Thursday Movie Picks #215: Discovery/Exploration

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is Discovery/Exploration, and this time, the theme was easy enough that I was able to come up with a theme within a theme, as you'll quickly discover:

With Byrd at the South Pole (1930). Admiral Richard Byrd led an expedition to Antarctica in 1928 with the aim of flying over the South Pole. Paramount sent along two photographers, and in the extreme weather conditions of Antarctica, it's amazing that they were able to get any footage whatsoever. But they got enough to come up with a usable narrative, even if I'm not certain just how much of it was staged. Regardless, it's an impressive look at a very harsh land.

The Hidden Land (1948). After World War II, the US military decided to undertake another expedition to Antarctica, code-named Operation High Jump, with Richard Byrd on hand again. They took along a couple of Technicolor cameras, while MGM lent the talents of three of their stars who had served in World War II to provide narration: Cmdr. Robert Montgomery, Lt. Robert Taylor, and Lt. Van Heflin. The expedition visited what was left of Admiral Byrd's base camp from the 1928 expedition, after Mother Nature had her way with it for 18 years, and flew over various parts of the continent.

Scott of the Antarctic (1948). John Mills plays Robert Falcon Scott, a British explorer who led an expedition in 1911-12 to become the first team to reach the South pole. Unfortunately, when Scott's team reached the pole, they found a Norwegian flag, which was a sign that they had been beaten to the pole by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Scott also erred in his planning and provisioning for the expedition, with the result that they fell behind schedule and didn't have enough supplies to make it back to base camp.