Ski Troop Attack

Ski Troop Attack (1960)

They Turned a White Hell Red with Enemy Blood!

An American patrol has to cross behind enemy lines by skis in order to blow up an important railroad bridge. The task is made harder by conflicts between the platoon's veteran sergeant and its inexperienced lieutenant and by constant attacks by pursuing German troops.

Date of release
1960-04-08
TMDB
4.8 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 14m
Genres
Action, War
Director
Roger Corman

Casting

Interesting facts

Ski Troop Attack is a 1960 American war film directed by Roger Corman and starring Michael Forest, Frank Wolff, Richard Sinatra and Wally Campo. Filmgroup released the film as a double feature with Battle of Blood Island (1960).

Production

The script was written by Charles B. Griffith, who had previously worked for Corman. Griffth was inspired in part by the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest.

The film was shot in Deadwood, South Dakota in the Black Hills over ten days. Corman selected the location because he could hire a crew from Chicago for lower rates than he would have paid a Los Angeles-based crew. To consolidate costs, Corman's brother Gene produced another film titled Beast from Haunted Cave at the same time on the same location, and with the same screenwriter and lead actors.

Michael Forest was paid $500 a week and later recalled that "what was taking place was tough on us physically."

Corman hired ski teams from high schools in Deadwood and Lead but could only film them on weekends and after school. One played the Germans and the other played the Americans. He cast a German ski instructor to play the head of the German ski troop, but the instructor broke his leg two days before the shoot, so Corman played the role himself. He had skied occasionally at college and took a one-day skiing lesson prior to filming.

The film's musical score, written by cellist Fred Katz, was originally written for A Bucket of Blood. According to Mark Thomas McGee, author of Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts, each time that Katz was asked to write music for Corman, Katz sold the same score as if it were new music. The score was used in a total of seven films, including The Wasp Woman and Creature from the Haunted Sea.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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