La tour blanche

SYNOPSIS

This vivid mountaineering drama sees Glenn Ford join a climb in the Swiss Alps. A lot of emotional baggage is carried along with the mountaineers: Ford falls for fellow climber Alida Valli, whose father was killed on the same peak; Lloyd Bridges is an arrogant former Nazi army officer; Cedric Hardwicke is an ageing British botanist; Claude Rains is a self-destructive French writer who is drunk most of the time; Oscar Homolka is the local Alpine guide and predictably neutral. What we have is a political digest of postwar realignment; amazingly enough, the Russians are not represented. Ignore the predictability of the symbolism and the wooden performances, and enjoy the excellent location photography.