Downhill Waster

By J. C.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN Directed by LARRY PEERCE Screenplay by DAVID SELTZER

The facts really seem too bad to be true. Nevertheless, a title at the beginning of The Other Side of the Mountain is there to dispel any doubts: "This is a true story."

In 1954, still in her teens, Jill Kinmont had won two important ski competitions and dreamed of qualifying for the 1956 Olympics. In 1955 she skied off the side of a mountain during the Snow Cup Race. She nearly died, and survival was hardly a mercy. Her neck was broken, her spinal cord damaged and her body paralyzed from the shoulders down. But Jill Kinmont (fetchingly played here by Newcomer Marilyn Hassett) vowed that she would recover as fully as possible.

The process of her rehabilitation which makes up most of this movie, eventually allowed her very limited movement and mobility in a wheelchair. Although Kinmont was retained as a technical adviser for this film, Larry Peerce (Goodbye Columbus, Ash Wednesday) has directed it with great doses of moral uplift and sentiment. The Other Side of the Mountain is photographed in the blindingly bright colors of a souvenir postcard, but is even less useful. It is too heavy for mailing and far too light to take seriously.

Brave Struggle. All the familiar material of rehabilitation melodrama is here: doubtful doctors and blind determination; parents trying to be brave, a fiance who has pledged true love wilting away from the full force of the tragedy, other patients being both cynical and supportive as Jill masters her wheelchair. Her struggle is abetted by another skier, a cordial eccentric called "Mad Dog" Dick Buek (Beau Bridges) who wants to marry her. She greets his initial proposal with one of those speeches about pity that seem to be required by films like this the way a western needs a Shootout. In the end, she changes her mind--but when he flies to join her, Buek dies in a crash. It is some indication of the hollowness of The Other Side of the Mountain that this piece of real personal tragedy comes out looking like the last desperate invention of a weary and rather mechanical scenarist. It has been said--probably too often --that life is a bad movie. By that standard, Larry Peerce here presents the real thing.

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