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White Hell of Pitz Palu

Leni Riefenstahl (Actor), Gustav Diessl (Actor), Arnold Fanck (Director), Rated:

Format: DVD

4.3 24 ratings

$16.95

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May 29, 2012

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Genre	Drama
Format	Multiple Formats, NTSC, Black & White
Contributor	G. W. Pabst, Gustav Diessl, Arnold Fanck, Leni Riefenstahl
Language	English
Runtime	1 hour and 34 minutes

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Product Description

A young couple go climbing in the mountains on their honeymoon, she gets killed and he, unconsolable, wanders the mountains for years without her. Another couple come to the same mountains, meet him and ask him to be their guide. Disaster strikes yet again. A frozen mountain landscape is the setting for some of the most spectacular film shots of the era which have not been surpassed even with todays technology. Excellent! This is the American release. 94 Minutes.

Product details

MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ NR (Not Rated)
Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches; 2.79 Ounces
Director ‏ : ‎ Arnold Fanck, G. W. Pabst
Media Format ‏ : ‎ Multiple Formats, NTSC, Black & White
Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 34 minutes
Release date ‏ : ‎ May 29, 2012
Actors ‏ : ‎ Leni Riefenstahl, Gustav Diessl
Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ English
Studio ‏ : ‎ Grapevine Video
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00319T63Y
Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1

Best Sellers Rank: #134,703 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #12,865 in Action & Adventure DVDs
- #23,416 in Drama DVDs

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4.3 24 ratings

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Chip Kaufmann

Not What I Expected.

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2005

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Having seen and enjoyed THE HOLY MOUNTAIN some time back, I was really looking forward to seeing this film which is considered by many to be the summit of the mountain film genre. Much has been made of the fact that the renowned director G.W. Pabst (PANDORA'S BOX, DIARY OF A LOST GIRL) was brought in to co-direct along with Arnold Fanck who created the genre. It's been said that this was done at Leni Riefenstahl's insistence to try and give the film and its characters more depth. Whoever was responsible for it made a big mistake. What emerges in WHITE HELL OF PITZ PAULU is a film with an agonizingly slow first half that stops dead in its tracks whenever it tries to focus on the three principal players, a mountain guide who has lost his wife and a young couple there for a holiday. The dramatic scenes directed by Pabst are totally out of sync with the Fanck's outdoor scenes giving the impression that you're watching two different movies. The mountain footage is breathtaking as usual with the seemingly impossible camerawork bolstered by a number of airplane shots. Some of the scenes such as the recovery of bodies in an ice grotto and the rescue of the couple from a frozen ledge linger in the memory long afterwards and in fact have shown up in a number of documentaries from time to time.

The rest of the film however is a real mess and is not at all what I expected. The performances by Riefenstahl and Ernst Petersen as the young couple are suprisingly flat which I attribute to Pabst's direction as they were much more full of life in HOLY MOUNTAIN. Gustav Diesel as the mountain climber gives the type of performance that the film needs but it isn't enough. Another big problem with this version of PITZ PALU which was restored in 1998 is the score provided for it by Ashley Irwin. A lot of it sounds like bad Soviet military music that just doesn't complement the action at all like Aljoscha Zimmerman's score did for HOLY MOUNTAIN. Silent movies were never silent and the musical accompaniment can really make or break the film and this time around unfortunately it's the latter. I don't think a good score could have saved this movie but it certainly would have helped it. THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PAULU is worth seeing especially if you are interested in Leni Riefenstahl or the mountain film in general but of those available on DVD HOLY MOUNTAIN is definitely the one to see. Hopefully Riefenstahl's 1932 opus THE BLUE LIGHT will come out soon in a restored version for that is where the mountain film truly reached its peak.

16 people found this helpful

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R. Donahue

Spectacular Mountain Scenery against a backdrop of Tragedy

Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2007

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Although originally a silent release (German) - this is one of my all time favorite films. I sincerely hope that Ray Harryhausen and Legend films will be able to colorize this film sometime in the near future - because it's spectacular mountain (Pitz Palu) scenery truly lends itself to the colorization process. Mountain climbing film - staring a young Leni Riefenstahl - against a backdrop of the tragedy - (of a doctor having lost his young bride ten years earlier on this very same mountain) - as portrayed magnificently by Gustav Diessl.

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William George Heisey

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2016

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Great!

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Trevor Willsmer

A weak plot but some truly astonishing filmmaking

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2013

Long before she was Hitler's favorite film director, Leni Riefenstahl was German silent cinema's sweetheart and the queen of the mountain movies, and looking at the remarkable The White Hell of Pitz Palu it's not hard to see why: easy on the eye and an expressive and appealing actress, if you absolutely had to be stuck up a mountain with someone she's the kind of person who would be on your list. The film itself is so astonishingly visually striking and engrossing that it's hard to believe it's so largely forgotten: you're more likely to see the amazingly vivid mountain sequences turning up as stock footage (most notably in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe) than you are to see this crop up on the revival circuit or on TV, so Kino's 134-minute DVD of the 1998 German restoration is particularly welcome.

