Quand brillent les Étoiles de Midi, by Marcel Ichac. Paris: Arthaud, 1960. 115 pages of text, 102 photo illustrations, 4 plates in color and a contour map of the area between the Col du Midi and the Tour Ronde. This is the story of the making of a mountain film, in which the producers refused to make any concession to public desire for cheap effects. There are no man-made avalanches, no cardboard precipices, no convulsed features, no cries of terror and no bleeding hands. The danger of such a decision is that the sincerity of the result will not be appreciated, but in this instance Les Étoiles de Midi won the Gran Prix du Cinéma Français in 1959 as well as many other awards. It was made by Marcel Ichac with the collaboration of Lionel Terray, Gérard Herzog and Jacques Ertaud. It is the 50th film by Ichac dealing with mountains, skiing, climbing or cave exploring. The action takes place on the Grand Capucin, one of the most beautiful granite obelisks in the Alps, its 1500-foot face rising from the névé of the upper Géant basin as an advanced sentinel of the aiguilles ornamenting the eastern buttresses of Mont Blanc du Tacul. It was first ascended by Bonatti and Ghigo in 1951, after three bivouacs and the placing of 200 pitons. Commentators said that it would never be repeated.

The film required six months in the making. On the mountain itself 30 people worked 25 days, the summit being attained on four occasions and parts of the route being climbed five times. It is without doubt one of the most remarkable unions of professional photography and technical mountaineering, and the climbing shots are supplemented by equally spectacular pictures of the methods used in their making. The courage of the cinema crew in unaccustomed and exposed positions merits the reader’s applause and rivals the nonchalance of modern technique, which would have given the Victorians of Grade IV some very bad dreams. The pictorial excellence of the book must be seen to be believed.

J. Monroe Thorington