Thin Ice (1937)
6/10
If you can look past all the skating and skating and skating, it's a dandy little film
24 February 2008
It's funny, but after doing well over 4000 reviews on IMDb, I had yet to see a single Sonja Henie film. Although I am a huge fan of Hollywood's Golden Age, I can't stand the odd notion of integrating skating or swimming (such as in the Esther Williams films) into enormous and ultimately silly song and dance spectaculars. While this Henie film was not done by famed choreographer and director Busby Berkeley, it was filled with gobs of song and skating numbers that frankly bored me and looked a lot like the work of Berkeley.

Fortunately, this film was on tape, so I was able to speed through these numbers when they became too tedious. What was left was actually pretty good thanks to some decent writing and a surprisingly nice performance by Henie. She and Tyrone Power did a good job when it came to the story and I really wish Twentieth-Century Fox would have just eliminated or extremely shortened the musical numbers because the romance was very sweet. Apparently folks in the 30s loved these cornball numbers, but they seriously impede the story. If you can look past this, this is a nice little time passer--good enough that I actually might just see another Henie film.
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