The film will be released to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s Folio in 2023.
Dominic Dromgoole, the former artistic director of London’s The Globe Theatre, will direct and produce Folio! Folio!, a feature comedy about the publication of the ground-breaking edition of Shakespeare’s works.
The film is aiming to shoot in summer 2022, produced by Marcus Coles’ UK company Folio 400 Productions. The company was founded to celebrate the 400th anniversary in 2023 of the publication of Shakespeare’s Folio – the first full collection of his plays, including the previously unpublished Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Tempest.
Dominic Dromgoole, the former artistic director of London’s The Globe Theatre, will direct and produce Folio! Folio!, a feature comedy about the publication of the ground-breaking edition of Shakespeare’s works.
The film is aiming to shoot in summer 2022, produced by Marcus Coles’ UK company Folio 400 Productions. The company was founded to celebrate the 400th anniversary in 2023 of the publication of Shakespeare’s Folio – the first full collection of his plays, including the previously unpublished Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Tempest.
- 6/2/2021
- by Ben Dalton
- ScreenDaily
Exclusive: All3Media has set up a comedy entertainment production company with two former top Fremantle executives, Deadline understands.
I hear that the British superindie has established Great Scott Media with Leon Wilson, who previously ran The X Factor and Got Talent production company Talkback Thames, and Ed Sleeman.
The pair left the Fremantle label earlier this year; Wilson was formerly MD of Talkback Thames, while Sleeman was MD of Talkback. The two companies were previously independent labels but merged in 2017 under the leadership of Fremantle UK CEO Liam Humphreys.
The pair were responsible for a slew of hit non-scripted series including Celebrity Juice, Through the Keyhole, and Harry’s Heroes, while Wilson also worked on Alan Carr’s Epic Gameshow, an ITV Saturday night primetime series that brings together the reboot of a number of classic American gameshows including The Price Is Right, Strike It Lucky and Play Your Cards Right.
I hear that the British superindie has established Great Scott Media with Leon Wilson, who previously ran The X Factor and Got Talent production company Talkback Thames, and Ed Sleeman.
The pair left the Fremantle label earlier this year; Wilson was formerly MD of Talkback Thames, while Sleeman was MD of Talkback. The two companies were previously independent labels but merged in 2017 under the leadership of Fremantle UK CEO Liam Humphreys.
The pair were responsible for a slew of hit non-scripted series including Celebrity Juice, Through the Keyhole, and Harry’s Heroes, while Wilson also worked on Alan Carr’s Epic Gameshow, an ITV Saturday night primetime series that brings together the reboot of a number of classic American gameshows including The Price Is Right, Strike It Lucky and Play Your Cards Right.
- 1/2/2020
- by Peter White
- Deadline Film + TV
Exclusive: All3Media has launched factual label Angelica Films with former BBC and Field Day exec Sally Angel.
The British production company will focus on producing documentary and factual programming for broadcasters and streaming platforms in the UK and around the world.
It is the latest non-scripted division for the Discovery and Liberty Global-backed production group, which also includes Betty, Killer Ratings producer Caravan, Maverick, Studio Lambert and Raw.
Angel spent four years as founder and creative director of Field Day Productions, which produced series including series including Inside The American Embassy for Channel 4. She previously worked for the BBC, where she produced series including Clive James’ Saturday Night Clive and Arena.
Jane Turton, CEO of All3Media said, “We’re delighted to be setting up this new label within All3 and really excited to have Sally bring her award-winning creativity and talent to head it up. She has a...
The British production company will focus on producing documentary and factual programming for broadcasters and streaming platforms in the UK and around the world.
It is the latest non-scripted division for the Discovery and Liberty Global-backed production group, which also includes Betty, Killer Ratings producer Caravan, Maverick, Studio Lambert and Raw.
Angel spent four years as founder and creative director of Field Day Productions, which produced series including series including Inside The American Embassy for Channel 4. She previously worked for the BBC, where she produced series including Clive James’ Saturday Night Clive and Arena.
