After a somewhat dull looking studio plane crash, we find farmer Spencer Tracy in Chamonix. He's a famous mountaineer but the mountain doesn't like him any more. That will not deter his much younger brother Robert Wagner, whose character is totally irredeemable - he wants to loot the corpses of their money and valuables. Somehow Tracy won't let him do the climb alone - cut to doubles in long shots and studio set mountain climbing - quite tense, actually.
They get there - there's only a survivor! Anna Kashfi, you know, from Cowboy, and Sirk's Battle Hymn, pretending not to understand English (she was, reportedly, Welsh). Wagner immediately wants to kill her. I mean what a cunt! Why does Tracy put up with this at all? (In fact they were quite close on set.) Where Tracy attacks him the look on his face is sheer rage.
Franz Planer films all this without derision, and in VistaVision, and Daniel Amfitheatrof sets it to music. Ranald MacDougal wrote it from a short novel by Henri Trouat that Tracy had spotted some time before. With Claire Trevor, William Demarest as a priest, Richard Arlen, E.G. Marshall.
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| Tracy wears the same red shirt throughout |
Q;'s sensible question was 'why didn't they just go up in a helicopter?' There are limitations to the height helicopters can reach - specialized ones have landed on Everest. I thought they said the summit was 6000 feet... which may have been beyond the reach of 1956 helicopters.
During filming Tracy and Wager were in a cable car that partially broke done leaving them suspended thousands of feet in the air. They were of course rescued but Tracy 'looked twenty years older' than when he'd got in - that night was a drinking night, oh yes.
We wondered whether Wagner really was that unpleasant a person.
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