The 1930 documentary, With Byrd at the South Pole, promised to bring to cinemas “Drama of human daring and courage at the bottom of the world! Actually filmed in the vast unknown of the Antarctic!”
It followed the American navy commander Richard Byrd’s celebrated expedition, and captured the first flight over the South Pole. “It is hard to believe,” grumbled the Times, “that the South Pole can be vulgarised, but this has been done and done thoroughly […] it has, in brief, found it snow and left it slush.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that in Britain, where the public imagination had been captured by an earlier age of Antarctic heroes, the mechanical era should have fallen flat.
Shackleton and...