Snow Gets in Your Eyes (1938) User Reviews (9)

Good To The Last Squeal

[krorie · 6/10 · 7 April 2007]

Ski competition in a department store in New York City? That's what this short is about and you'll have to see to appreciate the transition from outside ski slopes to the department store ramp, which is handled with skill.

The plot of this musical comedy two-reeler is simple: A guy who sells sausages at the department store is enamored of a salesgirl who works down the aisle from him. Hoping to impress her, he takes ski lessons so he can win the competition. Sandwiched between the light comedy sketches are two delightful musical treats, "Girl Wanted," and, would you believe, "The Harlem Yodel!"

The real stars of the show are the wonderful Dandridge Sisters, Dorothy Dandridge, Vivian Dandridge, and Etta Jones, each uncredited. The beautiful Dorothy Dandridge was to go on to a highly successful movie career including a nomination for the Academy Award for her role in "Carmen Jones," not long before her tragic death from a drug overdose.

The title is derived from lame yet harmless attempts at slapstick humor, centering on Charles Judels as Schlitz and Chester Clute as King Winter who gets fake "snow in his eyes" when he attempts to introduce the competition. "Snow Gets in Your Eyes" came out over a decade before the popular hit tune, "Don't Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes," dominated the nation's musical charts and thus is not a parody of that song but rather a pun on "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," from the 1933 musical, "Roberta."

Romance at the counters

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 26 December 2015]

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.

Mildly amusing slapstick about an indoor ski carnival in a department store...

[Doylenf · 5/10 · 28 May 2009]

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.

Worth seeing for The Dandridge Sisters musical number

[cyndi_fan247 · 6/10 · 6 January 2022]

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.

"I hear the call of winter and the flurry of snow."

[classicsoncall · 6/10 · 13 March 2017]

This story confused me a bit with the results of the ski jumping contest, because the second set of jumps by the principal competitors, Tommy Bradford (Roger Converse) and Buddy Brooks (Hudson Shotwell), were both in the forty foot range, while their first attempts were in the neighborhood of seventy five feet. Tommy won both, and in the first jump went ahead by six and three quarter inches. It was a head scratcher, but not enough to make me want to go back and watch it again.

Probably one's best takeaway here is listening to the Dandridge Sisters with Etta Jones singing a couple of catchy numbers, including 'Girl Wanted' and 'The Harlem Yodel'. Besides that, whenever I see one of these older films, I'm on the lookout for unusual product placement, and this one had Ritz Crackers and Bisquick on a display shelf behind the sausage making counter where Tommy kept an eye on his prospective girlfriend June (Virginia Grey). So both products have been around at least eighty years!

The title of the short is obviously a take-off on the popular song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", set to a wintry theme. Seeing a downhill ski slope constructed inside the All City Department Store was a bit unusual for the era, making me wonder how the store was able to afford such an extravagance. Particularly when a pretty good day at June's cosmetics counter resulted in total sales of twenty two dollars! Well, that probably took care of the snowflakes.

Brief Musical Short On Inspiration

[atlasmb · 4/10 · 12 March 2017]

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.

The place where I spent part of all my summers growing up . . .

[oscaralbert · 7/10 · 28 December 2019]

. . . features a ski jumping hill. Sometimes competitions had to be cancelled there because the tail winds were forcing contestants to "out-jump" the hill, as they flew 600 feet and more. Of course, Tinsel Town's version of this Alpine Sport is much tamer than Real Life. The preliminary round of SNOW GETS IN YOUR EYES "highlights" leaps of 21', 15', 35' and 35.6'! It does not get much better during the SNOW GETS IN YOIUR EYES' so-called "championship" bracket, as the jumpers' distances are reported as 39' and 41' (with the final effort being a scratch). Amid my old stomping grounds, most of the 12-year-old girls would have put all the men pictured here to shame! Hollywood never had the gall to dumb down a Western, and send Marion Mitchell "Duke" Morrison out to face the bad guys with a "two-shooter" or squirt gun. No wonder the American Midwest rejects L.A.'s fake version of Reality, given the total disregard for True Facts displayed by such insipid pap as SNOW GETS IN YOUR EYES.

Long Jump

[boblipton · 5/10 · 3 January 2020]

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.

Egads! It's Bad!

[ninehammers · 3/10 · 13 August 2020]

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.