Snowbound

“Everyone is here for a particular reason. I want to know what that reason is.” That’s the premise of David MacDonald’s Snowbound, a Gainsborough production that culminates in a half-dozen mysterious characters holed up in a mountain lodge in search of gold treasure during a blizzard. (Mountain towns blanketed with snow, where sound is muffled and access is restricted, make excellent settings for the tension and violence of film noir; see the top ten noirs in the snow.) We’re led to the lodge by film extra Neil Blair (Dennis Price), who’s been asked by his director Derek Engles (Robert Newton), who’s also Blair’s former commanding officer, to set up shop in the Alpine lodge and report back to Engles on any “intelligence” he can learn about other guests while pretending he’s writing a screenplay. Blair accepts the peculiar assignment, ultimately making the acquaintance of a beautiful “countess” (Mila Parély), a Greek named Keramikos who speaks too much German for comfort (Herbert Lom), a bellicose innkeeper (Willy Fueter), and a British Army deserter (Guy Middleton), among several other hotel guests. It turns out all these characters have some connection to a massive stash of gold bars which were stolen from the Bank of Italy by the Nazis and buried somewhere near their present high-elevation location. Some viewers will find it takes too long to arrive at the tense third act, where the action and noir aesthetic are ratcheted way up, and the tonal shifts along the way (the insertion of comic relief among the denizens of the hotel, for example) are counter-productive, but the payoff is worth it. As he so often does, Lom shines brightest in this film (“Cultivate a little less curiosity,” his character says to Blair), beginning with his ominous entrance, his face shrouded by shadows and shot from underneath, his ambiguous ethnicity the ideal palette for portraying a mysterious European villain (“This is not your little island,” he says about England. “This is Europe after seven years of war. It’s a jungle”). MacDonald and cinematographer Dade create thrilling atmosphere through thick shadows, low-key photography, high and low angles, and a particularly brilliant sequence where dozens of skiers carrying torches whoosh out to the mountains to rescue a missing man in the middle of the night.