Friday's Old Fashioned: Ski Patrol (1940)

As the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics get under way, the International Olympic Committee in conjunction with the United Nations called for a 52-day pause on all wars, a callback to the nominal truce of the Ancient Olympic Games, a futile, mostly symbolic gesture evoking an oversized sense of its own influence. Not to be confused with the 1990 comedy “Ski Patrol” about a wealthy developer seeking to sabotage a ski resort, 1940’s “Ski Patrol” is about the 1939-40 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. Yet, even if it is, and even if it is mostly set on the Finnish border where a reserve unit tries to fend off the enemy from tunneling beneath a mountain pass to attack, it is an American film, directed by Lew Landers, produced by Universal, and shot both on the Universal backlot and on location in California. Maybe that explains the various accents, incorrect Finnish uniforms, as IMDb has pointed out, and a screenplay that does not describe the reasons for the conflict in any detail whatsoever. No, this 1940 “Ski Patrol” feels conspicuously like an American war film pre-Pearl Harbor, wrestling between militancy and pacifism, with a gallery of wooden characters that are chiefly vessels for dialogue arguing one or the other. “In war, all friendships are forgotten. We must destroy those on top of the mountain.” 

That’s too bad because the set-up provides a chance at real drama between Finnish skier Viktor Ryder (Philip Dorn) and Russian skier Ivan Dubroski (Reed Hadley) competing in the 1936 Winter Olympics, the former helping the latter up when he falls as Ivan goes on to win gold and Viktor silver. That Olympic set-up, I confess, is why I watched in the first place and is what provides the one charged moment. After the race, when Viktor and Ivan receive their medals in a conference room, an Avery Brundage-like American gives a speech lionizing the glory of sportsmanship, and of sport itself, and how this will help bring an end to needless war…at which point we get a smash cut to a bomb exploding, the start of WWII and not so much a figurative snuffing of the Olympic spirit as an arch obliteration of it. Citius, Altius, Fortius, Extinctus.