Snow in the Movies

With all the snow we've had this winter I have been asked about my favorite uses of snow in movies.  Here is a very subjective list.

John Ford's The Searchers (1957).  Often in Westerns snow is hostile, something to overcome.  As Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley search for Debbie, captured by Indians, they come across a massacre of Indians by U.S. troops in the snow, as the Indians have had to seek shelter in forts because the buffalo are being killed off.  While the snow falls on Martin and Ethan they have to turn back and Ethan, more determined than ever, says it means nothing:  "We'll find her, as sure as the turning o' the earth."

William Wellman's Track of the Cat (1954).  During the winter, with the land covered by snow, a mountain lion is killing people and cattle.  The search for the mountain lion takes place in a bleak, black-and-white universe beautifully filmed in color.

Anthony Mann's The Far Country (1954).  Mann was particularly adept at natural exteriors, as settlers battle the snow and ice in Alaska.

Raoul Walsh's Northern Pursuit (1943).  A Canadian Mountie looks for Nazis in the snow.

King Vidor's War and Peace (1956).  The horror of the snow and cold of the Russian winter
does in Napoleon in this intelligent filming of the Tolstoy novel.

Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents (1961) shows how hard it is for Inuits to adapt to modern customs.  Should be seen in connection with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), a contrived documentary dealing with similar situations.

D. W. Griffith's Way Down East (1922) in which Lillian Gish is banished in the snow for her moral failings and becomes adrift on an ice floe.

Andre De Toth's Day of the Outlaw (1959), a beautiful Western in which a snowed-in town is held hostage.

Howard Hawks's The Thing (1951) in which an alien lands in the Arctic.

Samuel Fuller's Fixed Bayonets (1951):  the Korean War in the snow and ice; an unusual example of a war film in the snow; Roger Corman's Ski Troop Attack (1960) is another.

Then there are romantic films, musicals, and comedies, where snow is usually more benign, often signifying reconciliation, especially at Christmas.

Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), where Judy Garland sings, ironically, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" as her sister destroys snowmen, angry that the family is moving from St. Louis.

Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), where misunderstandings are cleared up in the snow in time for Christmas.

Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925), effective scenes of snow isolating people from each other and their feelings.

Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), in which separated lovers, now married to others, meet briefly in the snow.

Fran Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940), in which snow is a means of escape from the Nazis but also means death.

Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1956), in which a couple are reunited because of an accident in the snow.

Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember: Two lovers are reunited during a snowy Christmas after missing their meeting at the top of the Empire State Building.

Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1940), in which a snow globe at death becomes a child playing in the snow with his sled.

And then there are those films that end with snow falling, usually as a symbol of fatalism and moving on.  This includes the Jacques Demy film mentioned above as well as John Huston's The Dead (1987) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates (2006).