In Shiva's House

In the mythology of India, the Himalaya is the home of the gods. Shiva and Vishnu wander through the everlasting snows on the ridge of the world. Thus, when European expeditions trail off into the mountains of Nepal, Buddhist peasants assume that the strangers are going to look for heaven. Last week the film record of the two latest Himalayan expeditions, put on public view, showed heaven and hell interfused in some of the most terrifyingly beautiful pictures ever to move across a screen.

The Conquest of Everest (Countryman Films; United Artists) is a film record, in full color, of the 1953 expedition led by Colonel (now Sir) John Hunt of the British army, which succeeded, where five others had failed, in reaching the top of the world's highest mountain (29,002 ft.). The film has the distinction of being splendidly photographed (by Thomas Stobart and George W. Lowe of the expedition) in conditions where photography is about as easy as gathering edelweiss in an avalanche. It has also been intelligently edited, with a generally well-imagined musical score by British Composer Arthur Benjamin and a simple, sufficient narrative commentary written by British Poet Louis MacNeice.

The style, in short, rises to the subject, and the subject makes the film one of the most fascinating ever made. In it, the camera records a passing event and its permanent meaning in a single enormous symbol: man against mountain. Yet the saving grace of the film is its unpretentiousness. The mountaineers move through the snow world in their bright blue suits, not so much like symbols through an allegory, or heroes through a legend, as like common men through a hard day's work at a job they love.

Everest begins, as all good epics should, before the beginning. Earlier attempts to climb the peak are described; the terrain is analyzed in a general way. Then, at a footpace, the script proceeds with the 1953 expedition--how it was organized in England, how the men were picked and trained, how the equipment was tested--and at a footpace, it continues every step of the way to the top of Everest.

The use of this laborious method was the master stroke of the film's creators. They realized, as the makers of Anna-puma did not (see below), that audiences must be prepared almost as carefully as climbers for the upper altitudes. The ghastly Himalayan heights alone, shown to the general public for the first time in this picture, are enough to shake the heart of any man, and the further sight and sound of a fellow human being, gasping on them like an expiring fly, is an experience more severe than even, a horror-hardened moviegoer may care to undergo without a gradual preparation. Only by slow and patient teaching that the danger and the suffering must be understood and absorbed as necessary to a goal felt to be spiritual can the film lift up the heart of the onlooker to share in the triumph of the climax.

Everest, therefore, wears through almost a third of its 71 minutes before the expedition is safely stowed in its base camp at 18,000 ft. in the western cwm (a Welsh word that rhymes with doom), the colossal glacial ditch by which access to the peak is possible. From there to the summit is a lung-bursting matter of 46 days, with the camera dogging along for all but the last few thousand feet of the way. It sees some awesome things--avalanches down the vast chute of the cwm, in which ice blocks the size of a ten-story building dance along like pebbles; gaping crevasses whose sinister gullets lead down into a blue-green shade; the ominous huddle of the Everest massif, where three of the world's greatest peaks (Everest. Lhotse and Nuptse) lean threatfully together like three witches.

Foot over foot for five weeks, the 13 Britons and the 35 Sherpas--the rugged Himalayan porters led by Tenzing Norkey, one of the world's great mountaineers--drive up a jagged icefall of 3,000 ft. Then on to the face of Lhotse, the second witch, a moon-cold, 4,000-ft. cheek of ice and blackish stones. Ten days of chopping here, with every breath a ton to lift, and then a breakthrough--two tiny figures bobbing far above through the ice glare, like spots before the eyes--to the summit ridge. The excitement rises; the onlooker, tensed like the climbers for so long against so many obstacles, pushes forward out of his seat to be with the first assault team, Bourdillon and Evans, as they slog out for the south summit at least, and, God willing, the peak.

In the long wait. Sherpas sit brown and still as little Buddhas in the snow; the white men crack sharp glances at the heights; the bold English head of Colonel Hunt, snow-grizzled and weary, turns upward. Eleven hours later, the two are back. They have made the south summit; beyond, it was too rough. A camp is now established by Hillary. Tenzing and George Lowe at 27,900 ft. They spend the night there, and next day Hillary and Tenzing, the second assault team, try for the victory. Again the waiting at the lower camp, longer than before. Suddenly three figures are sighted, far up the Lhotse face--too far to tell . . .

The casual saunter with which the British team goes out to greet the returning climbers and to hear the fate of its expedition will go down in anecdote as a classic underplay in the British tradition. When Lowe, the first of the three to come down, gives the sign for thumbs up, a thrill shoots through the audience; and when the camera picks up Hillary and Tenzing, their faces shining like those of men who have been in paradise, it is a hard heart that will not beat faster, and a hard face that will not break into answering smiles.

Annapurna (Himalaya; Mayer-Kingsley), a film that describes the 1950 ascent by a French expedition of the highest peak (26,493 ft.) ever scaled until that time, is as Gallic in a bad sense as Everest is British in a good sense. Compiled by Cameraman Marcel Ichac from the superb footage he shot in the Himalaya, the picture covers the same perilous ground as the bestselling book of the same title by the leader of the expedition, Maurice Herzog. and attempts to cover it in the same spirit--a peculiarly misty approach to adventure which one critic has punningly called "St. Exuberance." Failing in this, the script degenerates into the sort of sentimentalism that makes Herzog a superman in crampons.

In contrast with the British approach, the French team--or so the picture makes it appear--indulged in a curly-haired, romantic rush to the summit, a climax which is indicated in the film by an idealized painting of the peak, and on the sound track by peals of Wagnerian music. Actually, the Herzog expedition was a carefully prepared one, and the summit was achieved as a result of first-class mountaineering. The pity is that a tale of true skill and daring did not seem stirring enough to the moviemakers; they had to dish up a fifth-rate lyric poem instead.

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