Reeling Backward: "Third Man on the Mountain" (1959)

Let's begin this discussion by stipulating that I consider mountain climbing to be quite possibly the dumbest enterprise ever conceived by man. Risking life and limb, not to mention gargantuan amounts of resources and manpower, just to scale a big rock? And with no recognizable reward for doing so, other than to be able to point and say, "I climbed it"?

Something can be foolhardy but still worthy -- traveling into space, say, or into the depths of the ocean. Perhaps there was a time in great antiquity when mountain climbers were true explorers, striving to go to places no one had ever been to find what was there. But even by the "golden age of alpinism" in the mid-19th century, most everyone involved in the endeavor did so for personal glory, not science.

"Third Man on the Mountain" is a Disney adventure movie that celebrates that time from a perspective a century hence, seen through the eyes of an 18-year-old boy who aspires to follow in his dead father's footsteps as one of the greatest climbers in Europe. Despite my reservations about its subject matter, I found it to be a bright, colorful, beautifully shot film with a reasonable amount of entertainment value.

The film, based on a book by James Ramsey Ullman and written for the screen by Eleanore Griffin, is about the conquering of a fictional peak called The Citadel, though the Matterhorn stood in its place. It actually inspired a new ride at Disneyland, the Matterhorn Bobsleds, that came out the same years as the movie. It's still running today after a refurbishment in 2012.

(No such hope for comparable longevity at Disney World in my hometown of Orlando, where it seems like every classic ride other than Space Mountain has been swapped out with newer stuff based on more recent Disney flicks. Oh, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, I pine for thee...)

The basic plot is pretty simple: young Rudi Matt (James MacArthur) was orphaned when his father, a legendary guide, died 16 years earlier trying to find a route up the Citadel. Now festooned in the town restaurant as a dishwasher, he pines to scale and climb. His uncle Franz (James Donald, forever the doctor from "A Bridge on the River Kwai") refuses to let him train as a guide. He's also scared to death of the Citadel, though he and the other guides hide it under a beer-soaked layer of bravado.

There's a girl in the story, because this sort of movie always has to have a girl, played here by Janet Munro as Lizbeth, daughter of the mayor and sorta/kinda beau of Rudi. There's a puckish contestant for her hand, she uses him to make Rudi jealous, and so forth -- very tiring stuff.

A couple of male figures act as role models and encouragement for Rudi. Captain John Winter (Michael Rennie, seemingly a foot taller than the rest of the cast) is a famous British alpinist who yearns to take on the Citadel, if only he can convince a local guide to accompany him. In an unlikely meeting, he falls into an icy crevasse and likely would've died if not for the happening by of Rudi.

The other man is Teo (Laurence Naismith), the old cook at Rudi's workplace who constantly frets at the absent-minded boy's breaking of dishes, but quietly encourages his dreams. Teo was once a guide himself before a terrible accident, and walks with a galloping hitch. But even at 65 he enjoys tackling smaller, less formidable peaks. Naismith has a terrific scene where he essentially takes on the entire gaggle of local guides, using the leverage of the crippled elderly man to shame them.

Also turning up is Herbert Lom as Emil Saxo, a surly guide from a competing village who gets recruited by Captain Winter when Franz and his cohorts balk. All three men and Rudi end up taking on the Citadel together, with various interpersonal conflicts and agendas competing.

The photography is just stunning, full of vivid colors and amazing vistas. The climbing footage is impressive even for its day, with the actors (or their stunt doubles) clambering across treacherous cliff faces with just their feet and hands plus a few humble tools -- rope, pickaxe, and that's about it. One nerve-rattling shot puts Franz virtually upside down, holding fast with one hand and his toe-holds, while he throws a loop of rope up above to pull himself up.

I'm deathly terrified of heights -- something that no doubt contributes to my disdain for mountain-climbing. But even if I weren't, I'd like to think I possessed the sense to eschew alpinism on its merits, or lack thereof. Watching movies where actors can do the derring-do themselves is far safer, and more entertaining.

Reeling Backward: "Sink the Bismarck!" (1960)

 

"Sink the Bismarck!" is the sort of movie you make 15 years after the war's end, not while it's still going on or freshly seared into memory. This straightforward, largely historically accurate take on one of World War II's great naval engagements has a slightly detached feel, much like its protagonist, Captain Jonathan Shepard (Kenneth More). 

He comes into his new job as the British Navy's chief of operations resolved to make decisions without any emotion or personal regard. In the end, Shepard breaks down and relinquishes his vice grip on his own humanity. It's a lot more touchy-feely take than you'd see back in the 1940s, I think.

It covers the brief war record of the Bismarck, the largest battleship Germany ever built. It was launched into the North Atlantic in 1940 to attack British convoy lines, and in its first major engagement easily destroyed the HMS Hood, the pride of the British navy. This led Prime Minister Winston Churchill to order every available ship and plane to hunt down the Bismarck, which they eventually did after much heroism and stupidity.

About that stupidity: At one point some British torpedo planes actually launched an attack against one of their own ships, because they hadn't been told it would be operating in the area and mistook it for the German juggernaut. Luckily, their new-fangled magnetic torpedoes malfunctioned and exploded as soon as they hit the water, otherwise hundreds of British seamen could've been lost.

To its credit, the screenplay by Edmund H. North, based on the book by C.S. Forester, depicts both the brilliance and incompetence of the men (and a few women) involved in the war at sea. At one point the commanders order a new ship with an ill-trained crew to take on the Bismarck, and it comes away -- barely -- after a terrible pasting.

The battle scenes are generally quite good, using a mix of models, stock footage and on-set recreations. The studio also had the cooperation of the navy, which allowed them the use of some actual WWII vessels that were about to be decommissioned. The shift between these different types of footage is nearly seamless. Although director Lewis Gilbert has a tendency to re-use certain shots over and over again, such as the one where the German officer orders the big guns to "Fire!"

