Everest: The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine

Produced   and   Directed   by   David Breashears and Andrew Harvard Arcturus Films
What happened to George Mallory and Andrew Irvine up on the northern flanks of Mount Everest in 1924 is the most tantalizing mystery of Himalayan mountaineering. Did they reach the summit three decade before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, or did they die soon alter they were seen disappearing into clouds above Camp VI by Noel Odell?
This fifty-minute historical documentary, made by two well-known American climbers in association with the BBC, asks those questions and many others. Could Mallory  and Irvine   have reached the summit at all, given their primitive climbing gear? And how about the ice axe which was found a decade later? Did a Chinese climber, now dead, actually see their bodies? Why did Mallory choose a novice, Irvine, as his partner for the summit attempt when the obvious choice was Odell?
The film faithfully recaps the story so well known to climbing enthusiasts the approach march up from Darjeeling via Dingri up to Rongbuk, Changtse and the North Col; the mountain, "a prodigious fang excrescent from the jaws of the earth", in Mallory´s words; and Mallory himself, the poet and enigmatic hero, obsessed with the mountain. Breashears and Harvard intermix film taken during their successful North Ridge Expedition of 1986 with original footage taken by Jon Noel during Mallory´s , 1922 and 1924 expeditions.     One memorable,   scratchy