro-ski/art/arnold-fanck--maestro-
de-peliculas-de-montana---arnold-fanck--the-master-of-mountain-
films/2625/


Thank You Very Much For The Good Information!

mmcc