Jane Turton, CEO of All3Media said, “We’re delighted to be setting up this new label within All3 and really excited to have Sally bring her award-winning creativity and talent to head it up. She has a...
- 10/15/2019
- by Peter White
- Deadline Film + TV
New titles also include African elephant and rhino genocide doc The Last Animals.
Distributor Kew Media Group has filled out its slate ahead of next month’s Cannes Film Festival and acquired worldwide sales rights to six new titles. The films will be making their festival market debut at the Marche du Film.
The titles include Nothing Like A Dame, a conversation piece between four renowned British actresses – Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Playwright and Maggie Smith. Directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill) and produced by Sally Angel and Karen Steyn, the film sees the four ladies discuss their careers...
Distributor Kew Media Group has filled out its slate ahead of next month’s Cannes Film Festival and acquired worldwide sales rights to six new titles. The films will be making their festival market debut at the Marche du Film.
The titles include Nothing Like A Dame, a conversation piece between four renowned British actresses – Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Playwright and Maggie Smith. Directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill) and produced by Sally Angel and Karen Steyn, the film sees the four ladies discuss their careers...
- 4/30/2018
- by Ben Dalton
- ScreenDaily
Kew Media Group has picked up international rights to six non-fiction films for Cannes including documentary Nothing Like A Dame, about the lives and careers of Brit actresses Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith. Directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill) and produced by Sally Angel (Night Will Fall) and Karen Steyn (Looking For Audrey), executive producers are Sally Angel and Debbie Manners for Field Day and Anthony Wall for the BBC.
Also new to the roster is Sam Rockwell-narrated One Million American Dreams, a history of the final resting place of over one million of New York’s unclaimed dead directed by Brendan J. Byrne (Bobby Sands: 66 Days); The Last Animals, an exposé on the crisis of the killing of African elephants and rhinos; Dealt, winner of the SXSW Audience Award for best documentary feature, about Richard Turner, one of the world’s great card...
Also new to the roster is Sam Rockwell-narrated One Million American Dreams, a history of the final resting place of over one million of New York’s unclaimed dead directed by Brendan J. Byrne (Bobby Sands: 66 Days); The Last Animals, an exposé on the crisis of the killing of African elephants and rhinos; Dealt, winner of the SXSW Audience Award for best documentary feature, about Richard Turner, one of the world’s great card...
- 4/30/2018
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
The Holocaust needs to be retold forever, but it's a tough topic to address without distortion or trivialization. André SInger's docu is about the Allied film record of the liberation of the camps -- horrific footage that was used in the war crimes trials and cut into documentaries -- that were then suppressed and locked away. In 2008, an abandoned film supervised by Alfred Hitchcock was finally finished. Night Will Fall DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 2014 / Color / 1:78 enhanced widescreen / 75 min. / Street Date January 27, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Narrators Helena Bonham Carter, Jasper Britton. Cinematography Richard Blanshard Film Editors Arik Lahav, Stephen Miller Original Music Nicolas Singer Written by Lynette Singer Produced by Sally Angel, Brett Ratner <Directed by André Singer
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Documentaries about the Holocaust have always been problematical. In some ways the subject was deemed a cultural taboo, to be discussed in only the gravest terms. For years after the war most Americans saw only chosen snippets of film footage, glimpses of the horrors in the death camps. The images published in magazine photo articles were more than people wanted to see.. There were plenty of exceptions, but most ordinary Americans first saw extended documentary footage in -- of all things -- a for-profit Hollywood picture in which big stars portrayed victims and villains. The movie, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg was actually in good taste, and had a laudable social purpose. The graphic film from the camp was part of the actual Nuremberg trials, after all. It showed a reality of our times that had been suppressed, whether for questions of taste or decency, or because 'the public couldn't take it.' I believe America accepted 'not seeing' because we were not yet a nation of morbid voyeurs. (Live and learn... from Joe Dante: "Actually I think the first time American audiences were exposed to Death Camp footage was in Welles' The Stranger, long before Judgment at Nuremberg.") Art film viewers saw Alain Resnais' Night and Fog, a quiet, haunting film that avoids emotional sensationalism by telling the story through views of Auschwitz as it was in 1955 and non-confrontational narration. Italians, East