Movie Review: The Donner Party (1992)

The wind blows. The snow drifts. Walking becomes an increasingly difficult chore.

A typical winter day in Chicago? Sure. But also the conditions dealt with, to varying degrees of success, by the Donner Party.

When I was in grade school, I used to tell a joke that was, at the time, hilarious to me: "Donner Party, table for four...wait...Donner Party, table for three?...um...Donner Party, table for two?" And so on.

This was long before I had any real knowledge of the Donner Party--what they'd gone through, the losses they'd suffered, how any of them survived.

Ric Burns--younger brother of Ken Burns, director of The Civil War, Jazz and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, amongst many other television events--wrote and directed this documentary way back in 1992 for the PBS series American Experience. I saw it when it first aired and subsequently bought the DVD of the program. Unfortunately, like most of my DVD collection, it was lost when I had to abandon La Casa del Terror back in 2016.

But like so many other movies, I've been able to replace my copy of The Donner Party and gave it a view on a recent cold winter's night.

And it made me shiver, though not from the cold.

You likely know the basic story: A group of settlers, led by George Donner, left from Springfield, IL, in the spring of 1846. They tried to beat the onset of winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They failed. The snows set in and dumped feet of snow in the passes the Donner Party would need to travel through. The party bogged down, used up what little provisions they'd brought along and, eventually, resorted to cannibalism to survive.

There's much more to the story, of course, and Ric Burns, like his older brother, goes into great detail and uses a combination of period photography, new footage of the locations where the grisly events took place and interviews with experts on the subject, all narrated by David McCullough (who also handled the same duties on The Civil War) and with actors like Timothy Hutton, J.D. Cannon and Amy Madigan giving voice to the unfortunate souls.

I re-watched The Donner Party on Super Bowl Sunday--I didn't care about either team and have long since given up caring about the commercials--and found that, even in the relatively cozy confines of la Casa de Mama, I was more than capable of feeling a chill.