šµ"Have you heard about dear Blanche? Got caught up in an..."šµ! Well all I can say is lucky old Blanche! Somehow there is something almost allegorical about the avalanche in the film and the career of a star that is also tumbling down the mountain. Rock Hudson is millionaire "Shelby" who has invested his last cent in a mountain retreat that he hopes will offer a wonderland of facilities to his guests. Needless to say, he invites the great and the good to the opening and that includes his mother (Jeanette Nolan); "Caroline" (Mia Farrow) and the rather more wary "Nick" (Robert Forster) who suspects that the construction clearing has left the place rather more vulnerable to the elements than he would have liked. Well guess what? He's right - else we'd not have had a movie. Now that might have been no bad thing as we spend about eighty minutes building up to what is, admittedly, not a bad five minutes of nature saying "I've has enough of this"... The pace is all over the place, Mia Farrow contributes almost zero to the thing and the polo-neck clad star looks totally out of sorts with a mediocre script and a plot that the title rather gives away. I suppose it was a disaster movie waiting to happen, but this is completely devoid of any sense of menace and ends rather as a damp squib. It's rated 15... Perhaps that's the maximum IQ required to watch? Some classy, chilly, photography but otherwise I wouldn't bother, sorry.
