I deliberately chose to watch Luis Trenker's original German version of this film ("Der Berg Ruft") instead of the English-language remake, because what little I'd heard about it wasn't promising, and despite my shaky German I felt it would give him and the film a better chance to see it as it had initially been intended. The German version turned out to be pretty good... so I was curious enough to check out the remake.
The interesting thing is that in fact "The Challenge" turns out to be very much a new version of the story, and not just a shot-by-shot translation of the script -- there are some very significant changes, and some of those relate directly to elements of the original that I myself had trouble with. I get the impression that someone was going through trying consciously both to improve on the completed film and simultaneously to tailor it to the English market, but the results are... a mixed bag, unfortunately.
Unsurprisingly, the elements that relate directly to the English protagonists have been expanded upon. This is evident from the very beginning, where the first fifteen minutes or so of the original opening have been dropped in order to start the story with Whymper's arrival on the scene (with the rockfall sequence being economically transposed to a later point in the film to explain away the Englishman's fall when he climbs solo -- in this version, it's no longer an unforced error on the climber's part but all the fault of the mountain!) In the final race for the peak, the scenes showing the English expedition have been considerably expanded whereas in the original the focus is largely on Carrel's attempts, and Hadow's fatal fall is both foreshadowed and excused by having the young man complain of feeling ill during the earlier part of the climb. The charming but fictional figure of his fiancée Miss Smeaton has been dropped, and a scene earlier on showing Whymper trying to raise money from his London publisher on the strength of his Alpine sketches has been inserted to tie the story back more closely to historical events -- we are a far cry at this point from the stereotypes of the original silent film, in which the Englishman sports a deerstalker and pipe and receives a letter from Carrel at the hands of the butler in his ancestral halls!
If you run the two versions side by side (a luxury the original film makers could never have imagined), it becomes evident that the actual climbing sequences have been considerably shortened -- all the more apparent because this footage, expensive to shoot and dialogue-free, is the one part of the film that in many places has been reused directly from one version to the other. I'm not sure if this was done because it was felt that English audiences had less tolerance for that sort of thing, or simply in order to make room for all the added dialogue.
One interesting observation is that while the footage of the disaster itself is very similar to that used in the German version, for some reason here it's much more obviously fake; the camera angle is slightly different, and it's evident that what we are seeing is dummies being thrown down the mountain rather than men falling helplessly pell-mell. I eventually realised that this is almost certainly left-over footage from the original: 'second-best shots' that had not been used in the German negative. Evidently it wasn't felt worthwhile to go back to the mountain and refilm a fall of several thousand feet unnecessarily!
The new version is definitely a good deal talkier than the original, and it's rarely an improvement. Criticism I've seen of this film has tended to centre around the tedium of the village sequences, which was something I couldn't really understand from my experience of the German version -- I'm afraid that here, yes, they really are too long and boring. The screenwriter has tried to inject some Ealing-style comedy by introducing an incompetent policeman and a drunken mayor, and played up the role of Luc, Carrel's dim-witted sidekick with the heavy Italian accent, whom I felt to be one of the less successful characters in the original. I didn't find Trenker's German accent too intrusive, and his dialogue is fluent enough, but since the motivation for the entire Matterhorn ascent now boils down to commercial rivalry between the villages of Breuil and Zermatt and their respective hotel-keepers, this element of the script has been considerably expanded, and it's not the most inspiring of material.
One interesting change is the added scenes showing Whymper's injury being treated -- the film-makers evidently felt, as I did, that there was simply too little relationship established between the two men prior to the 'betrayal', but I'm not sure that an elaborate sub-plot concerning the nursing abilities of Carrel's mother was a good idea. An odd decision was the removal of the eagle's feather (did they think English audiences would fail to appreciate the difficulty of getting one?) and its replacement by a weird dance of mutual greeting; as a result, later on, when Whymper simply sends back Carrel's rucksack as opposed to the personal gift the result is not nearly so effective.
Overall I think this script suffers from over-explanation; we don't need to see the precise process by which the Italians arrange to be in Carrel's mother's cottage, we don't need a convoluted explanation as to why Carrel isn't using Whymper's ice-axe, and we certainly don't need the Reverend Hudson's laboured summit speech to tell us what they're thinking when they take off their hats in reverence. But there were some places where I felt the clarifications did enhance the story -- the diagrams showing the progress of the rival parties up the mountain, for example, and the fact that Carrel's group discovers that they have climbed an isolated buttress and thus have to abseil down the far side to continue their ascent (a point I had totally failed to comprehend previously). And the expanded role for the rope-maker works well, both making the damning accusation seem less arbitrary and then helping explain something that had puzzled me -- how on earth Carrel could possibly prove that he has retrieved the right piece of rope and not just any random length, given that he has no witnesses as to where he got it!
