Dean Jones plays Johnny Baxter and his ship has just come in. Baxter leaves his dead-end job when he inherits a hotel in the Rocky Mountains. But the hotel is something of a money-pit and it will take all his ingenuity and the help of his family to turn it into a first-class ski resort and keep it out of the hands of evil banker Keenan Wynn.
From the plot alone it’s clear that Snowball Express is a boiler-plate Disney movie. The sets look cheap and are obvious while the location photography must obscure the faces of the stunt performers so almost every exterior is a wide shot (with the exception of close-ups done with rear projection). Snowball Express looks and feels like a made for television movie in every way.
What makes matters worse is that the film, a comedy, only has one gag: Dean Jones can’t ski. So much of the film follows Jones’ mishaps on the slopes. Hundreds of skiers are knocked down in the course of Snowball Express and not one of them gets a genuine laugh. Even when the hotel gets destroyed by Jones the reaction is more one of pity than hysterics.
The one thing that keeps Snowball Express at all watchable is Keenan Wynn’s turn as the evil banker. Wynn plays his part big; almost to the point of twirling his mustache. He’s the best bad guy to lock horns with Dean Jones since David Tomlinson. One spends the whole movie waiting for Wynn to appear again.
Films like Snowball Express are indicative of the identity crisis that Disney faced in the years immediately following Walt Disney’s death. Snowball Express is a film of 1965 that was made in 72 and feels painfully disconnected from the world at large. Luckily for Disney the studio began to find its legs again by the late seventies, but that does nothing for Snowball Express.
