1950 film by Ted Tetzlaff
The White Tower is a 1950 American Technicolor adventure film directed by Ted Tetzlaff, starring Alida Valli as a woman determined to fulfill her father's dream by conquering the mountain that killed him, and Glenn Ford as the mountaineer who loves her. It is based on the 1945 novel of the same name by James Ramsey Ullman. She assembles an unusual climbing party of six people in the Swiss Alps to tackle the nearly impossible ascent of a mountain known as 'The White Tower,' which has never been climbed. While struggling together to conquer the obstacle, each climber shows his true worth, or lack thereof.
Plot
Carla Alten is determined to conquer the White Tower, a difficult, unconquered peak in the Swiss Alps that had claimed her mountaineer father's life. Her climbing party consists of the wise veteran guide Andreas and four other men. Englishman Nicholas Radcliffe is concerned that he is too old to manage the climb. Alcoholic French writer Paul Delambre claims that he is just finishing a book about the mountain, but his wife treats the idea—and Delambre himself—with utter contempt. American Martin Ordway, a former pilot who was shot down in this region during World War II, has a blasé attitude about everything except his growing attraction to Carla. Against her best judgement, Carla is persuaded to enlist an expert German climber named Hein, whose wool cap bears the ghost of a Luftwaffe insignia.
During the climb, the team members' strengths and weaknesses are revealed. Ordway and Carla find themselves falling more and more in love. Radcliffe acknowledges that he has reached his limit and decides to return to the base camp rather than endanger the others.
At the next stage, morning finds Delambre too drunk to continue. The rest of the team leaves him in a tent with a safe fire. That night, during a blizzard, he digs up the bottle he has hidden, finishes his book, and accidentally sets the tent on fire, sending the pages flying into the storm. He staggers drunkenly off into the darkness and dies.
It becomes clear that Hein wants to prove Aryan superiority by becoming the first to climb the mountain. He slips away to pursue this goal. Ordway follows his tracks. Eventually, stuck on a snow bridge, Hein refuses to take Ordway's outstretched hand and plummets to his death. Suffering from snow blindness, Ordway collapses within sight of the peak. When Carla and Andreas find him, Andreas points out that Carla could easily reach the top, but she insists that it is more important to get Ordway back down the mountain.
There is no permanent damage to Ordway's eyes, and he and Carla decide to get married.
Reception
Bosley Crowther, reviewer for The New York Times, thought that "All of the danger and excitement, the toil and heart-breaking distress, of high-altitude mountain climbing are ticketed in the episodes in his [Jarrico's] script. And Ted Tetzlaff has brought it to the screen in a realistic style." However, he also felt that "For the use of the six mountain-climbers to symbolize the natures of mankind, with the mountain itself a symbolization of the challenge of life, is bookish stuff—and this becomes plainly evident in the sharp pictorial clarity of a film. Furthermore, the necessity of having these various symbols explain themselves and demonstrate their predestinations makes for a lot of tedious gab."[2]
