Wintertime was the last of the nine Sonja Henie skate-musicals made by the Fox studios, and basically the last notable film in her career. It was also the last film the indefatigable Cesar Romero made for Fox before shipping off to the Pacific theater. (He was already enlisted when the film was shot, and shipped out a couple of months after it was released.) Romero wouldn’t make another film for four years. It was also the last — and indeed only — Fox comedy directed by John Brahm, whose reputation rests mainly on dark, moody Val Lewtonish horror films (Hangover Square, The Lodger, The Undying Monster) and tons of noir television series (The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Defenders, Naked City and many more).
All these lasts make Wintertime sound melancholic, but it’s not, though there is a dark thread running through it. It’s of a piece with jazzy comedies that Zanuch’s studio made throughout the war years. They were distinctive in the Hollywood ecology. They often featured popular bands — Glenn Miller’s in Orchestra Wives and Sun Valley Serenade, Harry James’s in Springtime in the Rockies, Benny Goodman’s in Sweet and Low Down, Raymond Scott’s Quintette in Happy Landing) –, superb songs, and free-spirited dance (or in Henie’s case, skating) numbers. Many were filmed in black and white with lots of low-key lighting and quasi-noir effects that gave them the visual feel of B-movies at the time other studios were pushing high polish and technicolor. The paucity of A-list stars compounded the effect. And yet, for me the Fox jazz comedies are among the most cheerful of the time, with a natural, unpretentious gaiety more characteristic of the mid-30s.
The plot: Skip Hutton (Jack Oakie) owns a rundown hotel in the Canadian Rockies. He’s deep in debt and the hotel is about to be repossessed. It’s the middle of winter. But he has a plan — as in most comedies, it’s outrageous. He plots to divert to his own hotel the richest man in Norway, Hjalmar Ostgaard (S.Z. Sakall), and his beautiful ice-skating niece Nora (Henie) when they arrive at the resort town’s train station expecting to stay at the resort’s poshest hotel. Even if they stay only for one night and leave angry at the deception, Skip expects the publicity to bring funds to the hotel’s coffers. At the moment, there are no guests, just the resident talent, the Woody Herman Band. Right away, we get a taste of the music, with the band accompanying Brad (Cesar Romero) and Flossie (Carole Landis) in a funny mini duet of a Nacio Herb Brown-Leo Robin tune, “I Like It Here.” (This Herman band was the last one before he formed the illustrious and innovative first iteration of the Thundering Herd. It included trumpeter Billie Rogers, the first woman horn player in the major big bands.)
Brad expects to charm the beautiful and rich arrival, much to the ire of Flossie, but he’s upstaged by the hotel’s assistant manager, Freddie (Cornel Wilde), to whom Nora takes an instant shine. Romero often played the ridiculous conceited playboy in these Fox films with a disarming, hammy enthusiasm. He had been given leading roles in a couple of fine non-musical comedies, Tall, Dark and Handsome and A Gentleman at Heart, but Zanuck’s plans to make him a romantic star took a nosedive with his enlistment and deployment. He remained a vital part of the Fox comedy output in central supporting roles. In Wintertime, he steals the show. Wilde, just starting his career, is basically a handsome cipher, much like the technical juveniles of classical romantic comedies.
As they sleigh through the magical snowscape, Nora and Freddie are serenaded by the band.
Nora wants to help Skip and Freddie keep the hotel by persuading her father to buy it, but he hates the place. The only remaining way out is to make him so angry with one of the employees that he buys the whole establishment just to be able to fire him. Brad is tricked by Skip into being that scapegoat. He’s so successful at being an insulting and irritating underling that Hjalmar buys the hotel on the spot. Under Hjalmar’s management, it is transformed from ramshackle into high-end. Only two intrigues remain, one romantic, one political.
Everyone falls in love with Nora but she has eyes only for Freddie. Freddie, however, even though he has feelings for Nora, is being seduced away by a beautiful reporter who can provide good publicity for the hotel. In a fine long sequence, Nora tries to get emotional support and advice first from Brad, then Skip, both of whom misunderstand her indirect talk, inferring she’s declaring her love for each of them. Flossie gives her more solid counsel, which leads to a bit of backfire. It’s a nice piece of building up talking jokes to a sweet physical climax.
