Foreign productions in Cinetone in the 1950s and 1960s

This is how studio and production manager Bobby Rosenboom introduced his Cinetone studio to foreign producers. Since Dutch film production was slow to get going, he also tried to bring in productions from outside the country's borders. The arrival of foreign producers and film crews was the perfect opportunity for the studio staff to gain more experience. The fifties started well with a major assignment: the finishing and dubbing of a number of Marshall aid films for the European market.

Secret File, U.S.A.

In the early 1950s, the guilder was also very cheap against the dollar. That attracted film producer and director Arthur Dreifuss to Cinetone in 1954. He made a series of twenty-six episodes for American television based on individual case stories from the archives of the American Intelligence.

Director Frits Peters announced Secret File, U.S.A. as 'the great opportunity of the Dutch film industry'. Due to the arrival of the Americans, the studio was running at full speed and the foreigners took a lot of technical know-how with them, which the Dutch could learn a lot from.
The Cinetoners were fully deployed and their work ethic was great: evening and night work, especially in the lab, was the order of the day. It was different in Britain, where the union gave the workers a strong position. Moreover, says former head of the Cinetone laboratory Herman Greven, the Dutch were already known at that time for being reasonably fluent speakers of English, in contrast to, for example, the French.

Cinetone itself had an ideal location, with a variety of different characteristic locations less than half an hour's drive away. Arthur Dreifuss liked all this so much that he made two more films at Cinetone in the 1950s and 1960s: The Last Blitzkrieg (1959) and 10:32.

An all-in-one studio

Precisely the fact that Cinetone had everything to produce a complete film made it attractive for foreign directors to come to Duivendrecht, says Frans Weisz. He started his long career at Cinetone with various foreign productions.
His first job was as an assistant to the script girl at the American children's film A Dog of Flanders (James Clark, 1958). Just like in Secret File, U.S.A. a number of Dutch actors played in that film and the credits also feature many Cinetone employees.

Priced out of the market

At the end of the fifties, prosperity in the Netherlands rose and with it the value of the guilder against the dollar. The producers therefore often brought their own large crew and made little or no use of the studio. Bobby Rosenboom: 'We are priced out of the market […] A workman costs me the same here as in Hollywood'. Foreign studios with more experienced staff became more attractive.

In 1960, a special foreign production was made in Cinetone: the French/Italian feature film La ragazza in vetrina by Luciano Emmer. For this film, about two Italian guest workers who visit the Red Light District of Amsterdam, a section of canal was meticulously recreated in Cinetone. Frans Weisz, who was a production assistant on this film, talks about the enormous difference in level with the Italian film crew, who had just completed the shooting of La Dolce Vita with Fellini. 'We were pushed to the limit, and we put in a lot of effort,' says Weisz.

However, this production would unfortunately prove to be an exception in the sixties; most film crews wanting to do location shots of Amsterdam or the Netherlands used only Cinetone's production manager and went on to France or West Germany for the studio shoot. Even Anne Frank's house was recreated in the MGM studios for The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959).

The larger studios abroad had a lot of power and a better competitive position. Rosenboom was often asked to co-invest in a film, but the risk was too great for a small studio like Cinetone. It was therefore impossible to compete with the competition abroad, and also the hoped-for successors of Secret File, U.S.A. stayed out.

Foreign films that were shot in the Cinetone Studios in the fifties and early sixties

- Secret File, U.S.A., United States, Arthur Dreifuss and Harold Young, 1954 (television series)
- Assignment Abroad, United States, Arthur Dreifuss and Harold Young, 1955 (compiled from three Secret File, U.S.A. episodes)
- Spy in the Sky, United States, William Lee Wilder, 1958
- A Dog of Flanders, United States, James Clark, 1959
- The Last Blitzkrieg, United States, Arthur Dreifuss, 1959
- La ragazza in vetrina, Italy/France, Luciano Emmer, 1960
- The Director, United States, Ralph Levy and Richard Kinon, 1963 (three pilot episodes for a series)