Whether blinding blizzard conditions or a light dusting on Christmas Eve, snowfall intensifies the alienation and adds to the film noir atmospherics. Some of these films are set entirely in a winter wonderland, others have just a few snowy scenes, but all of them will leave you cold.
The minute bitter police detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) enters the cozy, firelit cabin of Mary Malden (Ida Lupino), he can feel the heat in more ways than one. When it turns out Mary’s mentally challenged brother may be responsible for a murder in the small farming town, Wilson finds himself torn between duty and compassion.
With a first act set in the heart of Los Angeles, the film flashes back to a vacation in the snow-capped mountains of Moose, Wyoming, where Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) and his hunting companion encounter thieves on the run and end up literally holding the bag. When bad guy Brian Keith shows up to reclaim the loot, a deadly snowplow will have the final say.
This film is cold. The story, the characters, the tone, even the setting in a town called Bitters, Wyoming, all project a frigidity like no other western. A growling Robert Ryan plays a grumpy cattle rancher who’s forced to defend his town from a band of thieves and fugitives who arrive one winter night.
Mostly shot among Parisian bars and cafes, the film follows Charlie Koller (Charles Aznavour) as he scrapes together a gritty living playing piano for cash. After gangsters enter the story by way of his hapless brother, the action culminates in a deadly shootout at a snow-coated mountain cabin.
In Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, the injured fugitive Johnny McQueen (James Mason) drags himself, often literally, across Belfast to evade the police and reunite with his freedom fighting gang. One of the most gorgeous climaxes in all of noir, the final scene captures the sheen of fresh snow and twinkling snowflakes to masterful aesthetic and emotional effect.
Set in a small, French-speaking town during World War II, the film traces the life of Frank Friedmayer (Daniel Gélin) from his childhood, when his prostitute mother raised him in a brothel, to his deliberate submergence into a life of violent crime.
It’s no surprise to find snow in a film about ice skating, and one of the key action sequences in Suspense takes place at a spectacular frozen pond where a gunshot triggers an avalanche while Belita is practing her routine. Barry Sullivan plays a drifter who falls in love with the skater and becomes embroiled in crime and mystery.
One of the most famous scenes in Hitchcock’s ouevre, tracks in the snow trigger a murderous memory as Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman ski down a mountainside. The film is otherwise set in a Vermont sanitarium where Peck and Bergman play psychiatrists getting to the bottom of Peck’s identity crisis.
The second western-noir crossover on the list, up-to-no-good escaped convicts descend on a small, snowy compound in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where a community of wives are waiting for their gold prospector husbands to return. Glenn Ford and Gene Tierney begin a doomed love affair.
Brothers and bank robbers take shelter from a blizzard in a small farmhouse where old rivalries and violent threats cause psychological chaos. Cornel Wilde plays the ringleader in need of a local to guide him and his fellow fugitives over the nearby mountain toward freedom.
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