Wintertime has several of Henie’s signature skating displays. I’m not really interested in them. I recognize how important she was in popularizing and commercializing the art/sport, but most state high-school skating champions nowadays can match, if not surpass, her technique, and Ice Follies kitsch is not my cup of meat. I find her more interesting as an actress. In her American films, almost exclusively comedies, she is the center of romantic attraction, but often with a hidden, slightly dangerous undercurrent that emerges whenever she feels wronged. It’s there even when she’s smiling. I’ve compared her to a Nordic fairy — beautiful, charismatic, but stubborn, driven and volatile, not to be crossed. Furious at what she believes is Freddie’s betrayal, she plots to elope with Brad just for spite.
At one point she tells Brad that anything she can do on ice she can do on the dance floor. That opens the door for a little paired dance number to the accompaniment of another fine Nacio Herb Brown-Leo Robin tune, “Later Tonight,” sung by Herman with the band. Cesar Romero and Sonja Henie are not Fred and Ginger, but it’s a nice turn, much preferable for me to Henie’s “Pavlova of the Ice” routines.
Skip gets wind of the planned elopement and intervenes by absconding with all of Brad’s clothes while he’s in the shower. That sets off a very funny extended slapstick run as Brad desperately tries to find some clothes. Romero wasn’t a great physical comedian, but he was pretty good, and Brahm’s direction is surprisingly deft for a man whose main craft was horror. In the end, Skip, Freddie, and Nora effect a switcheroo. Brad, expecting to sled off with Nora, finds his sleigh partner is actually Skip, while Nora and Freddie elope in the opposite direction.
Wintertime is a wartime movie, and the war is present in a way more usual in the serious films Fox was making at the time. At the beginning of the film, Hjalmar and Nora are nervous about German intentions on their country. The Ostgaards are hoping to escape Norway. The audience is reminded more than once of stringent immigration quotas. It’s a puzzle to me why Wintertime is set in Canada when it could just as easily have been set in the Rockies as were its Fox predecessors, Sun Valley Serenade and Springtime in the Rockies. I can’t find much information about the Canadian quota system in the war years, other than that it was extraordinarily tight. In any case, I’m pretty sure that most audiences forgot about the Canadian location and treated the action as U.S. based. (Nobody speaks with a Canadian lilt or uses Canadian locutions, fwiw.) They may well have known about U.S. quotas. These were also strict, but somewhat favorable to Northern Europeans. That is, except for countries-of-origin that were occupied by Germany. Near the end of Wintertime, Hjalmar and Nora learn that the Nazis have invaded their homeland. (That places the action in 1940.) Now the only way to remain in the country is to marry a native. So Nora’s elopement solves one problem, while also underscoring that their Norwegian kin are facing Nazi aggression with no place to go. There is no happy landing for them.
I can’t find much information about Brahm. The son of the leading German theater director before the ascent of Max Reinhardt, Brahm fled Germany in 1934 and settled in Hollywood in ’37. I don’t know whether he was part of the community of German-speaking Jewish refugee film people in Hollywood. His name does not come up in interviews with them. Maybe it’s because he was pigeon-holed as a B-director throughout his career. Nonetheless, his evocative horror-mysteries are among the most consistent applications of German expressionist cinema techniques, up there with Fritz Lang’s. It’s fitting that a generally cheerful and carefree film titled Wintertime with a Norwegian star and a father played by a famous Jewish-Hungarian actor has a somewhat dark background. For someone like Brahm, “wintertime” probably had more than one meaning. As for the Norwegian star, the film may have been an attempt to rehabilitate her reputation after her adulatory performance before Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and her friendly relations with Nazi brass. Although she supported the U.S. war effort and the Norwegian air force in exile, she was viewed as a quisling by many in Norway, a stigma that was not removed by Wintertime, which of course was not shown in her home country until well after the war ended.