July 8th, 2008
9. A Simple Plan (1998)
Snow covers a multitude of sins in A Simple Plan, where the discovery of a downed plane carrying $4 million leads to paranoia, deceit, and murder among two brothers, a friend, and their families. Sam Raimi's use of the remote Wisconsin countryside recalls the work of his former collaborators the Coen brothers in Fargo, another film where seemingly happy-go-lucky Midwesterners are revealed as greedy, weak, and desperate to escape the consequences of their heinous actions. In the end, family man Bill Paxton avoids the law but loses his fortune, all because he couldn't wait out an endless winter to collect on the bounty.
10. The Ice Storm (1997)
As the tagline for Ang Lee's 1997 film goes, "It was 1973, and the climate was changing." Sure, that's a metaphor for the post-counterculture experimentalism that had seeped into the Connecticut suburbs, the setting of Lee's adaptation of Rick Moody's novel. But it's also pretty literal: The film centers on the events of Thanksgiving weekend, just as fall slowly abdicates to winter. It's cold, but not cold enough for snow in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the ground, it's below freezing, so the moisture from a drizzly rainstorm coats everything in ice. It's beautiful, but also dangerous if you're driving—or taking a stroll, as Elijah Wood discovers.
11 and 12. The Thing From Another World (1951) and The Thing(1982)
Both adaptations of John W. Campbell's short novel Who Goes There? share its remote, frigid setting, though they don't have much else in common. The first, which bears a heavier stamp from producer Howard Hawks than from journeyman director Christian Nyby, finds a group of scientists in Alaska pitted against an emotionless vegetable alien intent on destroying them in order to sustain itself. The film's rapid dialogue and the image of hardworking men and women banding together to perform a difficult task mark it as a Hawks film, and its transplanting of free-floating fear to a monster from space would be much imitated throughout the decade.
The cold hinders the characters in Nyby's film, but it's downright hostile in John Carpenter's remake, which faithfully adheres to Campbell's original premise of an alien capable of imitating the form of humans, or any other living creature. Moving the action to Antarctica, the film uses cold to pin its characters inside as they turn on one another. There's no fleeing the scene when the cold itself can kill. And there's no Hawks-inspired bonding among people when anyone on the site might be an evil alien. Carpenter made no secret of his admiration of Hawks, but he essentially made the opposite of a Hawks film. Where Hawks left viewers with a defeated enemy and the command to "Watch the skies," in Carpenter's film, the chill shows no signs of lifting.
13. The Gold Rush (1925)
Charlie Chaplin went into insulin shock after shooting dozens of takes of the scene where he eats a licorice boot. For those without a taste for Chaplin's brand of comedy, that's a lot funnier than anything else in the movie, but The Gold Rush is still considered one of his greatest films. Although the story of a lonely prospector looking to hit it rich in the Klondike was largely a studio creation, it's a testament to Chaplin's Hollywood clout at the time that he was actually able to film one scene (of gold miners trudging up a mountain pass) on location in Chilkoot, Alaska. The Gold Rush was so influential that it handed down dozens of cold-weather tropes; 75 years after its release, The Simpsons was still riffing on the "two guys who hate each other get trapped in a cabin by an avalanche" scene.
14. Quintet (1979)
Here's something to know about Quintet: It's bad. Really, really bad. It would probably be the worst movie ever to feature Robert Altman's name in the director slot if not for the existence of H.E.A.L.T.H. Still, it's one hell of a cold-weather picture. Filmed at the ruined site of the 1967 Montreal World's Fair in the dead of winter, it conveys, if nothing else, what a drag it must be to live in the post-apocalyptic ice age in which it's set. Filmed in the weird part of the 1970s (as evidenced by the presence of Nina Van Pallandt), Quintet is about a drifter, played by a cold, pissed-off-looking Paul Newman, who wanders into a futuristic city and gets involved with what seems to be a futuristic version of the Mafia. If this movie had been made 16 years later, it would have cost half a billion dollars and been called Waterworld. The lesson? Count your blessings.
15. Ice Station Zebra (1968)
Although star Rock Hudson cited it as his favorite role, John Sturges' Cold War thriller Ice Station Zebra isn't anything like a classic. There are some good performances by Hudson and Patrick McGoohan, but Jim Brown as a nail-chewing Marine looks totally lost, multiple writer turnovers resulted in a messy script, and it's at least half an hour too long. Still, it works for two reasons: It nicely presages the great-game spy thrillers of the 1970s, and it puts the cold in Cold War, with its narrative of a desperate submarine sent on a reckless rescue mission to a remote arctic weather station. At any rate, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes liked it: He ordered his Las Vegas TV station to show it more than a hundred times before finally buying a print which played on continuous loop in his Desert Inn hideout.
16. The Ice Harvest (2005)
It's Christmastime in Wichita. A couple of thieves (John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton) have just lifted more than $2 million in cash from the local mob and need to get out of town. Fast. And yet it's clear from the opening scene of The Ice Harvest that it isn't going to be possible, as the Midwest plains are coated in a sheet of ice. Director Harold Ramis, working from a wry script by Robert Benton and Richard Russo, turns the forbidding landscape into a metaphorical running joke, as the thieves slip and slide desperately across the terrain without actually getting anywhere.
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