Snowbound (1948) Robert Newton, Dennis Price, Stanley Holloway, Herbert Lom, Marcel Dalio, Mila Par?ly Movie Review

Snowbound (1948)   3/53/53/53/53/5


Dennis Price and Stanley Holloway in Snowbound (1948)

No Hidden Treasure Here

Engles (Robert Newton), a director, offers an old friend Blair (Dennis Price) some work, but not on the production he is working on but instead to go to a ski lodge in Italy under the guise of writing a script but in fact he wants him to keep an eye on the other visitors staying in the place. As Blair begins to observe the various visitors to the old log cabin guest house he begins to try and work out what is going on as various guests, including one who calls herself the Comtessa Forelli (Mila Par?ly), seem there for secret reasons as it is believed that during the war some Nazi treasure was buried there.

Take an attractive snow filled location, nice sets with plenty of detail and a cast who look appealing in it. That sentence would easily be at home in one of my reviews of a Hallmark movie but "Snowbound" is certainly not a Hallmark movie but an old British thriller with the sort of cast who deliver strong, workmanlike performances but for one reason or another they don't really linger in your memory. That is very much the truth about "Snowbound" as whilst an okay distraction for those interested in old British cinema there is little in this black & white thriller which is going to linger on in your memory after you have finished watching it.

The trouble is that whilst director David MacDonald has tried to instil "Snowbound" with some mystery and style it ends up a movie which for the first hour is all about people talking and little of what they say grabs you. There are times when the babble of the characters ends up making you feel like you are in a room where others are talking but what they are saying is not interesting enough to pay attention to. Even when the pieces start to fall in to place and we learn why the various guests are really at this remote lodge it still doesn't truly grip you. Basically you have to wade past the first 60 or 70 minutes of dialogue heavy scenes before the movie comes close to sparking in to life although even then it is not enough to make anything more than just an okay distraction.

What this all boils down to is that "Snowbound" came up short for me and whilst not a terrible movie it is one which fails to really grab the audience during the first hour, making it sadly a bit of a slog.


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