Thursday, January 10, 2019

Thursday Movie Picks #235: The Cold



This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is The Cold, which is appropriate since I'm trying to get over a particularly irritating cold. But I'm assuming that's not what was meant by the theme, and besides, I found it a lot easier to think of movies set in cold places than movies where characters are suffering from the sniffles. As is usually the case, this week's selections are pretty old:

Trail of '98 (1928). Silent about the Klondike gold rush and the people who try to make their fortune in gold. Ralph Forbes plays the main prospector; Dolores Del Rio is his love interest. Some of the scenes of the characters trying to get to the Klondike from where they disembark from the boats are surprisingly harrowing.

Island in the Sky (1953). John Wayne plays the pilot of a cargo transport plane which is forced to land in the cold of northern Labador. Search planes are sent out to try to find the plane, but it's a big and cold wilderness, a fact that both the men on the ground and the pilots searching for them know all too well. Will they be able to find the crew before the crew freeze to death? The movie also has a disturbing scene of Andy Devine doing a cannonball into a swimming pool.

Ice Station Zebra (1968). Rock Hudson plays the commander of a submarine who is given the orders to take a crew to the North Pole and rescue the crew of an Arctic weather station. The Soviets are going there too, and Hudson realizes there's more to the mission, although he doesn't quite know what that more is. Meanwhile, he's got a disparate bunch in his submarine crew, and fears one of them could be a double agent.

3 comments:

Brittani Burnham said...

I'm 0/3 with your picks as I quite often am. Maybe after a few more years of Blind Spots I'll eventually get to more of these classics. lol

Birgit said...

I love your picks even though I haven’t seen any of these. You showcase great movies! I know about the behind the scenes issues on The Trail of ‘98 and highly recommend watching “Hollywood: The Stuntmen” and excellent 13 part series narrated by James Mason 5alking all about the silent era. Each episode is dedicated to something or someone important from the Stuntmen to the director’s, cameramen and stars. They spoke with many people who worked dur8ng this time including the Stuntmen who worked on this movie. The footage you see is real and Stuntmen ended up dying as a result.

Dell said...

I'm just going to say ditto to Britt's comment.