The father of the mountain movie, main director Arnold Fanck (who shot the location exteriors while G.W. Pabst did the studio interiors) has a remarkable feeling for the changing face and nature of the title character, the mountain itself, able to shift from joyous beauty to menace in a matter of seconds. The shifts of light, the effect of the wind, the changes in temperature are as expressive as any actor's performance, creating a real adversary for its engaged couple who get lost and have to fight it for survival. The prologue sets the tone perfectly, as another couple's cocky confidence turns to tragedy, the slowly melting icicles driving the survivor mad as he waits for help, the film mirroring it minutes later as another icicle hanging from a mountain hut drips onto Riefenstahl's hand as she lies in the sun blissfully unaware of the danger it is foreshadowing. There's joy too, particularly in a remarkably vivid sequence of a plane flying around their hut in an energetic display of daring acrobatics that makes Sepp Allgeier's camerawork almost take flight itself.

(The pilot is played by WW1's second most successful flying ace Ernst Udet who, like Reifenstahl, would have his career destroyed by his association with Hitler - in his case with rather more finality. Having been instrumental in building up the Luftwaffe, political infighting and domestic problems drove him to alcoholism and a mental breakdown and his suicide in 1941 after Goring used him as a scapegoat for losing the Battle of Britain).

Unfortunately, after the dramatic entrance of `the Ghost of the Mountain,' the surviving lover who haunts the slopes looking for the frozen body of his bride, the film starts to lose its grip and only intermittently regains it. It's small wonder US distributors Universal cut the film down to 79 minutes from its original 150-minute reported running time: even in this not-quite-complete restoration it's 50 minutes before they start their ill-fated climb, the husband-to-be driven to accompany the `Ghost' by what one suspects is some Pabst-inspired jealousy over Leni's romantic awe for the bereaved climber's morbid romantic quest.

The influence on Fred Zinnemann's final film, Five Days One Summer - which also revolves around the frozen corpse of a lost love and the possibility of tragedy repeating itself - is clear, but, perhaps unsurprising considering his reputation for sadistically putting his cast in real harm's way, Fanck is less successful when it comes to drawing us into these people's story. He's obviously more interested in the mountain than his characters or the plot, both of which are thinly sketched out to avoid eating up screen time that could be better spent on more shots of the mountain, gradually eroding their effectiveness. It doesn't help that once disaster strikes and its trio are trapped on a mountain ledge the sum total of their efforts to escape are waving a flag and, at night, an oil lamp while waiting for someone to rescue them or that there's no real interaction between them as their hopes fade. As a result, when one of them does rather pointlessly make the ultimate sacrifice it all seems rather arbitrary and academic since we're so uninvolved in their fate.

What carries the film are the set pieces, particularly a visually stunning night sequence where the villagers make their way up the mountain and into a crevice and ice cave to recover the dead bodies of a group of climbers by torchlight in a remarkable chiaroscuro play of light and shadow that's worth the price of admission on its own. From the captions it's clear that the ice cave sequence was originally given a red tint to turn it into a diabolical inferno, but the restored print on Kino's DVD has no tints (not a major problem: the film looks fine in black and white), which isn't the only change from the original version that might disparage some purists. Kino's version also replaces the German intertitles with English ones, though these are presented in the style of the German version, while the various notes and letters have burned in subtitle translations. Nonetheless, the restoration feels like its treated the film with respect, and Ashley Irwin's new score is particularly impressive, adopting a bolero motif for the climbing sequences and the ever faithful Dies Iraes for the mountain in threatening mood.

Kino's DVD also includes the last TV interview with Leni Reifenstahl, a substantial 52-minutes with the surprisingly sprightly 100-year old that skirts around most of the major issues, as well as a stills gallery and an intriguing extract from the abridged German talkie reissue version that, unusually, dubbed the characters dialogue in such perfect synchronization you could be forgiven for thinking it had been shot with sound.

Its pacing and story problems alone ensure that The White Hell of Pitz Palu isn't the deathless classic of lore, but it still impresses despite its faults.

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Walpurga Pauels

Sonderlich, tiefgründig, trotz gespielter Verliebtheit und Röckchen im Schnee...

Reviewed in Germany on March 22, 2014

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Ein sehr attraktiver Hauptdarsteller, vom Schmerz zum Extremindividualisten mutiert. An diese "Steilvorlage" reicht selbst die Darstellung von Leni Riefenstahl charakterlich kaum heran !!! Eisbilder mit "frozen faces" in der Tiefe der Gletscherspalte.
Schwarz auf Weiß und umgekehrt, close ups und ein angepasstes Tempo lassen wohl bei erprobten Entschleunigungspraktikern ein künstlerisch wertvolles Werk erwachsen.

2 people found this helpful

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Prohaska Helga

Die weisse Hölle von Piz-Palü

Reviewed in Germany on February 28, 2016

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Aujch dieser Film darf mich an meinen Grosscousin erinnern, wenn auch die Szenen mit ihm sehr klein sind, aber als Erinnerung für meine Enkel ist der Film sicher interessant. Auch mit welchen einfachen Mitteln damals gedreht wurde.

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Dr. Martin von der Grün

Nicht vergessen: Stummfilm in schwarz-weiß!

Reviewed in Germany on January 11, 2014

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Die DVD war im in Ordnung. Schade nur, dass man das Interview mit dem Erstbesteiger der Eiger Nordwand, Andreas "Anderl" Heckmair, kaum versteht. Da ist die Aufnahmequalität ganz mies. Ob das nur auf meiner DVD so ist? Der Rest passt.

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Sven

Piz Palü

Reviewed in Germany on July 17, 2013

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Sehr gute Kopie vom Original. Für Filme-/Videofreunde von großem Interesse.
Bietet viele Anregungen für Hobbyfilmer.
Inhalt und Darsteller sollte man kritisch hinterfragen.
Historie des Films hochinteressant.

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