Mamba

Mamba (1930)

FORBIDDEN LOVE...PASSIONATE HATE!

August Bolte, the richest man in a settlement in German East Africa in the period before World War I, is called "Mamba" by the locals, which is the name of a deadly snake. Despised by the locals and the European settlers alike for his greed and arrogance, Bolte forces the beautiful daughter of a destitute nobleman to marry him in exchange for saving her father from ruin. Upon her arrival in Africa, she falls in love with an officer in the local German garrison. When World War I breaks out, Bolte, unable to avoid being conscripted, foments a rebellion among the local natives.

Date of release
1930-03-09
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 18m
Genres
Drama
Director
Albert S. Rogell

Casting

Interesting facts

Mamba is a 1930 American pre-Code drama film, released by Tiffany Pictures. It was shot entirely in Technicolor and stars Jean Hersholt, Eleanor Boardman, Ralph Forbes, Josef Swickard, Claude Fleming, William Stanton, and William von Brincken. It was based on a story by Ferdinand Schumann-Heink and John Reinhardt and was advertised as the First Drama In Natural Color as all previous color features in sound had featured musical numbers.

Production

According to an advertisement from the studio, the film cost more than $500,000 to produce. The studio kept 120 African American extras on weekly payroll. Exterior sets were built at Universal Studios.

Early sound films presented unprecedented difficulties in making tracking shots with the early sound equipment. During the filming of Mamba, director Rogell successfully recorded the dialogue between Jean Hersholt and Eleanor Boardman by incorporating a stuntman made up as a hunchback. As the couple strolled behind the stuntman, he pointed his “hump”—which concealed a microphone—aiming it toward each actor in turn as they spoke.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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