Germans, Russians and others eventually made dramatic movies that showed the experiences of various concentration camp victims. Many of these dramas were good, but none could embrace the near-cosmic immensity of the horror. Can any single experience help us to come to grips with the fate of millions? And then there's the problem of the endless footage of corpses -- these formerly taboo images are still too much for sensitive people. The English, the Americans and the Russians all filmed in the camps that they liberated. Night Will Fall tells the story of the 1945 production and then abandonment of a long-form film documentary officially sanctioned by the Allied victors. It was produced by Sidney Bernstein and partly overseen by Alfred Hitchcock. The director developed a script and an approach for a document intended to quash present and future claims that the mass murders were faked, exaggerated or a political illusion. A cut called German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (Gccfs) was prepared up to a certain point, but then shelved, with no go-ahead for a finish. The U.S. Army finally brought in Billy Wilder to supervise a shorter version called Death Mills. But Wilder's film also remained classified, and was not released to the public either. A version of it was shown to German audiences. The docu footage was also projected at the Nuremberg trials, as evidence against the German war criminals. Night Will Fall was announced almost ten years ago, in newspaper articles that explained that the British Imperial War Museum was finally going to complete the original Gccfs. Yet we had already seen much of Gccfs on PBS TV in 1985. All but the last reel of the film was located, in its work print form. It screened at least twice on PBS as Frontline: Memory of the Camps; I taped the second airing on VHS and have a burned DVD of it around somewhere. The 'new' Memory of the Camps was finished in 2014. The Warner Archive Collection's Night Will Fall is a documentary about the making of these movies back at the close of the war. Holocaust survivors, surviving Signal Corps cameramen and the producer of Schindler's List -- himself an Auschwitz survivor - are among the on-camera interviewees. Various personalities including directors Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock are represented by archived interviews on film and audiotape. The details of the liberation and the Signal Corps' activities are certainly interesting. We also want to know about the involvement of Hitchcock and Wilder, although all we get are a few remarks and notes on Hitchcock's concerns with the narrative, in audio bites that I would guess were taken from the famed Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews. Hitchcock asks for the inclusion of panning shots, to help prove that what was seen wasn't being faked. Wilder says much the same thing. When it comes time to explain why the project stalled, we're shown a couple of paragraphs in some documents that suggest that America did not want to antagonize the German population with this negative material. The inference is that with the Cold War heating up, most forms of de-Nazification were abandoned after the obvious death camp villains and high-ranking Nazis were executed or locked away. Washington wanted German cooperation in opposing Stalin, and put a halt to the bringing of many more German war criminals to justice. The Russian attitude was quite different. A Soviet Army cinematographer interviewed for Night Will Fall tells us that when their troops liberated a camp, their first action was to shoot every German guard as soon as they were positively identified. That's sounds okay to me. As I said, the 'finished'1945 film German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was also released in 2014. It retains the title Memory of the Camps and is credited to Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock. Night Will Fall ends with a final couple of minutes of the 'finished' Memory. It consists of a semi-poetic narration and an edited sequence showing, in graphic close-up, ten or so victims by the side of the road, presumably executed during the retreat of the camp guards. It's everything the movie shouldn't be, a repetitive series of shock cuts to staring corpses with parts of their heads blown away. I can only compare it to one of the intolerably gory highway safety films that aim only to shock the audience. The brain of one corpse lies in a neat heap alongside a skull blown wide open; another man's head seems to be missing above the nose. I'm not sure what the point is. If it's done to produce a blast of more extreme horror to reach the audience, it's a failure. I must admit that I'm conservative on this issue, as I believe that too much of the audience will compare this real carnage to effects they see in the latest zombie thriller. That sickens me the same way I felt when I witnessed high schoolers on a bus describing the awful 9/11 coverage as, 'really cool.' Night Will Fall has value, but to me its style, making even mild use of editing techniques from today's Reality Programming, is inappropriate. The horror of this reality is blatant, banal even. The most responsible way to use the the horror footage would be to simply