“Peculiar to German filmmakers in the 1920s was the cult of idealized mountain films, which were both brilliant documentaries and first-rate melodramas, with very definite if embryonic symbolic propaganda content. They were the inspiration and largely the monopoly of Dr. Arnold Fanck, a former geologist who translated his great passion for the mountains into film.... The White Hell of Pitz Palu was the last of the great silent German mountain films, and one of the best and most successful.... Most of the film was shot, under freezing conditions and other hardships, during a five-month location trip to the 12,000 foot high Pitz Palu, in the Bernina group in the Alps. It was co-director Pabst's (Pandora's Box) 9th film.... Dramatically a bit shaky and unsound, but pictorially magnificent, this is a real thriller--and a real film. (Tonight's print, happily, is first-rate.)” William K. Everson