Snow Gets in Your Eyes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not exactly a witty slapstick comedy short, this one is strictly corn from start to finish.

VIRGINIA GREY is the pretty sales clerk who has ROGER CONVERSE in love with her at an adjoining sales booth. The whole story takes place during an indoor ski event. Both of the main contenders for the prize are smitten with Grey. Converse brushes up on ski technique to win at the indoor ski carnival, but not before the other guy tries to win by deceptively coating Converse's skis with soap.

A few silly sight gags can't overcome the overall weakness of the script--such as CHESTER CLUTE getting hit in the face by artificial snowballs as he attempts to be King Winter, but the whole story is just a clumsy attempt at combining comedy with a couple of musical interludes.

Roger Converse sings an uninspired song called "Girl Wanted" which is repeated at the happy ending. VIRGINIA GREY gets to bat her eyes in her usual flirtatious manner while being romanced by two men. And a group of black entertainers get to do a swing number--in the middle of which I recognized DOROTHY DANDRIDGE as one of the black girl singers before she became a name.

Mindless fluff, weakly executed.