6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 3.8 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
When a plane crashes on a mountaintop Chris wants to plunder the wreckage. His older brother Zachary has given up mountain guide work but goes along rather than letting his brother risk it alone. The only survivor is a Hindu girl who Chris wants to kill. Zachary fights him off. While Chris steals from the dead passengers, Zachary prepares a sled to take the girl down the mountain. Filmed in VistaVision.
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Claire Trevor, William Demarest, Barbara DarrowDrama | Insignificant |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Younger viewers who see Robert Wagner hawking reverse mortgages on those ubiquitous television commercials might
only remember him—if in fact they remember him at all—either from his self-parodying roles in the Austin Powers
films or from reruns of his old television series Hart to Hart, Switch or It Takes a Thief. Some may
remember in the back of their minds that he was once married to Natalie Wood and was involved in the quasi-scandal
surrounding her supposedly mysterious death (something that reared its ugly head again fairly recently when the
captain of the boat the couple and Christopher Walken were on that fateful night was doing some hawking of his own,
for a book he had written). But few younger than, say, 40 or 50 may recall that Wagner was something of a matinee
idol during the twilight years of the studio system in the fifties. Perhaps hampered by looks that seemed too good to
be true, Wagner had considerable success with several films but never really was able to establish himself as a serious
actor, despite impressive turns in such films as the first version of the Ira Levin thriller A Kiss Before
Dying.
In fact there often seemed to be a certain level of menace lurking just beneath the surface of Wagner’s impeccably
handsome face, and that endowed the actor with a subtly palpable sinister quality that glints through in several of his
portrayals. It’s certainly there in spades, albeit as subtly as ever, in the 1956 Edward Dmytryk film The
Mountain, a disaster movie of sorts long before that genre had ever been “officially” formulated (and trivia buffs will
remember that Wagner was one of the many co-stars—not so coincidentally in a sort of villainous role—in the mega-hit
disaster film The Towering Inferno). An iconic real life 1950 air disaster involving an Air India flight crashing into
Mont Blanc evidently served as the inspiration for the source novel for The Mountain, although several key plot
points were changed along the way. (A subplot in the Jean-Pierre Jeunet film Amélie also concerns this same air
tragedy.)
The Mountain is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This VistaVision spectacular looks reasonably sharp on Blu-ray, with especially nicely saturated colors, the best of which are some extremely bright and robust reds and blues. Fine detail is well above average in close-ups, though a lot of the second unit (location) photography is noticeably softer than the rest of the film. The process photography shows its literal seams, with lightly flaring purple halos surrounding foreground objects. Grain looks natural, and there doesn't seem to be any restoration work of any type done on the elements, so there are occasional scratches and other blemishes.
The Mountain features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono mix that reproduces the film's soundtrack with decent fidelity and range, but little depth or nuance. Dialogue is cleanly presented, as are ambient environmental effects, and Daniele Amfitheatrof's very colorful and expressive score is also well represented, but the entire track has an understandably one dimensional, flat aspect that doesn't really reach out and grab the listener. There is very slight hiss noticeable in some of the quieter scenes of the film, but overall there's really no outright damage to report.
As is usual with these Olive Films Blu-ray releases, no supplements of any kind are included on this release.
Robert Wagner never seemed to really grab the brass ring of movie superstardom, despite having impeccable good looks and a smooth, suave acting manner. Perhaps his charms were better suited to the small screen, where that mischievous gleam in his eye translated better to the audience. (It's interesting that his best known television roles featured the actor as someone with a kind of scheming undercurrent.) The supposed sibling relationship between Tracy and Wagner is on its face absurd (what kind of gene pool produced these two?), and probably would have been more smartly handled as a father son interaction, but the two do great work here in a film built around a tragic disaster, but which doesn't really make that disaster its ultimate focus. Lushly helmed by the almost always reliable Edward Dmytryk, The Mountain has some unusual depth and nuance within its admittedly soap operatic frame. This Blu-ray looks decent if not exceptional and sounds fine, and despite Olive's typical lack of supplements, it comes Recommended.
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Universal 100th Anniversary
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Warner Archive Collection
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Limited Edition to 3000
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