The North Face to which the title refers is the North Wall of the Eiger, one of the last mountains in the Alps to be successfully climbed. In 1936, as Hitler was preparing to annex Austria, his Berlin PR machine was eager for publicity showing the superiority of the Aryan blah blah blah. The Berliner Zeitung was hoping to report news of a successful German climb of the Nordwand and when a woman working at the paper (the excellent Johanna Wokalek from the Baader Meinhof Complex movie) mentions that she know two mountaineers who might be considering a climb of the mountain, she gets her big break as a reporter. As it turns out, she has been in love with one of these two since they grew up in the mountains together.
In one review that I read, the comment was made that the movie starts slow. This may be true for those cursed with the attention span of a gnat but personally I found that the time wasted on the wacky notion of character development made me care what happened to them later, when they're fighting for their lives on a cold-hearted killer of a mountain.
Dumb reviews aside, there is plenty of climbing drama throughout the movie, well before the assault on the Eiger. To give a little background, I visited the Eiger in a non-climbing visit 25 years ago, buying this postcard at the Jungfraujoch. Notice the label for the Hinterstoisser traverse about a third of the way up. Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser are the two primary climbers and the Hinterstoisser traverse gets its name from a maneuver Hinterstoisser used, running/swinging along the face of the mountain in an increasing arc in order to reach an inaccessible route upwards. Early in the movie, you see Hinterstoisser nearly die using this maneuver on a more pedestrian mountain, so when you see him start to go for it on the bloody Eiger, the suspense is amazing.
In the movie, Hinterstoisser and Kurz unfortunately team up with a pair of Austrians, one of whom suffers some bad injuries that require retreat. So they're not only on the Mountain from Hell, they're trying to descend it in horrible weather carrying a disabled man.
The Eiger has a number of long term features, including a few ice fields (a big challenge if you don't have crampons). Another, visible on the postcard above, is labeled Spinne, German for Spider. In bad weather, you can freeze to death on the vertical wall of the Eiger. In good weather, temperature changes release volleys of rocks and ice, which the Spider "drops" onto you.
Anyway, I hope that you will tale a chance on this movie, which is available for streaming from Netflix. You'll want to see it before Hollywood's Mediocrity Factory attempts to clone it, replacing the awesome actors in the German version with Anne Hathaway and cast Jack Black and Tom Cruise in what has become a 1930s bromance.
