NOW PLAYING: Leopold Lindtberg's SWISS TOUR
/
OFFICIAL RE-RELEASE KEY ART FOR LEOPOLD LINDTBERG’S SWISS TOUR. SOURCE: GME, PRAESENS FILM.
Over the past several months, GME has paid homage to Adrienne Mancia by showcasing films in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room that she championed throughout her prolific career as a film exhibitor and curator. We now turn our focus to one of our company’s major projects: the excavation of libraries of celluloid films that have been abandoned in warehouses which GME has subsequently repatriated to archives for preservation and exhibition. For lighter, end-of-summer fare, we present Leopold Lindtberg's SWISS TOUR (1949) — a project that cuts across the various facets and activities of our company, including film archiving, distribution, and exhibition.
In SWISS TOUR (also known as FOUR DAYS LEAVE), American soldiers stationed in Europe in the aftermath of World War II are on leave in Switzerland. Among them is marine Stanley Robin (Cornel Wilde) who loses his heart to a watch seller named Suzanne (Josette Day). In the glamorous nightlife of Zermatt, however, the seductive Yvonne (Simone Signoret) puts their young love to the test. Stanley, a lovelorn soldier, subsequently aims to win Suzanne back by entering a ski race at the foot of the Matterhorn. Though Lindtberg’s film was a Swiss production, it was well-received on both sides of the Atlantic, with The New York times noting that Lindtberg’s film was “closer to Hollywood than Switzerland.”
Lindtberg was born in Vienna in 1902 and emigrated to Zurich, where he first found work as a theatre director. In the early 1930s he began directing films for the company that would distribute SWISS TOUR, Praesens Film (which turned 100 years old in 2024). Lindtberg was a star filmmaker for the studio, helming such notable films as DIE LETZTE CHANCE (English translation: THE LAST CHANCE) (1945), which powerfully evokes the fate of Jewish refugees during the Second World War. The film won the Palme d’or at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival and is currently distributed by GME on DVD to North American academic institutions.
Unavailable on home video for decades, the discovery and excavation of SWISS TOUR's nitrate 35mm film elements in a New York City warehouse made for a fascinating archival project at GME. Jon Gartenberg wrote about the process of unearthing SWISS TOUR and making it widely available for the first time:
My colleague Jeff Capp and I uncovered pristine 35mm nitrate film elements in a commercial warehouse storage facility in the metropolitan New York City area. They proved to be the best known surviving physical elements in the entire world; thus, archival work not only involves the discovery of 'lost' films, but also identifying the highest quality celluloid elements that are to be used as preservation master material. In 2006, my company repatriated these materials to the Cinémathèque suisse in Lausanne; the film was subsequently preserved in 35mm, and the World Premiere restoration was shown at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2007.
COVER ART FOR THE DVD RELEASE OF LEOPOLD LINDTBERG’S THE LAST CHANCE (1945), PUBLISHED BY GME AND PRAESENS FILM.
GME subsequently collaborated with Praesens Film to produce a new digital restoration of SWISS TOUR, which is available to North American academic institutions as a DVD, and can also be viewed in its entirety at the top of this page. GME also collaborated with Praesens film on the DVD release of Lindtberg’s THE LAST CHANCE, which was praised by Alfred Hitchcock for its suspense, and is widely regarded as one of the most important contributions to Swiss film history. GME and Praesens’ DVD publication of THE LAST CHANCE includes a behind-the-scenes photo gallery, stills from the film, and a radio interview with producer Lazar Wechsler, among other bonus features. Both DVD editions are co-published by GME and Praesens Film.
As GME not only rediscovered, but facilitated the repatriation, preservation, digitization, and now distribution (via home video) of Lindtberg’s film, the project of resurrecting SWISS TOUR wholly encapsulates the breadth and scope of our work as a full-service company dedicated to archiving, distributing, licensing, and curating film, television, photography, and library assets. Gartenberg's essay about the rediscovery of SWISS TOUR, which was published in a dual-language booklet by Schweizer Filmklassiker for the DVD release of the film, can be read below:
