Well-acted film that skips flashy for effective. With its character focus, surprisingly good characterization, character development, moral ambiguity, and pacing it feels a lot more like a stage play than a TV movie - in the best ways.
Bradford Dillman and George Kennedy put in great work with Dillman's quiet desperation being particularly poignant.
The mountain setting works well to focus on the isolation of the characters both from the world and from moral decisions then, finally, from each other. The cold weather seems at first to represent the hostility of the world but ends up representing the coldness of the men toward each other.
The writer, Jack Sowards, had previously worked on TV series like Bonanza and this was his first full-length screenplay to be shot. Its good dialog, solid pace, and rich characterization foreshadow the work he did a decade later when he wrote Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Definitely worth a watch if you can find it!
