Mountain Films

Much of this story is just a hazy memory. Suspicion was Alfred Hitchcock’s first film on which he was both producer and director, it was also one of very few to be distributed by RKO Pictures. In the film, a shy spinster runs off with a charming playboy, who turns out to be penniless, a gambler, and dishonest. She comes to suspect that he is also a murderer, and that he is attempting to kill her. For her role as Lina, Joan Fontaine won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1941 and the film was the only Oscar-winning performance in a Hitchcock film. This was one of the many superb titles that Mountain Films had picked up in their RKO rights deal. Peter Burt had bled ‘King Kong’, ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘Top Hat’ and the other Astaire and Rogers musicals as far as he could, releasing the films in numerous lengths and versions. However when you consider the size of RKO’s catalogue, it’s immediately noticeable that he only took the cream off the top and never really looked any further than that. Along with Kong, Kane and Astaire & Rogers he manage to release ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, Mighty Joe Young, The Last days of Pompeii, Bedlam, Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Boy with Green Hair and perhaps a half dozen or so more. There were so many he could have released, any of the Saint series, The Falcon series, The Tarzan series, not to mention Hitchcock’s ‘Notorious’ from 1946 or Orson Welles’s ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’. I always wondered why they never released 1951s ‘The Thing from Another World’, was it because RKO were just the distributors and only co-producers.

Peter Burt’s phone call to Derek came out of the blue and was simply the offer of Mountain and Derann financing the release of the Hitchcock mystery thriller Suspicion. He said he would supply the 35mm print if we paid for the 16mm reduction negative at a laboratory of our choice. This wasn’t as easy as it may sound as we were informed that the 35mm wasn’t a first class print and needed dozens of grading corrections before they could even consider letting us have an 8mm test print. We had chosen Rank Film Labs for the job in question where Roy Hubbard was still in charge, and it soon became apparent that Mountain had had a very cheap 35mm print run off at some less than quality lab of their own. However we finally accepted one of the test prints and had the bulk run off and mounted on 5×400′ spools it was eventually released, but it never sold well and was a great disappointment to both Mountain (who did supply the box label) and ourselves.  

However this was not the first time Derann had worked with Mountain Films, as even before I’d joined Derann they had released two martial arts titles, “Kung Fu Killers” and “Fists of Death”. Derek edited a 400′ and 200′ from one or more of the 16mm library prints and Mountain had supplied the card boxes.  

This is the final entry into this saga… however I’ve painstakingly attempted to compile full lists of the titles we held the rights to and the 35mm distribution companies they came from, for all the 16mm, standard 8 or super 8 that have appeared in our either our hire or sales catalogues over the years. That will appear here later.