THE MOUNTAIN

US, 1956, 105 minutes, colour.
Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Claire Trevor, E. G. Marshall. William Demarest, Anna Kashfi.
Directed by Edward Dmytryk.

The Mountain is an enjoyable adventure story, set in the Swiss Alps, of a rescue attempt to a crashed plane. However, it is meant to be something more - a morality parable about greed and self-sacrifice, responsibility and irresponsibility, respect and disrespect for life, the old world and the new. All this is embodied in two brothers, one old, one young, who scale the mountain. This, then, becomes the symbol for the challenge and threat to life. Spencer Tracy plays the brother who stands for good, Robert Wagner for evil. Part of the lesson value for a young audience is that the irresponsible young man of evil destroys himself.

While the film clearly offers this message, it is less obtrusively communicated than might seem from this introduction.

1. The mountain was the centre of the realism of the story. Mountains are also seen as symbolic. How did this mountain act as a symbol for the theme of the story?

2. Zachary and Chris stood for two extremes. How was this illustrated - good and evil, old and young, traditional and modern, strong and weak, selfless and selfish, religious and irreligious?

3. How did the film quickly establish the two characters and where they stood? Chris and his longing for something better, at people's beck and call? Zachary, older, the sheep, the widow after him?

4. How was the mountain shown to be difficult and a challenge? The rescue meetings, Zachary's past experience and his 'idea' about the mountain, the attempt at the North face?

5. Why did Zachary really go? How persuasive was Chris? What did the long sequences of climbing show about both of them? Why was the climb an achievement for Zachary? How despicable were Chris's motives? Why? What was your reaction when he started to steal?

6. Was it melodramatic to have someone found alive? What were the qualities of each brother's reaction? How insensitive to people was Chris? Why was he prepared to let the woman die. even kill her?

7. Was Chris's death well worked into the film? Was it fitting?

8. What had Zachary achieved by the end of the film - for his own self-esteem, for the survivor (and his communicating with her), in regret for Chris? Why did he tell the story in Chris's praise?

9. What impact does a film like this have? Was Zachary too good and the film too optimistic or was it a good story with a satisfactory moral?