However, the most significant changes to the film come at the climax and ending -- I actually had to go back and check out the German version again on YouTube because I thought I might have totally misunderstood it. But no; Carrel's motivation for going back up the mountain really has been completely reversed. Instead of rushing immediately to defend Whymper as in the silent original-- instead of going 'for the honour of all mountaineers', as in the German version-- in "The Challenge", Carrel climbs the Matterhorn single-handed in search of the missing rope in order to *prove* that Whymper is lying and in the active hope of seeing him hanged, and is very disappointed to discover the truth.
It's very hard to guess why on earth they did this, and I can only suppose that it's in order to have a subsequent lengthy confession scene in which Luc explains the whole thing for the benefit of the audience -- Carrel's discovery is one of the more confused parts of the German version, and perhaps they felt the character needed the misunderstanding explicitly spelt out before he could charge off to the rescue. But it's a complete about-turn to the story.
The second total reversal comes with the final courtroom scene; final, that is, for the original script, but not so here. Instead of Carrel bursting in, bloodied and exhausted, just in time to save Whymper from a murder charge, here the verdict of the enquiry -- which appears to be a pretty cursory affair -- is quite the opposite: the Englishman is actually exonerated. As a result Carrel ends up instead wading in Wild-West-style to save his friend from a public lynching at the hands of an angry crowd... presumably because the scriptwriter felt the film needed an action finale rather than a lengthy legal sequence, but it's a somewhat jaw-dropping development!
It also means that we lose one of the more powerful moments from the German version: the final, unspoken sequence in which the two of them celebrate by reaching the peak alone together. Instead -- presumably to flatter English sensibilities -- the film ends with Carrel conceding a graceful defeat at ground-level: "You won, and I am glad of it".
Comparing the lengths, I see that "The Challenge" is actually twenty minutes shorter than "Der Berg Ruft", but it manages to come across as longer. I suspect it has a lot of additional dialogue and plot devices and fewer mountain shots... but the result is that it feels busy and over-laboured, with few of the elaborations actually being an improvement. Perhaps it's not surprising that it failed to kick-start a genre of 'mountain films' in England to match those in Germany, even with Nazi exiles like Emeric Pressburger on hand to make them. But it's interesting in that it comes across as someone's deliberate attempt to fix perceived issues with the earlier attempt -- one wonders just how much input Luis Trenker had in the process and what, as director and screenwriter on the original production, he felt about the changes.
The interesting thing is that in fact "The Challenge" turns out to be very much a new version of the story, and not just a shot-by-shot translation of the script -- there are some very significant changes, and some of those relate directly to elements of the original that I myself had trouble with. I get the impression that someone was going through trying consciously both to improve on the completed film and simultaneously to tailor it to the English market, but the results are... a mixed bag, unfortunately.
Unsurprisingly, the elements that relate directly to the English protagonists have been expanded upon. This is evident from the very beginning, where the first fifteen minutes or so of the original opening have been dropped in order to start the story with Whymper's arrival on the scene (with the rockfall sequence being economically transposed to a later point in the film to explain away the Englishman's fall when he climbs solo -- in this version, it's no longer an unforced error on the climber's part but all the fault of the mountain!) In the final race for the peak, the scenes showing the English expedition have been considerably expanded whereas in the original the focus is largely on Carrel's attempts, and Hadow's fatal fall is both foreshadowed and excused by having the young man complain of feeling ill during the earlier part of the climb. The charming but fictional figure of his fiancée Miss Smeaton has been dropped, and a scene earlier on showing Whymper trying to raise money from his London publisher on the strength of his Alpine sketches has been inserted to tie the story back more closely to historical events -- we are a far cry at this point from the stereotypes of the original silent film, in which the Englishman sports a deerstalker and pipe and receives a letter from Carrel at the hands of the butler in his ancestral halls!
If you run the two versions side by side (a luxury the original film makers could never have imagined), it becomes evident that the actual climbing sequences have been considerably shortened -- all the more apparent because this footage, expensive to shoot and dialogue-free, is the one part of the film that in many places has been reused directly from one version to the other. I'm not sure if this was done because it was felt that English audiences had less tolerance for that sort of thing, or simply in order to make room for all the added dialogue.
One interesting observation is that while the footage of the disaster itself is very similar to that used in the German version, for some reason here it's much more obviously fake; the camera angle is slightly different, and it's evident that what we are seeing is dummies being thrown down the mountain rather than men falling helplessly pell-mell. I eventually realised that this is almost certainly left-over footage from the original: 'second-best shots' that had not been used in the German negative. Evidently it wasn't felt worthwhile to go back to the mountain and refilm a fall of several thousand feet unnecessarily!
