TV Reviews : ‘Storm’ Scales the Heights of Sisterhood

The trouble with most mountain-climbing adventure stories is characterization. All those climbers with their goggles, parkas, pickaxes and backpacks are hard to tell apart, especially in a blizzard. Shot in the icy Austrian Alps, “Storm and Sorrow,” on Lifetime cable tonight at 9, happily manages to showcase some individuality because of its feminine angle.

The central figure is based on the American climber Molly Higgins. Leigh Chapman’s script, adapted from the diary material in the book “Storm and Sorrow” by Robert Craig, charts Higgins’ frosty welcome by her uptight male teammates and her subsequent rite of passage at a 1974 international mountain-climbing expedition held in the Soviet Union at Peak Lenin in the Pamirs near the Chinese-Afghan border.

Higgins is played by a svelte Lori Singer, who scampers up sheer rock and ice, her blond tresses outlined against the wintry horizon like a Nordic Spider Woman. The Austrian locations and the avalanches and the loss of life among the climbers are dramatically captured by executive producer Hans Proppe and director Richard Colla.

The production, which shot its interior scenes in Hungary, recalls in its chilling mountain scenes another odyssey on the icy faces of the Austrian Alps, Clint Eastwood’s “Eiger Sanction” (1975).

The rugged male actors in “Storm and Sorrow” look tiresomely alike (imagine an open audition for a Marlboro ad), but the women are refreshing.

Fueling the feminine theme is a subplot about the true-to-life female Soviet mountain-climbing team at the same expedition, in whom unity is seen as a much stronger component than in the fractured egos of the American male climbers.