lay out the raw takes, with slates and camera stops, like legal evidence. Night Will Fall aestheticizes many shots. In one sequence, close-ups of massed corpses are rendered in negative, turning the horror into stylized 'art.' Fake 'end of reel' blips and flashes are added for style, as in any modern Reality Show, where the only rule is to hype the subject matter using any editorial trick that will keep the frame alive. A s hort piece of footage has been digitally sharpened, and looks as if a sub-par tape source had been run through a bad electronic filter. Is this splitting hairs, and being oversensitive? I suppose that times change and that revisionism happens with everything. But this grim, vitally important history is now leaning toward becoming another entertainment choice. Other snippets of the new 'finished' Memory of the Camps are glimpsed in Night Will Fall. The new film appears to use the same or much of the same narration text. I can't tell if that reconstituted ending was part of the original, because when the original Memory showed on PBS, a card came up informing us that the final 'Auschwitz' chapter had been removed at an earlier date. What remained of the original rough cut ended there. I've always theorized that it was snipped off to be given to documentarians and Stanley Kramer. Many of the standard shots of Auschwitz that we see, often in terrible quality, may have come from that reel. The new Memory of the Camps doesn't retain the original narration, as read by actor Trevor Howard. The original version was unusually eerie and effective because it was just a sequence of raw shots with insert title cards and maps, and the only audio on the soundtrack was Trevor Howard's distinctive voice. It is a very good read. Howard seems to be suppressing his anger all the way through, reading the more ironic comments as if he's personally offended. It's as if the Army Intelligence officer Trevor Howard plays in The Third Man had been asked to record the narration. The new narrator in the finished (2014) clips we see gives a smooth and uninflected read, which to me revises and re-interprets everything. The Holocaust shouldn't need mood music to tell us how to react -- although I realize that that a music track might have been part of the plan in 1945 as well. And it's possible that Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein, when they heard Trevor Howard's interpretation of the narration script, already knew that they wanted something else. But Howard's track is the one that came from the battlefield of the original production, and should be preserved. I remember buying a copy of a previously classified Army movie about 1950s atom tests, only to find that the original narration had been similarly tossed away and replaced with a new one that sometimes didn't even align with the graphics on screen. This to me makes the movie a censored, worthless revision. Watch William Wyler and John Sturges' docu Thunderbolt on TCM sometime. The Army wasn't keen to show that movie either, and we can tell why -- it's an honest account of how fighter bomber pilots, mostly unopposed in the air, pressed their advantage over retreating Germans in Italy. The narration and the comments by the pilots are bloodthirsty and merciless. Apparently the Army did not like seeing its personnel presented as gleeful killers. Thunderbolt was released only several years after it was finished, by a small studio. Like I said above, I realize that my comments about the style of Night Will Fall are highly subjective and prejudiced. But they are my honest thoughts on the film. The Warner Archive Collection DVD-r of Night Will Fall is a good enhanced encoding of a show that consists of new interviews and the old atrocity documentation footage. The improved quality of the film from the camps spares us nothing. If there are more ways to mangle, burn or abuse a human body, I don't want to know about them. The audio and other technical specs are of a high quality as well. The disc's three extras offer much added value. The first is a lengthy lecture by Professor Rainer Schulze, who re-traces basically the entire subject matter of Night Will Fall on a higher plane, with more detail and information. The lecture answers many questions that the main feature doesn't touch. Schulze also discusses the politics behind the ways the 'hot potato' death camp footage was shown, and then not shown. Frankly, I can see a spokesman like Professor Schulze being excluded from a new 'entertainment' documentary because (a.) he probes deeply into uncomfortable aspects of the subject and (b.) he's a German with a German accent. Want to learn more about this appalling yet essential history lesson? This is a fine study piece. The second and third extras are two shorter concentration camp docus that show how both sides depicted the horror, using much of the same footage. Oświecim (Auschwitz) is the Russian film. It has a Russian title card but English opening and ending text cards -- with a misspelling. It identifies the 'great men' that will insure that the Fascists are brought to justice as Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill -- even though Roosevelt had been dead for a year. The Russian docu refers to the war criminals