there's a great black and white of climbing EL CAP - maybe the 5 or 6 ascent - surreal helicopter footage of the king swing - a fall in the dark without headlamps and a great scene of a guy reaching a ledge and looking over, his buddy says "hey man why you getting so close not roped up" and the guy literally leaps for the rope he untied from

I checked out Amazon.com browsed to their climbing and mountaineering movie section.

Probably 90% of the movies have Everest in the title.

RickF wrote:

jspeigl wrote:A while back there was this thread about a German movie Nordwand. Has anybody seen it yet in the US?

Nordwand is playing at some of the old revival theaters around Southern California. I saw it last Friday night at the Bayview Theater in Seal Beach. Even with the sub-titles and embellishing history with some cheesy love story, its a great climbing movie. It does a good job of showing how alpine climbing was done in 1936.

I thought that movie was awful! Insipid dialogue, wooden acting, no drama in the film, and too long. There were some OK scenery shots, but the camera never lingered long enough in one spot for me to really enjoy it.

austin944 wrote:

RickF wrote:

jspeigl wrote:A while back there was this thread about a German movie Nordwand. Has anybody seen it yet in the US?

Nordwand is playing at some of the old revival theaters around Southern California. I saw it last Friday night at the Bayview Theater in Seal Beach. Even with the sub-titles and embellishing history with some cheesy love story, its a great climbing movie. It does a good job of showing how alpine climbing was done in 1936.

I thought that movie was awful! Insipid dialogue, wooden acting, no drama in the film, and too long. There were some OK scenery shots, but the camera never lingered long enough in one spot for me to really enjoy it.

It should be generally accepted on this thread that we are mountain junkies and won't hold the movie to a high standard, so long as there are scenes of pitons, snow, rock, ropes and grim faces. That's my story anyway. Therefore Nordwand was a "great film." As was K2, and the Eiger Sanction and The Mountain (Spencer Tracey).

barrys wrote:Cliffhanger and Vertical Limit are the real cream of the crop for me.

I actually had to watch it with subtitles the first time. AWESOME!!!

Sweet thread! Best thing is that I found most of these movies online. Can't seem to find Higher Ambitions though. Anyone?

Did you find the North face movie online?

I did some searching once and couldn't get it.

One that I like that I haven't seen listed yet is "Third man on the mountain" from Disney.

I just watched 180° South last night. I really enjoyed it and it has a great soundtrack. It has more surfing than mountaineering but it captures the spirit of adventure pretty well.

dskoon wrote:Did you find the North face movie online?

I did some searching once and couldn't get it.

It must be available somewhere; I rented it from the local video store the other night. It was actually a good movie and the climbing aspects of it appeared to be accurate as well.

I'll bet that the best climbing/mountaineering movies are European. I've watched Catherine Destivelle in Reves des Cime, and it was quite possibly the most breathtaking quasi-documentary I've ever seen....The footage (with no special effects) was unbelievable. I have a 50's era B&W film of Gaston Rebuffat climbing that puts to shame that POS, Nordwand.

There are many others in french, but I've seen a few in Spanish and one in Italian, mainly about really hot chicks that crimp their way up insanely hard rock climbs. You'll just have to broaden your horizons and learn a foreign language to watch awesome climbing flicks. Get a foreign language dictionary, find some keywords, and search through BitTorrent.... download, and enjoy!

Some of the best video, however, can be found on YouTube (also in several languages). I just bought a DVD player that has a WiFi connection to the internet. We watch YouTube stuff on the TV or projected on the big screen. It's pretty cool, but there's some nasty shit too.....

Donal Sutherland in Cerro Torre Scream of Stone

Here are 8 mins of mountain porn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3uCR6U68Jc

Jim and Lou Whittaker's videos are unbelievably still only available on VHS
Classic documentaries, you can find them at paladventurevideos.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Everest North Wall
Winds of Everest
Karakorum

- another of my all time favorites - "The Blizzard" in "Dreams" by Akira Kurosawa.

On Belay!

Dersu! Dersu!
Great flick!

I actually just watched The Eiger Sanction for the first time last night. I laughed aaaaaalot, oh Cint Eastwood, you and your lady friends, hahaha! How many pats on the butt to sometimes random chicks does one movie need? lmao. But overall not that bad for the 70s.

If you're referring to the German Northface movie about the Eiger and Toni Kurtz and crew it's on Netflix.