Snow Scence

I'm getting pretty homesick seeing all the snow that going around MT and NM, and since all we have here is RAIN, TORNADOS, AND FLOODS, this list hit me.  The Telegraph recently released this list of the greatest snow scenes in movies.  Check 'em out and leave your snowy-wintery movie favorites in the comments section.

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

When we see a snow-globe fall from Kane’s dying fingers to shatter on the stairs, it sets up cinema’s greatest metaphor for the life unlived. Childhood days of sledding are a dreamy, white-shrouded vision, but one sealed off behind glass, an idyll the tycoon can no longer access.

It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

The sheer quantity of snow in Capra’s holiday classic required a pioneering special effect. The traditional white-painted cornflakes made too much noise, so 6000 gallons of the fire-fighting chemical foamite, mixed with soap and pumped through a wind machine, were used instead.

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

They were warned, the Torrance family, that winters in the Overlook Hotel would be fierce: the snowdrift comes right up to second floor windows, enabling Danny to be pushed out and run into the maze to hide. It’s here that his dad gets lost for good, following tiny footsteps into a frozen void.

Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)

Lucky for Phil Connors that there’s always snow on Groundhog Day, or how else would he perfect the art of ice sculpture? Ramis’s immortal time-loop comedy is partly about being stuck in one climate and learning to make the most of it – constant slush is no one’s idea of fun.

White Christmas (Michael Curtiz, 1954)

“May all your Christmases be white” is a long-abandoned dream here – but less so in Vermont. Irving Berlin’s song has become more famous than the film it belongs in, though he came up with the melody on the set of Top Hat (1935), and used it first in the Crosby-Astaire vehicle Holiday Inn (1942).

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

From its famous opening, with a helicopter inexplicably chasing a dog across Antarctic wastes, John Carpenter’s shape-shifter shocker is the coldest, bleakest, least cuddly of monster movies. If you made a snowman out of this stuff, chances are it would mutate and try to eat your head.

Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)

Anyone who’s never been to North Dakota, and knows it only from the Coen Brothers’ indelible fable of criminal bungling, would be led to expect an entire population saying “Yah, you betcha”, and a flat white horizon as far as the eye can see. Pack a parka: there’s no escape.

The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)

Not too hospitable, the planet of Hoth – when you’re not being gored by the Abominable Snowman-like Wampas or besieged by AT-AT walkers, you’re falling to your knees in an appalling blizzard, and being forced to spend the whole night curled inside the guts of a ripped-open tauntaun.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter Hunt, 1969)

James Bond does like a ski chase – there are more in The Spy Who Loved Me and The World is Not Enough, and that one on a cello in The Living Daylights – but all pale next to the scale and momentum of his escape from Blofeld’s Alpine hideout. Those Arctic shenanigans in Inception owe it a lot.

Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990)

John Hughes, who wrote this merrily slapsticky Yuletide home-invasion romp, has been called the Frank Capra of his age, and had a similar thing for the white stuff (see also: Planes, Trains and Automobiles). Here it lends blanket assurance that nothing too awful will befall Macaulay Culkin.

McCabe and Mrs Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

You don’t get much more anti-heroic, not to mention slower, than the climactic gunfight in Altman’s downtrodden frontier western. It’s all furtive trudging, hiding behind rocks, and bullets in the back. The elements lent a hand: heavy snow fell for nine days while they shot it.

Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald, 2003)

Ascending the near-vertical west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes wasn’t the problem for Joe Simpson and Simon Yates: it was coming back down. Crawling over a glacier with a shattered knee, Boney M playing in your head, and only melted snow keeping you alive, is the very definition of delirium.

Time Out (L’emploi du temps) (Laurent Cantet, 2001)

Laurent Cantet’s Golden Lion-winner, a searing study of mid-life crisis, swathes the screen in white, suggesting the blank page that downsized consultant Vincent (superb Aurélien Recoing) finds himself looking at, as he keeps pretending to occupy himself in the Franco-Swiss Alpine hinterland.

Meet Me in St Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)

It’s not all trolley songs, jollity and tinsel. Minnelli’s evergreen musical plumbs the depths of despair when the distraught Tootie (Margaret O’Brien) savagely lops the heads off her snow people. “Nobody’s going to have them! I’d rather kill them if we can’t take them with us!”

The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)

A school bus, a frozen lake, a slippery bend: snow-fond novelist Russell Banks (Affliction) wrote the source for Egoyan’s haunted drama about a terrible accident in British Columbia. Ian Holm’s hearse-chasing lawyer proposes a suit, but the town’s emotional deep-freeze takes some thawing.

Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990)

Burton’s gentlest film — yes, the one where Johnny Depp has blades for fingers — reaches its peaks of pathos when toytown suburbia turns wintry, and Edward bends his talents to fashioning the exquisite sculpture of an angel from a block of ice, while his sweetheart Winona Ryder gawps on in astonishment.

Dr Zhivago (David Lean, 1965)

Has there even been a better excuse to put Julie Christie in sable hats? Costumier Phyllis Dalton inspired a fashion revolution here, but Lean and cinematographer Freddie Young don’t stint on the chill, doing for a trek through the glacial Urals what they did for the desert in Lawrence of Arabia.

Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001)

It’s impossible to forget the scene in this one-of-a-kind Inuit epic where the hero runs for his life, completely naked and seemingly for days, across the frozen wastes of the Canadian Arctic. It also wins the prize for snowiest interiors, given that most of the dramatic intrigue centers in and around igloos.

The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)

Chaplin’s Tramp turns Klondike prospector in this classic silent comedy, full of helter-skelter snow chases and marauding bears. Inside his shonky cabin, which ends up tipping off a cliff, he performs several of his most famous routines, including the dance of the dinner rolls and the serving of boots for supper.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005)

It’s been winter for some hundred years in Narnia, thanks to the curse Tilda Swinton’s White Witch called upon the land. This does allow her to rock the glam-villain stylings of a frosty warrior-sorceress, and to have a chariot drawn by polar bears, so you can understand why she was tempted.