WALTER RIML

Cameraman - Actor - Photographer

1932/35: FILMING IN GREENLAND

In 1933, Walter Riml was a member of the Universal Greenland film expedition with director Dr Arnold Fanck.
In the Fanck film ‘SOS Eisberg’, the 2,05 meter long Tyrolean plays the cook ‘Fritz Kümmel’ and other caracters alongside Leni Riefenstahl, Gustav Diessl and Sepp Rist. 
The Greenland farce ‘North Pole - Ahoy!’, a parody of ‘SOS Iceberg’, is also filmed near Ummannaq. ‘Nordpol - Ahoi!’ (in Austria: “Hoppla - Wir Beide!”) is the last film with the duo Walter Riml and Guzzi Lantschner. The film is directed by Andrew Marton. The leading role is played by Marton's wife Jarmila. Paul Dessau is writing the film music and Charlie Roellinghoff writes probably a screenplay. However, individual scenes are presumably also developed from the situational comedy and spontaneous ideas of its protagonists Riml and Lantschner. ‘Nordpol - Ahoy!’ was a sensational success when it premiered in Vienna 1934 January 6th in 8 cinemas and in Berlin  April 18th as press reports of the time prove.
The ‘Licht-Bild-Bühne’ wrote: ‘Something so hilarious has not been seen for a long time’... and the ‘Dessauer Filmbühne’ said: ‘Film success - Ahoy. A dead-laughing, enthusiastic audience called for Riml and Lantschner often and for a long time’....
‘North Pole - Ahoy!’ is even shown in Japan. 
And: Riml and Lantschner were even offered a two-year contract in Hollywood after the end of filming in Greenland. However, it is not known why the contract was never finalised.

Moreover, despite the great success, after ‘Nordpol-Ahoi!’ there was suddenly no more film with the ‘Hamburg Carpenters’. Walter Riml later explained that this was probably on the instructions of Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, who said: ‘This is not German humour.’  This instruction becomes understandable when you realise that the characters of the Hamburg carpenters probably go back to the Jewish vaudeville artists, the Wolf brothers.
 
The film ‘Nordpol - Ahoy!’ has been lost to this day despite an intensive and worldwide search!  


Riml´s work took him to Greenland again in 1935. The documentary film ‘The Great Ice - Alfred Wegener's Last Voyage’ was made. In addition to his work as an actor, Walter Riml made many documentary films of glacier calving and the life of the Eskimos. He worked together with the famous polar explorer Dr Ernst Sorge.

 

Walter Riml's archive with over tens of thousands of photographs of Greenland and negatives from his 1936 trip to Japan was burnt in a bombing raid on Berlin in 1944.
 

In the photo gallery on this page you can see a page of his passport with the stamps from his first trip to Greenland. Walter Riml later added the handwritten entries ‘Greenland’ with the date. On the left-hand side of the passport is a residence permit for Switzerland. The film ‘Adventure in the Engadin’, in which Walter Riml played the leading role, was shot there in 1932.

 

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Impressum Texte © Helma Türk - Fotos Walter Riml © Dr.Christian Riml