The new version is definitely a good deal talkier than the original, and it's rarely an improvement. Criticism I've seen of this film has tended to centre around the tedium of the village sequences, which was something I couldn't really understand from my experience of the German version -- I'm afraid that here, yes, they really are too long and boring. The screenwriter has tried to inject some Ealing-style comedy by introducing an incompetent policeman and a drunken mayor, and played up the role of Luc, Carrel's dim-witted sidekick with the heavy Italian accent, whom I felt to be one of the less successful characters in the original. I didn't find Trenker's German accent too intrusive, and his dialogue is fluent enough, but since the motivation for the entire Matterhorn ascent now boils down to commercial rivalry between the villages of Breuil and Zermatt and their respective hotel-keepers, this element of the script has been considerably expanded, and it's not the most inspiring of material.
One interesting change is the added scenes showing Whymper's injury being treated -- the film-makers evidently felt, as I did, that there was simply too little relationship established between the two men prior to the 'betrayal', but I'm not sure that an elaborate sub-plot concerning the nursing abilities of Carrel's mother was a good idea. An odd decision was the removal of the eagle's feather (did they think English audiences would fail to appreciate the difficulty of getting one?) and its replacement by a weird dance of mutual greeting; as a result, later on, when Whymper simply sends back Carrel's rucksack as opposed to the personal gift the result is not nearly so effective.
Overall I think this script suffers from over-explanation; we don't need to see the precise process by which the Italians arrange to be in Carrel's mother's cottage, we don't need a convoluted explanation as to why Carrel isn't using Whymper's ice-axe, and we certainly don't need the Reverend Hudson's laboured summit speech to tell us what they're thinking when they take off their hats in reverence. But there were some places where I felt the clarifications did enhance the story -- the diagrams showing the progress of the rival parties up the mountain, for example, and the fact that Carrel's group discovers that they have climbed an isolated buttress and thus have to abseil down the far side to continue their ascent (a point I had totally failed to comprehend previously). And the expanded role for the rope-maker works well, both making the damning accusation seem less arbitrary and then helping explain something that had puzzled me -- how on earth Carrel could possibly prove that he has retrieved the right piece of rope and not just any random length, given that he has no witnesses as to where he got it!
However, the most significant changes to the film come at the climax and ending -- I actually had to go back and check out the German version again on YouTube because I thought I might have totally misunderstood it. But no; Carrel's motivation for going back up the mountain really has been completely reversed. Instead of rushing immediately to defend Whymper as in the silent original-- instead of going 'for the honour of all mountaineers', as in the German version-- in "The Challenge", Carrel climbs the Matterhorn single-handed in search of the missing rope in order to *prove* that Whymper is lying and in the active hope of seeing him hanged, and is very disappointed to discover the truth.
It's very hard to guess why on earth they did this, and I can only suppose that it's in order to have a subsequent lengthy confession scene in which Luc explains the whole thing for the benefit of the audience -- Carrel's discovery is one of the more confused parts of the German version, and perhaps they felt the character needed the misunderstanding explicitly spelt out before he could charge off to the rescue. But it's a complete about-turn to the story.
The second total reversal comes with the final courtroom scene; final, that is, for the original script, but not so here. Instead of Carrel bursting in, bloodied and exhausted, just in time to save Whymper from a murder charge, here the verdict of the enquiry -- which appears to be a pretty cursory affair -- is quite the opposite: the Englishman is actually exonerated. As a result Carrel ends up instead wading in Wild-West-style to save his friend from a public lynching at the hands of an angry crowd... presumably because the scriptwriter felt the film needed an action finale rather than a lengthy legal sequence, but it's a somewhat jaw-dropping development!
It also means that we lose one of the more powerful moments from the German version: the final, unspoken sequence in which the two of them celebrate by reaching the peak alone together. Instead -- presumably to flatter English sensibilities -- the film ends with Carrel conceding a graceful defeat at ground-level: "You won, and I am glad of it".
Comparing the lengths, I see that "The Challenge" is actually twenty minutes shorter than "Der Berg Ruft", but it manages to come across as longer. I suspect it has a lot of additional dialogue and plot devices and fewer mountain shots... but the result is that it feels busy and over-laboured, with few of the elaborations actually being an improvement. Perhaps it's not surprising that it failed to kick-start a genre of 'mountain films' in England to match those in Germany, even with Nazi exiles like Emeric Pressburger on hand to make them. But it's interesting in that it comes across as someone's deliberate attempt to fix perceived issues with the earlier attempt -- one wonders just how much input Luis Trenker had in the process and what, as director and screenwriter on the original production, he felt about the changes.