We here in the West are seeing some very picturesque images from the snow-packed East and all those frosty hillocks are putting me in mind of movie death scenes involving snow. While I appreciate that extreme weather conditions regularly cause actual deaths – and I certainly don’t mean to make light of those statistics – I nonetheless have always had a warm place in my heart for movie characters whose demise comes in the bleak midwinter.

Obviously, spoilers galore follow for the titles mentioned but I’ll try to be somewhat oblique !

1.  MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971).  Towards the end of Robert Altman’s downbeat yet oddly romantic revisionist western, one character’s agonizingly slow progress through the wintry wastes of a Pacific Northwestern mining town halts abruptly as his strength fails him and he perishes, the snowflakes falling mercilessly upon his uncovered head until he vanishes from view.

2.  DAMIEN, OMEN II (1978).  One of the unfortunate victims of the Antichrist’s wrath in this first sequel to THE OMEN (1976) suffers a particularly nasty demise.  While watching a kid’s hockey game, the ice beneath his feet splits asunder and he drops down, immersed in frigid lake water and pulled by the current under the feet of the horrified witnesses.  It’s precisely his proximity to the possibility of rescue that makes this death scene so difficult to watch.

3. DEVIL TIMES FIVE (1974).  A clutch of seemingly orphaned children are taken in from the cold at a hunter’s lodge, only to turn on their hosts in a number of grisly ways.  The climactic death of one character shaded, to my at-the-time young eyes, as an ostensible hero (in part because the folksy character actor was a regular on a couple of TV cops shows) was made even more traumatic because it was protracted and expressly cruel… as you can surmise from the above image.

4.  THE RED TENT (1969).  Sean Connery’s death in this final film from Mikhail Kalatozov is only a spoiler if you don’t know your history.  Playing legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-1928), the first man to reach both the North and South Poles, Connery flies to rescue stranded fellow explorer Peter Finch, whose airship has gone down on the return leg of an expedition to the North Pole.  Then at the height of his popularity as the star of the “James Bond” films, the characteristically never-say-never Connery has a haunting final moment, standing amid the wreckage of his own downed airship, dealing with the failure of his mission and knowing full well he hasn’t a chance in Hell of surviving the arctic cold.

5.  CASTLE KEEP (1969).  It’s actually hard for me to pick one of the many deaths that occurs in this unjustly neglected Sydney Pollack film.  Burt Lancaster plays a martinet army major whose squadron is charged with holding a Belgian chateau against a line of advancing Nazis.  You don’t get far into this existential war film before you’re chest high in ambiguity.  “All of us had been killed twice, some of us three times,” confesses Tony Bill, as the film’s narrator Private Benjamin.  “Maybe that’s why we were at the castle.”  There’s a touch of OUTWARD BOUND (1930) to the increasingly curiouser and curiouser goings on as each soldier finds some reason to want to stay in the castle or the nearby village.  I suppose it’s the deaths in the rose garden that are my favorites, occurring off camera as bullets cut the air and slice the heads off the blooms before they find their targets.

6.  THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967).  There’s all kinds of winter fun in this lighthearted but undeniably creepy horror spoof from Roman Polanski.  Vampires drop in on buxom bathers through sundered skylights, hoteliers are found frozen solid in the snow, a legion of undead bloodsuckers arise from frost covered graves and, best of all (especially for an impressionable 10 year-old) a hunchback uses an empty coffin for a toboggan, which seems like a really cool idea until he sails straight off the lip of a precipice to his (presumed) death.

7.  THE GRAND SILENCE (1968).  Boy, we sure didn’t have our hopes up during the late 60s, did we?  Even forty years after the fact, this seminal and excessively snowy spaghetti western continues to sucker punch Euroater fans who thought Sam Packinpah had taught them everything they needed to know about cynicism.  Even after the surprisingly cruel killing of the quasi-comic relief sheriff, I just wasn’t expecting the grim result of this particular showdown.  And speaking of grim…

8.  CUT-THROATS NINE (1972).  This Spanish-Italian coproduction was directed by Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, who got his start helming Zorro sequels and knock-offs but in this case delivers a no-holds-barred tale of survival, deception, desperation and white hot hate.  A cavalry sergeant (Claudio Undari, billed as “Robert Hundar”) shepherds a group of vicious convicts across the winter wastes, one of whom is responsible for the murder of his wife.  Midway through the film, the seeming protagonist is beaten by his charges, shackled inside an abandoned stable and burned alive… but if you think he’s out of the game  you’re not the only one in for a shock.  Bleak, brutal and yet disarmingly poetic, CUT-THROATS NINE is a superb (if unpleasant) blending of prairie drama and balls-out Gothic horror.

9.  THE ROARING TWENTIES (1939).  As a kid, I was so impressed with how Raoul Walsh staged this death scene on the snowy steps of an inner city church that I used to mimic the action through my teenage years and into my 30s for the amusement of my friends and drinking buddies.  It took me that long to perfect the transitional moment at which the character, mortally wounded from a bullet wound in the back, can ascend no higher and falls, rotating on his way down to wind up on his back for his aggrieved moll to mourn.

10.  Even though I use the image at top from THE SHINING (1980), the above Jacksickle is not my favorite frosty fiend.  That honor goes to Robert Taylor in THE LAST HUNT (1956).  Taylor plays such a hateful bastard that you want to see somebody take him out long before he does and yet death finds “Charlie Gilson” in the most unexpected of ways.  I feel justified in this spoiler because I want to draw attention to the unusual quality of this Richard Brooks western, which might slip the notice of moviegoers not predisposed to oaters, and because it dispatches a movie villain in a way would never been done nowadays.  Post 1980, audiences prefer to see their bad guys killed seven times from Sunday before their actual demise or sent off with a pithy bon mot (“Yipee-yo-ky-ay, muthaf***er”).  You don’t get that here and the shock of having your expectations thwarted will stay with you until long after the thaw.

Stay warm!