Snow Gets in Your Eyes

Described as a short musical romance, "Snow Gets in Your Eyes" is short on romance and short on music, though the Dandridge Sisters appear briefly. The comedy also comes up short. This is a rather uninspiring twenty minute film that revolves around an indoor skiing competition which includes no suspense or prodigious talent.

Really there is not much to recommend this film. No laugh out loud moments, no tear-jerking scenes, no hum-worthy melodies.

Virginia Grey was a long time favorite of MGM's Louis B. Mayer, she appeared in dozens of MGM films and was at one time briefly linked with Clark Gable.

She gets a chance to star in her own short subject here with a pair of forgotten romantic rivals, all working in a department store. It's wintertime and the store is sponsoring a ski jumping contest in the store. One very nice set was built for this.

In any event her two rivals, Roger Converse and Hudson Shotwell get to jump to win a store prize and the fair lady's hand.

Charles Judels is the officious store manager who backs the wrong horse and ends up hanging around so to speak.

The short subject crammed a few musical numbers in its running time including three by the Dandridge Sisters before lead Dorothy went out on her own.

It's a pleasant 20 or so minutes with a few laughs also at the store manager's expense.

Snow Gets In Your Eyes is cover-your-eyes awful! However, it's the kind of awful that still manages to retain a tiny bit of charm and curiosity for the viewer. From the ridiculousness of the premise to the flat acting to the uneven direction, there's not much to warrant a recommendation. But "not much" does not mean nothing. With the way traditional gender roles are treated, as well as the portrayal of minorities, a good deal of this short film is unintentionally hilarious! If you watch it during a lazy day, it's worth 20 minutes of your time.

Roger Converse has just lost his job at the sausage counter of the department store he works in. To get his job back and win the heart of Virginia Grey, he enters the competition for the ski jump off the enormous mountain built in the store in this musical short subject.

That mountain is a huge prop for one of MGM's sound stages, but those sound stages are big, and that's largely the point of this short, and fairly typical of MGM's shorts during this period. There's always something bizarre in them, because MGM spent huge sums of money on their shorts. While the Pete Smith Specials, the Fitzpatrick Traveltalks, the cartoons, were intended to make money, shorts like this were loss leaders, and the money had to show on the screen.

This isn't a great short, but it's mildly entertaining, and there is a ~3 minute song and dance number called "Harlem Yodel" that is actually really great, which features black musicians The Dandridge Sisters along with the Cats and the Fiddle, and it's actually quite good and definitely the highlight of the film. The other musical number that precedes it is a bit of a throwaway. The plot isn't terribly interesting, but the indoor ski jump in a department store (which is a central part of the story) was pretty unique.