The Mountain Reviews

"I haven't climbed in ten years. That in itself would be enough if a man gets old. And besides, my hands are not as strong as they once were - and the mountain is against me. But all that there is, there's one thing more, the most important thing. It isn't right! Isn't there anything inside you that tells you it isn't right? You want me to take you up to the top of the mountain in the sight of God so you can pick the pockets of dead people?"

MGM must have been furious when, after throwing the production of Tribute to a Bad Man into chaos when he pulled out after a few days shooting on health grounds, citing the location's high altitude as the reason he couldn't finish the picture, Spencer Tracy went on to make The Mountain for Paramount instead. Not that it's Tracy doing any of the real climbing in this surprisingly gripping drama that sees his simple mountain guide returning against his will to a mountain that doesn't want him and has tried to kill him three times already to help Robert Wagner loot the bodies of the victims of a plane crash at the peak.

At first Tracy seems badly miscast and showing his age and then some as Robert Wagner's older - very much older - brother. Only 56, just a couple of years after playing Wagner's father in Broken Lance, his hell raising years had caught up with him enough by then to make him look old enough to play his grandfather here. It doesn't help that the part is clearly written for a man a good ten years younger, rendering him less a simple man than an unconvincingly naïve one in his scenes with thinly-drawn romantic interest Claire Trevor, brushing off his dialogue as if he doesn't believe it either while she effortlessly runs rings around him. But he's on firmer ground when his manipulative brother's desperation to get enough money to get out of their picturesque but poor village makes him cast aside his moral qualms and better judgement.

Mountain movies tend to work better when there's some antagonism between the climbers, whether it's Glenn Ford's easygoing ex-G.I. locking horns with Lloyd Bridges' Nazi fanaticism in The White Tower, Sean Connery and Lambert Wilson's romantic rivalry in Five Days One Summer or Clint Eastwood trying to work out which of his fellow climbers is trying to kill him in The Eiger Sanction, and that's very much the case here. It's not too difficult to predict the plot developments, but Edward Dmytryk's direction and the cast underplay it just enough to avoid slipping into melodrama until the finale, while the special effects are surprisingly good, the VistaVision system allowing a much higher quality of backprojection that blends in very well in most scenes. It doesn't have the sheer elemental grandeur and visual poetry of Arnold Fanck's German `berg' films with Leni Riefenstahl, but it does have a very impressive sense of scale thanks to an excellent eye for locations. There's a constant contrast between Franz Planer's vivid color photography and the beauty of the surroundings with the cynical characters and their dark motives. Here it's often the bright sunlight that reveals not just Wagner's callousness but even that of a tourist and his attractive mistress or the initial self-important throwaway slights of the `official' rescue expedition.

As usual in this kind of film (or at least those of the American variety) the women have little to do: Claire Trevor's widow waits for Tracy to marry her, playgirl Barbara Darrow briefly uses Robert Wagner for some holiday amusement and Anna Kashfi manages to have a role that's both pivotal and thankless. But the male supporting cast, including E.G.Marshall, William Demarest and Richard Arlen, don't have that much to do either in roles that are intended to set the stage for the two stars and their resentment and disappointment. Ultimately it's very much a two-hander, but Tracy and Wagner work well enough together to paper over some of the thinness of the characters, holding their own against the film's third star, the stunning scenery and locations. These look suitably epic and stunning on Olive's extras-free but also region-free widescreen Blu-ray release that does a pretty good job of recreating VistaVision's self-proclaimed `motion picture hi-fidelity.' There is some slight colour fluctuation in the chimney sequence but not enough to detract from an impressive transfer of a largely forgotten film that, while not hugely ambitious, is surprisingly well crafted and satisfying.