mostly as Fascists, not Germans, perhaps because they wanted to show the film in the Russian sector of defeated Germany. The narration is fairly specific about what we're seeing, describing the things done to individual prisoners and identifying a number of them by name. Adults and children pose for the camera as Russian doctors examine them. The last film is indeed the Billy Wilder supervised Death Mills, which covers much of the same content. Although it consists mostly of British and American film, it also uses a great deal of Russian footage, with a narration track that says totally different things about some of the victims we see. At one point the narration refers to the brutish-looking female SS guards as Amazons, and says that they are 'Deadlier than the Male.' Is that evidence of Billy Wilder's input? My bias against Night Will Fall is probably a more generalized rant against today's commercial documentaries, many of which are, I think, compromised by the need to compete with other forms of entertainment. The show does have interesting content and may be perfect for someone unfamiliar with the subject. If a viewer wants a show to introduce the subject of Genocide to children, I can't see this or any atrocity footage being the right thing to show them. For others, the excellent extras greatly enhance the film's desirability. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Night Will Fall DVD-r rates: Movie: Good Video: Very good Sound: Excellent Supplements: One informational lecture short subjects and two short docus made right after the war (see above) Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? Yes; Subtitles: English Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: June 18, 2016 small>(5144fall)
Visit DVD Savant's Main Column Page Glenn Erickson answers most reader mail: dvdsavant@mindspring.com
Text © Copyright 2016 Glenn Erickson...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Documentaries about the Holocaust have always been problematical. In some ways the subject was deemed a cultural taboo, to be discussed in only the gravest terms. For years after the war most Americans saw only chosen snippets of film footage, glimpses of the horrors in the death camps. The images published in magazine photo articles were more than people wanted to see.. There were plenty of exceptions, but most ordinary Americans first saw extended documentary footage in -- of all things -- a for-profit Hollywood picture in which big stars portrayed victims and villains. The movie, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg was actually in good taste, and had a laudable social purpose. The graphic film from the camp was part of the actual Nuremberg trials, after all. It showed a reality of our times that had been suppressed, whether for questions of taste or decency, or because 'the public couldn't take it.' I believe America accepted 'not seeing' because we were not yet a nation of morbid voyeurs. (Live and learn... from Joe Dante: "Actually I think the first time American audiences were exposed to Death Camp footage was in Welles' The Stranger, long before Judgment at Nuremberg.") Art film viewers saw Alain Resnais' Night and Fog, a quiet, haunting film that avoids emotional sensationalism by telling the story through views of Auschwitz as it was in 1955 and non-confrontational narration. Italians, East Germans, Russians and others eventually made dramatic movies that showed the experiences of various concentration camp victims. Many of these dramas were good, but none could embrace the near-cosmic immensity of the horror. Can any single experience help us to come to grips with the fate of millions? And then there's the problem of the endless footage of corpses -- these formerly taboo images are still too much for sensitive people. The English, the Americans and the Russians all filmed in the camps that they liberated. Night Will Fall tells the story of the 1945 production and then abandonment of a long-form film documentary officially sanctioned by the Allied victors. It was produced by Sidney Bernstein and partly overseen by Alfred Hitchcock. The director developed a script and an approach for a document intended to quash present and future claims that the mass murders were faked, exaggerated or a political illusion. A cut called German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (Gccfs) was prepared up to a certain point, but then shelved, with no go-ahead for a finish. The U.S. Army finally brought in Billy Wilder to supervise a shorter version called Death Mills. But Wilder's film also remained classified, and was not released to the public either. A version of it was shown to German audiences. The docu footage was also projected at the Nuremberg trials, as evidence against the German war criminals. Night Will Fall was announced almost ten years ago, in newspaper articles that explained that the British Imperial War Museum was finally going to complete the original Gccfs. Yet we had already seen much of Gccfs on PBS TV in 1985. All but the last reel of the film was located, in its work print form. It screened at least twice on PBS as Frontline: Memory of the Camps; I taped the second airing on VHS and have a burned DVD of it around somewhere. The 'new' Memory