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Postwar Europe is cogently illustrated as the distance between the noble mountain bear (Gibson Gowland) and the depraved peacock in uniform (Erich von Stroheim), America is the conflicted married couple caught in the middle (Francelia Billington, Sam De Grasse). Cortina is the burg at the foot of Mount Cristallo, the august Dolomites setting embodies the moral quandary: "There is only one way up, but many ways down." The evocative close-ups in the carriage ride to the chalet—the Austrian cavalry officer's gloved grip on his saber, the wife's provocatively bare ankles, the husband's complacent pipe—make for a lesson not forgotten by the Polanski of Knife in the Water and Cul-de-sac, Stroheim's marauding aristocrat is a perfumed Lothario who's already pitched the same lascivious come-on to three women by the time the pious village celebrates the Festival of Transfiguration. Seduction is a sport like cliff-climbing, to him mountains are not the mystical entities venerated by Gowland's salt-of-the-earth guide but "lifeless rocks" ready to be conquered. Billington's neglected desires make her the officer's natural prey: Their dalliance in the woods amidst tall, makeshift crosses is aborted (a cheeky insert shot has the clueless surgeon hubby comforting a pregnant patient) but he ravishes her all the same, turning up in her dreams armed with sprawling leer and fully erect cigarette-holder and finger. The peaks and precipices of human relationships, in a forthright style distilled from Griffith and Zola. Certainly the bedrock formation for the Riefenstahl-Fanck epics, though for Stroheim these alpine heights don't personify glory as much as they dissolve our civilized armors and bring us closer to the vultures. Eastwood builds on the metaphor in The Eiger Sanction. With Fay Holderness, Ruby Kendrick, Jack Perrin, and Valerie Germonprez. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |