Film of the Week: North Face

The script isn't much to write home about. But once the climbers hit the title wall of the Alpine monster the Swiss dubbed The Eiger, "North Face" turns into perhaps the most evocative, you-are-there-and-about-to-die mountain movie ever made.
This incredible German production - and production is the most descriptive word for it - combines on-location stunt work with marvelously convincing studio fakery to make every freezing wind blast, muscle-straining movement and potentially fatal injury palpable. You'll feel like a survivor coming out of the theater, and will want nothing more than to get beside the nearest roaring fire as soon as you can.
Set in 1936, not long after a crack Nazi climbing team has died on the Eiger and during the run-up to the Berlin Olympics, two rock-happy lads from Bavaria (Benno Furmann and Florian Lukas) bike to Switzerland to make their own assault. Though the press tries to spin their attempt into win-one-for-the-Fatherland propaganda, the duo are mostly doing it, well, for whatever it is that drives some people to climb mountains. And they've got it bad.
That's what writer-director Philipp Stolzl wants us to think, anyway. I doubt that personalities and relationships from the true story the film is based on are portrayed as
factually as the movie's mountaineering details. But Stolzl makes it his business to portray the guys as indifferent members of the Wehrmacht, whose partial motivation to enter the international race to the Eiger summit is it's a good excuse to quit the army. He also makes sure to contrast the brave sportsmen's struggle and suffering against the Nazis' and other rich European types' lush accommodations far below, from which they watch the weather go from bad to worse up on the rock.
That and a boilerplate kinda-sorta love story don't make for the cleverest narrative. But the whole thing as a kind of metaphor for the Fascist enterprise resonates in interesting historical ways. Humorously, the French and Italian climbing teams quit before even trying to fight the mountain (just like their countries did in World War II!). Only a couple of anxious-for-the-Anschluss Austrian Nazis give the German lads any competition, and as the situation deteriorates they find themselves uniting in common cause - or, at least, in the dimming hope of living through this horrific situation they all thought they had the power to master.
If you wondered why that "White Hell of Piz Palu" movie was so popular with the Germans in "Inglorious Basterds," "North Face" gives you a new jack idea of how exciting and wrenching that pre-war genre could be. I just wish its insight into mountain movies' world-conquering cultural subtext wasn't so blunt.