The Angry Hills
With Robert Mitchum, Stanley Baker, Elisabeth Muller.
US, 1959, digital video, black & white, 105 min.
The lingering shadow of Nazi rule again weighs heavily on Aldrich’s second European project after Ten Seconds to Hell, the Greek-set, cat-and-mouse chase The Angry Hills. Set in the early years of the German occupation of Athens, the film drops Robert Mitchum’s strapping foreign correspondent with a leaflet of wanted names into a corroded landscape of resistance fighters, ruthless Gestapo and beautiful, conflicted women. A.I. Bezzerides’ adaptation of a Leon Uris book is a fast-moving cyclone of narrow escapes, double-crosses, covert alliances and thwarted romances, but Aldrich, crucially, never allows the plot to lapse into cynical murkiness. Through exquisite deep-space staging in high-contrast widescreen and naturalistic portrayals of psychological turbulence (particularly from Elisabeth Müller as a distraught mother with ties to the Nazis), the film weighs the many human dimensions of its knotty political situation, ultimately arriving at a surprising tribute from Aldrich to the capacity for grace under pressure.