of the Camps was finished in 2014. The Warner Archive Collection's Night Will Fall is a documentary about the making of these movies back at the close of the war. Holocaust survivors, surviving Signal Corps cameramen and the producer of Schindler's List -- himself an Auschwitz survivor - are among the on-camera interviewees. Various personalities including directors Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock are represented by archived interviews on film and audiotape. The details of the liberation and the Signal Corps' activities are certainly interesting. We also want to know about the involvement of Hitchcock and Wilder, although all we get are a few remarks and notes on Hitchcock's concerns with the narrative, in audio bites that I would guess were taken from the famed Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews. Hitchcock asks for the inclusion of panning shots, to help prove that what was seen wasn't being faked. Wilder says much the same thing. When it comes time to explain why the project stalled, we're shown a couple of paragraphs in some documents that suggest that America did not want to antagonize the German population with this negative material. The inference is that with the Cold War heating up, most forms of de-Nazification were abandoned after the obvious death camp villains and high-ranking Nazis were executed or locked away. Washington wanted German cooperation in opposing Stalin, and put a halt to the bringing of many more German war criminals to justice. The Russian attitude was quite different. A Soviet Army cinematographer interviewed for Night Will Fall tells us that when their troops liberated a camp, their first action was to shoot every German guard as soon as they were positively identified. That's sounds okay to me. As I said, the 'finished'1945 film German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was also released in 2014. It retains the title Memory of the Camps and is credited to Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock. Night Will Fall ends with a final couple of minutes of the 'finished' Memory. It consists of a semi-poetic narration and an edited sequence showing, in graphic close-up, ten or so victims by the side of the road, presumably executed during the retreat of the camp guards. It's everything the movie shouldn't be, a repetitive series of shock cuts to staring corpses with parts of their heads blown away. I can only compare it to one of the intolerably gory highway safety films that aim only to shock the audience. The brain of one corpse lies in a neat heap alongside a skull blown wide open; another man's head seems to be missing above the nose. I'm not sure what the point is. If it's done to produce a blast of more extreme horror to reach the audience, it's a failure. I must admit that I'm conservative on this issue, as I believe that too much of the audience will compare this real carnage to effects they see in the latest zombie thriller. That sickens me the same way I felt when I witnessed high schoolers on a bus describing the awful 9/11 coverage as, 'really cool.' Night Will Fall has value, but to me its style, making even mild use of editing techniques from today's Reality Programming, is inappropriate. The horror of this reality is blatant, banal even. The most responsible way to use the the horror footage would be to simply lay out the raw takes, with slates and camera stops, like legal evidence. Night Will Fall aestheticizes many shots. In one sequence, close-ups of massed corpses are rendered in negative, turning the horror into stylized 'art.' Fake 'end of reel' blips and flashes are added for style, as in any modern Reality Show, where the only rule is to hype the subject matter using any editorial trick that will keep the frame alive. A s hort piece of footage has been digitally sharpened, and looks as if a sub-par tape source had been run through a bad electronic filter. Is this splitting hairs, and being oversensitive? I suppose that times change and that revisionism happens with everything. But this grim, vitally important history is now leaning toward becoming another entertainment choice. Other snippets of the new 'finished' Memory of the Camps are glimpsed in Night Will Fall. The new film appears to use the same or much of the same narration text. I can't tell if that reconstituted ending was part of the original, because when the original Memory showed on PBS, a card came up informing us that the final 'Auschwitz' chapter had been removed at an earlier date. What remained of the original rough cut ended there. I've always theorized that it was snipped off to be given to documentarians and Stanley Kramer. Many of the standard shots of Auschwitz that we see, often in terrible quality, may have come from that reel. The new Memory of the Camps doesn't retain the original narration, as read by actor Trevor Howard. The original version was unusually eerie and effective because it was just a sequence of raw shots with insert title cards and maps, and the only audio on the soundtrack was Trevor Howard's distinctive voice. It is a very good read. Howard seems to be suppressing his anger all the way through, reading the more ironic comments as if he's personally offended. It's as