The White Hell of Pitz Palu

Doctor Johannes Krafft has spent years looking for the wife he lost on the mountain during their honeymoon. Every year he climbs the same peak, and every year he comes down having found nothing. This time a young couple goes with him. The three set out together. The weather turns, a mass of ice breaks away, and the three are left stranded high up on a ledge. Arnold Fanck and G. W. Pabst directed the film together. It is taken as the best known of the German mountain films. Every climbing scene was shot on the real mountain in Switzerland; no studio was used. Leni Riefenstahl plays the young woman, and Ernst Udet, the First World War pilot, flies the aircraft himself. The night searches by torchlight became a model for later films.