Colourful history … Paul Brennan with the original print of Mamba he tracked down in Adelaide. Photo: Wolter Peeters
Sacha Molitorisz, The Age, reports
Tonight in the New York city of Syracuse, film critic and author Leonard Maltin will welcome to the stage Paul Brennan, a film historian from Woollahra.
Brennan will tell the dark, twisting story of Mamba, a drama that pioneered new technology and bankrupted a studio before it was lost, apparently forever.
On its release in 1930, Mamba astounded film-goers with its realistic sound and Technicolor visuals. Blending forbidden passion with a Zulu uprising, the lavish production was billed as ''the screen's first all-talking, all-colour drama''.
''It is a landmark film from the dawn of sound,'' Brennan says. ''It was so advanced. The rest of Hollywood didn't catch up until the mid-'30s.''
Unfortunately, it soon went from landmark to waylaid. Despite performing well at the box office, Mamba was so expensive it bankrupted Tiffany Pictures, the independent studio that produced it. Within a decade, every one of the film's prints was destroyed or missing - along with the performance of its Australian co-star, Claude Fleming.
But in 2009, in a twist worthy of Hollywood, Brennan hunted down a print in Adelaide after some internet detective work. It was owned by an 80-year-old woman and her 85-year-old husband, who used to work as a travelling picture show man in Australia's backblocks.
''I went to New York in 2009 and showed what I had, and their heads collectively exploded,'' Brennan says. ''They could not believe the entire film was there.''
The print had vision but no sound - in this early period of talkies the soundtrack was provided by a record played on a turntable coupled with the projector. So the next step was to unearth the soundtrack.
After more hunting, Brennan jubilantly located a complete set of nine soundtrack records at UCLA. These he gave to Swedish sound engineer Jonas Nordin, who synchronised the soundtrack and the visuals. Thanks to Brennan and Nordin, the film had its emotional ''re-premiere'' in Melbourne in November.
Tonight in Syracuse, at an event called Cinefest, Mamba will have its first US screening in 80 years.
''Cinefest is a four-day showcase of the last 12 months of discoveries and restorations,'' Brennan says. ''And we have the Saturday night slot.
'' They're having us as the star attraction. Leonard Maltin is hosting, and Jonas and I have prepared a 70-minute PowerPoint presentation on the history of Tiffany Pictures, which was formed in 1922 and was really a production house of wealthy people making expensive movies starring their friends.
''One of their showcase pictures was Mamba, which was a movie of such scale and ambition that even Technicolor took out ads to say how good the colour was.''
Mamba comes from the era portrayed in The Artist. It's the story of a brutish German in colonial Africa who marries a young beauty, but her heart belongs to a dashing Englishman.
''Love at first sight,'' trumpeted the poster. ''But she was the wedded slave of the cruellest white man in Africa!'' In response, the Zulus revolt.
The film couldn't save Tiffany and when the studio went under, Mamba was lost - but not without playing a part in the making of another classic.
''In 1938, the David Selznick studio was about to start filming Gone With The Wind,'' Brennan says. ''And they said: 'We're going to have a big fire, so anyone who has anything they don't like, bring it down.' Every single thing Tiffany owned, including all the props and negatives, were taken there.
''So when you're seeing the burning of Atlanta, you're seeing the burning of all these silent films and all these independent studio prints. Everything went up in smoke that night.''
Except for that one print of Mamba that found its way to Adelaide.
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