Winter Carnival is going totally sweet: you met this hot girl from Smith, and you're really into her, and she's the odds-on favorite to be named this year's snow queen. Then it happens. Some albino mustached count from Latveria skis in out of nowhere and steals the girl.
This is the plot of the 1939 Hollywood film "Winter Carnival," which was originally destined to become a cinematic classic directed by noted author F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald, who wrote "The Great Gatsby," was originally hired by United Artists Studios to direct "Winter Carnival," but he was quickly fired after he made a drunken spectacle outside the Hanover Inn while visiting campus. Sick from alcohol poisoning, Fitzgerald went on to spend nearly two weeks recovering in the hospital.
Production continued under the less exciting -- and less drunken -- direction of Charles Reisner.
The archetypal struggle between good old Dartmouth lads and European nobility began, the movie shows, in the early 1930s when Carnival snow queen Jill Baxter ditched her sophomore love John Welden in favor of a hotshot duke with a moustache and a smooth generic foreign accent. Jill runs off with the duke and becomes an aristocratic tabloid queen -- until she dumps him.
The press goes crazy, and Jill goes on the run all the way back to Dartmouth, just in time see her younger sister about to be swept away by the svelte Count Von Lundborg.
The exciting story is greased along its rollercoaster track with many cries of "Oh Jeepers!" and minutes upon minutes of witty dialogue built around of football metaphors.
The film comments on all things from nobility to drunkenness, but the most noticeable message is an outright rejection of feminism.
One scene shows professor Welden physically forcing an apron over the Jill Baxter's shoulders. Negative rape imagery? Far from it. Baxter proceeds to wash a set of dishes with a big grin across her face.
"You know what's even more surprising [than me washing dishes]? I like it!" Baxter exclaims.
The domesticated snow queen goes on to admit that all this time she has been living her life like it was one giant Winter Carnival.
Every single element of this film, except the large Hanover train department that seems to have disappeared, exists with massive relevance for modern Carnival. There is still an ice sculpture, a ski race and a 15-year-old girl who gets picked up by a frat boy pretending to be a senior and some pesky duke who has all the right moves to make some girl's day and ruin some guy's night.
"Winter Carnival" is showing for the second consecutive year at the Top of the Hop, this time on Saturday from 7 to 9 p.m. with free food. Last year the movie drew a crowd of 125 to 150, according to committee estimates. This year organizer Zach Rubeo '05 hopes for a similar turnout for "Winter Carnival," a movie he called "not great but definitely fun to watch and an important movie to see -- somewhat."
