Strong, handsome men battling the elements, attempting to conquer mountains despite freezing temperatures, biting winds, and the limits of their own endurance. Filmmakers return to this story again and again. When it's well done, it still manages to enthrall. Despite a few weaknesses, Philipp Stölzl's North Face (Nordwand) is one of the more successful ones, thrilling, nail-bitingly intense, and simply beautiful to behold.

The story concerns two skilled German climbers, volunteers in Hitler's new mountain strike force, Toni Kurz (Benno Furmann) and Andi Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas). The pair set off in 1936 to tackle "the last problem of the Western Alps" -- the 1,800-meter summit of Switzerland's Eiger North Face, pushed to climb by a German reporter, Henry Arau (Ulrich Tukur), who believes that a success would mean great propaganda for the Nazis and the upcoming Berlin Olympics. Toni's real motivation, however, is Arau's assistant, Luise (Johanna Wokalek, last seen in The Baader Meinhof Complex), an old love who's become a bourgeois Wicked City Woman, a turn that chaps rural Toni's prole hide.

As other reviewers have noted, there's a fascinating history of so-called "mountain films" in German cinema, most of them made in the 1920s and 1930s. One director, Dr. Arnold Franck, made a name for himself with these difficult to shoot epics, teaching himself to shoot on location during a climb up the Jungfrau in the Bernese Alps and producing classics of the genre like The Mountain of Destiny (1924) and The Holy Mountain (1926). Franck was an early influence on the young Leni Riefenstahl, and co-produced her skiing film, White Ecstacy, and there still exists an international organization devoted to the Mountain Film genre.

North Face falls squarely into that oeuvre, shot both on location with hand-held cameras by cinematographer Kolja Brandt, who won a German Film Award for the trouble, and on a temperature-controlled soundstage. That it's virtually impossible to tell where the location footage and the staged outdoor scenes leave off is a testament to both Brandt and production designer Udo Kramer -- the climbing sequences are consistent, and consistently exciting.

Off the mountain, it's less compelling. The dialogue is clunky, the romantic elements feel forced, and the politico-socio messages all feel tired, and beside the point. That's not what we, the audience, want to see in a mountain-climbing movie, and it often feels as if the director himself would like to get back to the North Face as well. Stölzl, who cut his teeth on music videos for Madonna and Rammstein, has more of a feel for visuals than for directing actors in dialogue-heavy scenes, and the movie suffers a bit because of it.

Still, North Face delivers when the boys hit the mountain. The cinematography is breathtaking, and Brandt's camerawork is quick, intimate, and dexterous. Would that Stölzl had trusted that his story could be told entirely on the face of the Eiger, it might be a near-perfect film. As it is, North Face is still a fine achievement.