While I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid the Polar Vortex here in sunny Los Angeles, much of the rest of the country has been trapped in varying levels of snow, all the while keeping their eyes on an Olympic games that had deliver the required frost manually. In short, it’s been an exceptionally icy winter. So here are, in my view, the ten films that best capture the weather, in all its inconvenience, danger, and beauty.
10.) Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)
Speaking of the way people run to southern California to escape harsh winters elsewhere! Aldo Ray stars as a commercial artist who, while hunting in snowy Wyoming, winds up with a bag containing some recently-stolen cash, only to leave it behind in the harsh weather. Back in Los Angeles, the thieves track him down, and before long, they all set off to where he might have left the loot. The disparity between the two places could not be better expressed – bustling Los Angeles contrasted with the remote midwest – just heightening how easy it is to lose some money, or your life, out where no one else can find you.
9.) Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)
One of cinema’s most problematic great films, Flaherty’s portrait of an Inuit family in Quebec may not quite be the documentary it purports to be, but it remains a startling look into a way of life bygone even then. Flaherty’s approach to his subjects is at once curious and exploitative, but what he captures best of all is not so much a portrait of the natural elements (though, surrounded by them, this too is inevitable), but the way Nanook and his family use the nature to their benefit, either in the hunt or in the home. The film’s most intriguing sequence shows the building of an igloo, then a virtually unknown habitat in the Western world, and now so familiar that it has lost much of its wonder, a feeling the film spectacularly restores. The snow is an almost insurmountable enemy, but it is also the very way they are able to protect themselves.
8.) The Grey (Joe Carnahan, 2012)
Joe Carnahan’s surprisingly thoughtful, emotionally ragged examination of man forced to battle the elements both within and without uses the oppressive, frozen wilderness to express a man similarly cut off from the world around him. John Ottway (Liam Neeson) may start the film ready to kill himself, but once his plane crashes and he’s forced to outlive the descending pack of wolves, as well as deteriorating morale and comradeship amongst his stranded party, he could not be more focused on living. Just like a wolf itself, Carnahan wraps his film around our throats and refuses to relent.
7.) Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999)
When you’re trapped, anything can start to look like food. Even people. Ravenous is a deeply odd film, often combining absurdity, horror, suspense, historical curiosity, and psychoanalysis into even a single moment, resulting in a film much richer than even its cannibals-descend-on-an-army-encampment-in-1840s-Sierra-Nevada might suggest. Hardly the first, nor last, film to capitalize on the visual dichotomy between gruesome gore and the pure white of snow, it all seems to blend with the muck of the earth, suggesting that whatever we might endure, we are inevitably churned back into the very stuff from which we try to escape.
6.) Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)
The Coen brothers get it – snow, for all its pictorial beauty, is a huge pain in the ass. It’ll drive you straight off the road. It’ll make a getaway just impossible. And when you’re already having a terrible day, wouldn’t you know it, your windshield has an inch of ice over it and you’re going to have to whack at it like hell to get it off. Very telling that the one person seemingly able to move through it with relative ease and comfort – none other than Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the lead detective trying to get to the bottom of a series of homicides – is also she who triumphs. Become at peace with your elements and you’ll become at peace with your world.
5.) The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925)
Often a man more interested in the oppressive power of the city, The Gold Rush sees Chaplin turn to the horrifying outdoors, where his Tramp character goes to capitalize on the titular hurry to mine as much precious metal from Canada as the land could bear. Hilarity ensues, particularly in an extended sequence that finds Chaplin, a fellow prospector, and an escaped criminal trapped in a remote cabin on the edge of a cliff. The possibilities of nothingness were never better exploited.
4.) Khrustalyov, My Car! (Aleksei German, 1998)
Look, it just wouldn’t be a list of snowy movies, especially one inspired by the most recent Olympic games, without some acknowledgement of Russia, and it wouldn’t be Russia without German’s fantastical, absurdist, incomprehensible and wondrous vision of a plot during the 1950s to kill Joseph Stalin. I would need an encyclopedia and several weeks to even begin to unpack the narrative beyond that, but this two-and-a-half-hour film so enraptured me that the sense of bothering with such minor details feels entirely unnecessary. I will instead remember its outrageous humor and dozens of images that feel ripped from a strange crossbreed between Bela Tarr and more recent, Tim Burton-infused modern revivals of German expressionism.
3.) Ceiling Zero (Howard Hawks, 1936)
There is another Hawks-infused film that perhaps better capitalizes on the snow, but its remake was too good to leave off this list, and we’ll get to that in a second. Instead, I wish to turn your attention to this marvelous, crackerjack creation, a film so beautifully suffused with character detail that you hardly notice it happening, only for the most minor point to pay off in the most surprisingly poignant way. James Cagney stars as a past-his-prime hotshot pilot, still intent on performing the most outrageous feats of flying and bedding any barely-legal woman within eyesight. Inclement weather (more ice than snow, but hang with me) descends on his outpost, and long-buried tensions gradually boil to the surface, as the humorous camaraderie that had thus far carries us along gives way to devastating loneliness and casual alienation. Isolation breeds introspection, and that’s not always pretty. This may be Hawks at his most distilled, his most pure, and it’s one of Cagney’s finest hours.
2.) The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
What is left to say of Carpenter’s masterpiece? It remains one of the most effective engine movies, with an unbeatable threat, piece by piece, dismantling an imperfect institution. Sure, the stranded men do all they can and it’s still not enough, but the real brilliance comes in their pitiful attempts feeling achingly human, inherently flawed by nature of their limitations, both physical and intellectual. We really feel we are trapped with people, not plot machines. And the snow, treated so matter-of-factly, only presents the only obstacle that matters – walling off the possibility of escape. The weather has rarely felt more palpably oppressive.
1.) McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
Except, perhaps, for Altman’s own masterpiece, an anti-Western set in the Pacific Northwest and really giving those who look at its modern, soaked landscape and scoff something to truly get discouraged about. The rain seems to never stop, until finally, the snow comes, and the simple act of walking, let alone running, which becomes necessary as the true nature of the Wild West comes to bear, feels completely impossible. Altman understood that the danger of these settlements came not from small bands of outlaws who could oppose the law with little expectation of punishment, but from those in tremendous power able to flaunt the very idea of a law not yet laid down. The basic concept of an establishment is as temporary as a storm, and just as dangerous.