Macao V Forbidden (recycling Dick Davol's Macau footage)

I realised that when I posted my recent Forbidden post I had neglected to provide any comparisons to show that the footage used in that movie was simply recycled from the footage Dick Davol had shot for Macao.

I found a couple of screen grabs that provide a reasonable comparison. They're not frame-to-frame matches but you get the general idea. It may just be the print quality available on Youtube, but the original Macao footage (first image) is much clearer. 

Another matching shot is the footage used for the passengers disembarking the ferry. In Macao, the footage is used alone first, and then is repeated for a back-projection shot showing the main characters getting off the ferry. In Forbidden, it serves only as back projection for Tony Curtis' character alighting.

I'm sure there are plenty more examples but I don't have the patience to go through both films again at this point. Perhaps there wasn't any other real Macau footage available to a US studio at the time, and selling/licensing the footage to UIP for Forbidden may have recovered some of the costs incurred in filming Macao (which was a box office bomb). Or maybe the footage was Davol's to license out? He gets no credit on either film though.

Reminder: Macao was produced by RKO and Forbidden by UIP. There's an interesting snippet, for Macao, on the AFI catalog site that says the following:

In May 1948, HR [Hollywood Reporter] announced that Universal-International [UIP] had purchased the screen rights to a story entitled "Macao," which was described as a "post-war story, localed off the China coast.

It has not been determined if the Universal story is related to the RKO picture. RKO purchased Bob Williams' story in Aug 1949.

So perhaps there are closer links between the two films than just the footage? Even though it was shot and released later, it looks like Forbidden was in the pipeline around a year before Macao.