THE MIDNIGHT FILM AVALANCHE
Massimo Benvegnù

Just as in astronomy each celestial body in the universe is worth placing and cataloguing, even purely with the scope of attempting to create some kind of order, the various objects crossing the galaxy of film can also be given a different degree of significance on the basis of their scientific value and uniqueness, but also of their impact, consistency and nature. Some films are like fleeting asteroids, others leave trails like comets and others again have strange orbits, returning cyclically to make themselves felt in our hemisphere of reference, while many leave behind them only detritus for film libraries, scattered fragments that drift around with no driving force, lost in space.

Recently an increasing number of historians, researchers, directors and nostalgic spectators have tried to rewrite the history of B movies, films that met with some success with the public but failed to leave behind them any trace in the form of festival prizes or in the academic literature. Of the various currents of this strictly commercial kind of film, whose entirely momentary public appeal represented its very essence , there was also a vein which used the mountains as the backdrop and inspiration for its stories: we are talking about the strange phenomenon of “Tyrolean” comedies, "Lederhosen film" or "Yodel Comedy", very popular for a certain period on both sides of the Alps, in all its different forms and variations.

Usually co-productions mostly funded with German capital, these films used well-known plots and old variety stereotypes in order to patch together entertaining comedies involving alpine holiday makers and sentimental hunting scenes, more or less effective, in lower Bavaria. The distribution of these works was mostly limited to the local market, with some films occasionally making their way to Austrian and Dutch cinemas, or the alternative circuit in Trentino Alto Adige.

Like all genres, this kind of film also had its leading lights. In this case, we can recall figures such as Alois Brummer, Franz Josef Gottlieb, Jürgen Enz, Sigi Rothemund (who used the pseudonym Siggi Götz), Gunter Otto, who many described as the ‘master’ of the genre, and the Austrian Franz Marischka, son of the famous operetta singer Hubert Marischka and nephew of Ernst, the director of the renowned film trilogy dedicated to Princess Sissi. However, while Sissi was synonymous with grace and elegance, also thanks to the young Romy Schneider, the same could certainly not be said of the handful of films directed by Marischka in the valleys of Tyrol, which may have earned him the title of ‘black sheep’ of the family.
At all events, in the context of a hypothetical guide to B movies it is amusing to record this phenomenon, limited to a specific time and place, a meteor which crossed the lesser film panorama making a big noise, and whose passage left only a few relics in film libraries. We are amused to show you these films, without any desire to give new added value to the material, but simply as a pure, light-hearted form of divertissement.