The Mountain is the story of two brothers, Zachary (Spencer Tracy) and Chris (Robert Wagner), who climb a mountain after a plane crash.
Let's forget that Tracy and Wagner are hardly credible as brothers, since the former was about fifty and the latter about thirty when the movie was filmed; that's a minor problem.
What's heavy-handed to the point of being insulting is the characterization of the two brothers. Zachary is the equivalent of a saint: he is kind, patient, pious, respectful towards the dead, ready to take on himself the most ignominious accusations to protect Chris and to risk his life not only for his brother but even for a stranger.
Chris, on the other hand, is a mean-spirited, whiny creep who treats Zachary like rubbish, beats him, threatens to leave him without a house, is ungrateful when his brother saves his life, then robs corpses, destroys a cross on a grave and tries to murder the only survivor of the plane crash. It's so over-the-top it's laughable.
Climbing scenes are competently filmed and Tracy is reliable as always, but, had Zachary been given some flaws and Chris some qualities, The Mountain would have been far more interesting.
6/10
Let's forget that Tracy and Wagner are hardly credible as brothers, since the former was about fifty and the latter about thirty when the movie was filmed; that's a minor problem.
What's heavy-handed to the point of being insulting is the characterization of the two brothers. Zachary is the equivalent of a saint: he is kind, patient, pious, respectful towards the dead, ready to take on himself the most ignominious accusations to protect Chris and to risk his life not only for his brother but even for a stranger.
Chris, on the other hand, is a mean-spirited, whiny creep who treats Zachary like rubbish, beats him, threatens to leave him without a house, is ungrateful when his brother saves his life, then robs corpses, destroys a cross on a grave and tries to murder the only survivor of the plane crash. It's so over-the-top it's laughable.
Climbing scenes are competently filmed and Tracy is reliable as always, but, had Zachary been given some flaws and Chris some qualities, The Mountain would have been far more interesting.
6/10