if the Army Intelligence officer Trevor Howard plays in The Third Man had been asked to record the narration. The new narrator in the finished (2014) clips we see gives a smooth and uninflected read, which to me revises and re-interprets everything. The Holocaust shouldn't need mood music to tell us how to react -- although I realize that that a music track might have been part of the plan in 1945 as well. And it's possible that Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein, when they heard Trevor Howard's interpretation of the narration script, already knew that they wanted something else. But Howard's track is the one that came from the battlefield of the original production, and should be preserved. I remember buying a copy of a previously classified Army movie about 1950s atom tests, only to find that the original narration had been similarly tossed away and replaced with a new one that sometimes didn't even align with the graphics on screen. This to me makes the movie a censored, worthless revision. Watch William Wyler and John Sturges' docu Thunderbolt on TCM sometime. The Army wasn't keen to show that movie either, and we can tell why -- it's an honest account of how fighter bomber pilots, mostly unopposed in the air, pressed their advantage over retreating Germans in Italy. The narration and the comments by the pilots are bloodthirsty and merciless. Apparently the Army did not like seeing its personnel presented as gleeful killers. Thunderbolt was released only several years after it was finished, by a small studio. Like I said above, I realize that my comments about the style of Night Will Fall are highly subjective and prejudiced. But they are my honest thoughts on the film. The Warner Archive Collection DVD-r of Night Will Fall is a good enhanced encoding of a show that consists of new interviews and the old atrocity documentation footage. The improved quality of the film from the camps spares us nothing. If there are more ways to mangle, burn or abuse a human body, I don't want to know about them. The audio and other technical specs are of a high quality as well. The disc's three extras offer much added value. The first is a lengthy lecture by Professor Rainer Schulze, who re-traces basically the entire subject matter of Night Will Fall on a higher plane, with more detail and information. The lecture answers many questions that the main feature doesn't touch. Schulze also discusses the politics behind the ways the 'hot potato' death camp footage was shown, and then not shown. Frankly, I can see a spokesman like Professor Schulze being excluded from a new 'entertainment' documentary because (a.) he probes deeply into uncomfortable aspects of the subject and (b.) he's a German with a German accent. Want to learn more about this appalling yet essential history lesson? This is a fine study piece. The second and third extras are two shorter concentration camp docus that show how both sides depicted the horror, using much of the same footage. Oświecim (Auschwitz) is the Russian film. It has a Russian title card but English opening and ending text cards -- with a misspelling. It identifies the 'great men' that will insure that the Fascists are brought to justice as Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill -- even though Roosevelt had been dead for a year. The Russian docu refers to the war criminals mostly as Fascists, not Germans, perhaps because they wanted to show the film in the Russian sector of defeated Germany. The narration is fairly specific about what we're seeing, describing the things done to individual prisoners and identifying a number of them by name. Adults and children pose for the camera as Russian doctors examine them. The last film is indeed the Billy Wilder supervised Death Mills, which covers much of the same content. Although it consists mostly of British and American film, it also uses a great deal of Russian footage, with a narration track that says totally different things about some of the victims we see. At one point the narration refers to the brutish-looking female SS guards as Amazons, and says that they are 'Deadlier than the Male.' Is that evidence of Billy Wilder's input? My bias against Night Will Fall is probably a more generalized rant against today's commercial documentaries, many of which are, I think, compromised by the need to compete with other forms of entertainment. The show does have interesting content and may be perfect for someone unfamiliar with the subject. If a viewer wants a show to introduce the subject of Genocide to children, I can't see this or any atrocity footage being the right thing to show them. For others, the excellent extras greatly enhance the film's desirability. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Night Will Fall DVD-r rates: Movie: Good Video: Very good Sound: Excellent Supplements: One informational lecture short subjects and two short docus made right after the war (see above) Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? Yes; Subtitles: English Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: June 18, 2016 small>(5144fall)
Visit DVD Savant's Main Column Page Glenn Erickson answers most reader mail: dvdsavant@mindspring.com
Text © Copyright 2016 Glenn Erickson...