Gilbert also directed several other military-themed films, including the outstanding "Damn the Defiant!". I guess he had a thing for punctuation in his titles. And he made the original "Alfie" and a couple of middling James Bond flicks.

Shepard is not the name of the real Navy C.O.O. at the time of the Bismarck engagement -- one of the movie's few "pumping up" of the narrative. They also shrink the time scope to give it more of a cinema vérité scope. There's also the addition of a supposed rivalry between Shepard and Admiral Günther Lütjens (Karel Štěpánek), the actual German fleet commander.

In the fabricated exposition, we learn that Lütjens commanded the German ships that sunk Shephard's vessel out from under him the previous year. This sets up a chessboard match between the two, with Shepard working on a large schematic map with little models representing the warships, while Lütjens stands on the Bismarck's bridge and barks orders to the Bismarck's commander, Ernst Lindemann (Carl Möhner).

"Sink the Bismarck!" is generally pretty evenhanded in its depiction of the Axis forces -- again, something you wouldn't see in a contemporaneous WWII film. Though the story is unequivocal in portraying Lütjens as a jingoistic fool, who continues the mission even after the Bismarck has sustained serious damage to its oil tanks. The impression left is that the more conservative Lindemann would've saved the Bismarck to fight another day.

The film is also notable for being the rare war picture with a substantive female character. Women's Royal Naval Service Second Officer Anne Davis acts as Shepard's right-hand woman, relaying his orders, offering advice and acting as go-between for the command staff he (at first) treats rather shabbily.

There's even a hint of a budding romance, or at least camaraderie, as Davis allows Shepard a moment of privacy when he learns that his son, who was thought lost in the hunt for the Bismarck, has been rescued. Davis is a model of upper-class British professionalism and refinement. Ironically, actress Dana Wynter was actually born in Germany (to English and Hungarian parents).

I certainly enjoyed "Sink the Bismarck!", though its quest for a documentary-like style leaves it less viscerally engaging than one might hope for. That very British stiff upper lip only takes you so far, movie-wise.

Reeling Backward: "The Man Who Never Was" (1956)

"The Man Who Never Was" is a crime caper built inside a war film. It's the (mostly) true story of the one of the biggest hoaxes ever played, with the winner earning not stacks of money but sums of lives -- 30,000 Allied soldiers spared, by some reckoning.

Operation Mincemeat was one of the those things that sounds elegantly simple in abstract: British Intelligence would dump a body with secret documents detailing an Allied invasion of Greece -- not Sicily, where everyone (including their Axis enemies) was sure the blow would fall. The Germans would find the documents, route their forces elsewhere, and a victory secured with greatly reduced bloodshed.

And that's exactly what did happen.

In execution, though, the scheme was frighteningly convoluted and could have come apart at the seams in any number of ways. Ewen Montagu, the real-life intelligence officer who cooked up the idea -- adapted from one suggested by RAF Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley -- wrote a 1953 best-selling book after his team's exploits were declassified. It, and the movie adaptation three years later, lays out all the details of the operation with some engaging storytelling.

It was such a fiendishly good idea, in fact, that the Allied forces tried replicating it several more ties during the course of World War II. German intelligence forces, of course, were none too keen on repeating their mistake. This actually translated into other instances captured cinematically in which the Germans ignored crucial intelligence that fell into their lap. For instance, there's a scene in "A Bridge Too Far" where a German soldier captures a map of Allied bridge objectives, but when he turns it in his commanders dismiss it as a ruse. That really did happen.

The chief challenge facing Montagu, played by Clifton Webb, was finding a body and preserving it in such a way that the Germans would think the man had died in an airplane crash at sea and his body floated ashore several days later. After consulting with medical experts, he convinces the father of a young fellow who died of pneumonia to donate the body, no questions asked. They would store the body in a special container filled with dry ice, and a submarine launch it a mile off the shore of Spain -- where the supposedly neutral government would cooperate with a German investigation.

The steps Montagu and his team (Robert Flemyng plays his sidekick) took to convince the Germans the body belonged to a real British Royal Marine were truly astounding. Dubbing the man William Martin, they concocted all sorts of fake papers and records. His death was published in the regular newspaper rolls of war dead. They even stuffed theater tickets, a clothing store receipt, keys and other personal articles into his pockets.

The most intriguing trickery was inventing a fiance for young Willy Martin. They enclosed a love letter from a fictional sweetheart in his pocket, and a receipt for an engagement ring. In the movie the sweetheart is played by Gloria Grahame as Lucy Sherwood, a buxom American gal who is the roommate of Pam (Josephine Griffin), Montagu's assistant. Spurned in her own romantic misadventures, Lucy dictates a convincing letter of yearning and regret that the intelligence officers find positively enthralling.

The last third or so of the movie is pure flimflam. It involves a German spy posing as an Irishman (Stephen Boyd) who is sent to London to inquire after Willy's activities to see if they're legit. This eventually leads him to the doorstep of Pam and Lucy, where the latter, having actually just been told of the death of her flyboy beau, convinces the interloper that she's genuinely devastated.

The culmination is Montagu and his men rushing over to the spy's whereabouts to arrest him, and suddenly pulling up and realizing they have to let him go. Otherwise, Montagu reasons, the Germans will have been tipped off to their ruse.

None of this occurred, but its makes for a satisfying conclusion to the movie. The real Montagu spoke approvingly of the changes -- he surely could not have minded being portrayed as a brilliant gumshoe in addition to a military intelligence strategist. The movie's final coda has Montagu placing the Order of the British Empire medal he received for his exploits on the fictional Willy Martin's grave in Spain.

In movie-making if not in war, myth always trumps history.

3 stars out of four