- 6/21/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Andre Singer’s Night Will Fall will get a global broadcast launch on Jan 27, to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The date is also International Holocause Remembrance Day.
The film revisits the project from decades ago that involved Sidney Bernstein, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock to tell the story of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps; footage from 1945 is used extensively.
The harrowing documentary will be shown on Channel 4 (UK), HBO (Us), Arte (Germany/France), Ard (Germany), Tvp (Poland), Vpro (The Netherlands), Channel 8 Hot and Keshet TV (Israel), Dr (Denmark), Rtvslo (Slovenia), Yle (Finland), and Nrk (Norway). Midas will distribute in Portugal.
Tel Aviv-based Cinephil handles international sales.
Producers are Sally Angel and Brett Ratner and executive producers are Richard Melman, James Packer and Stephen Frears.
The 75-minute film is a UK-us-Israel-Denmark production.
Night Will Fall had a work in progress screening at the 2014 Berlinale.
The date is also International Holocause Remembrance Day.
The film revisits the project from decades ago that involved Sidney Bernstein, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock to tell the story of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps; footage from 1945 is used extensively.
The harrowing documentary will be shown on Channel 4 (UK), HBO (Us), Arte (Germany/France), Ard (Germany), Tvp (Poland), Vpro (The Netherlands), Channel 8 Hot and Keshet TV (Israel), Dr (Denmark), Rtvslo (Slovenia), Yle (Finland), and Nrk (Norway). Midas will distribute in Portugal.
Tel Aviv-based Cinephil handles international sales.
Producers are Sally Angel and Brett Ratner and executive producers are Richard Melman, James Packer and Stephen Frears.
The 75-minute film is a UK-us-Israel-Denmark production.
Night Will Fall had a work in progress screening at the 2014 Berlinale.
- 11/25/2014
- by wendy.mitchell@screendaily.com (Wendy Mitchell)
- ScreenDaily
The BFI has acquired UK rights to Andre Singer’s concentration camp documentary Night Will Fall.
The film is about not only the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps but the work by army and newsreel cameramen to document the horrific scenes they found in 1944 and 1945. The footage had been planned to be used in a contemporary film spearheaded by Sidney Bernstein, which Alfred Hitchcock was asked to edit; but that project was scrapped. The Imperial War Museum has restored the original footage.
Helena Bonham Carter narrates.
The film is being slated for a UK theatrical release on Sept 19.
The film had a work in progress screening at the Berlinale and then had its UK premiere at Sheffield, where it won a jury special mention. It screens this week at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
The BFI deal was done with Spring Films and Angel TV; Cinephil is handling international sales. The BFI had...
The film is about not only the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps but the work by army and newsreel cameramen to document the horrific scenes they found in 1944 and 1945. The footage had been planned to be used in a contemporary film spearheaded by Sidney Bernstein, which Alfred Hitchcock was asked to edit; but that project was scrapped. The Imperial War Museum has restored the original footage.
Helena Bonham Carter narrates.
The film is being slated for a UK theatrical release on Sept 19.
The film had a work in progress screening at the Berlinale and then had its UK premiere at Sheffield, where it won a jury special mention. It screens this week at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
The BFI deal was done with Spring Films and Angel TV; Cinephil is handling international sales. The BFI had...
- 7/17/2014
- by wendy.mitchell@screendaily.com (Wendy Mitchell)
- ScreenDaily
Berlin -- Brett Ratner's documentary company RatPac Documentary Films has the North American rights to Night Will Fall, a companion piece to Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 documentary on the Holocaust. Ratner is co-financing the completion of the documentary, which is currently a work-in-progress getting its world premiere in Berlin, in return for which he received North American rights. "It's not a formal acquisition because the film isn't complete. We are financing completion," Ratner told The Hollywood Reporter. He described the project as "awesome." Ratner is producing the work-in-progress with Sally Angel, with executive producers James
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- 2/11/2014
- by Clifford Coonan
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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