A whole generation of American film, packed into one small 1992 movie not enough people saw. The director was Keith Gordon, who played the bullied nerd with the murderous car in John Carpenter's Christine.

Ethan Hawke leads and narrates, three years before Before Sunrise. Gary Sinise makes his debut, two years before Forrest Gump. Peter Berg is in it, before he directed Friday Night Lights.

A MIDNIGHT CLEAR (1992) sends a six-man American intelligence squad, chosen for their high IQs and already gutted by losses, into the snowbound Ardennes in December 1944. They find a small German unit that doesn't want to fight.

The Germans want to surrender, but they need to stage a fake battle first, so it looks to their own army like they went down bravely. The two sides build snowmen, sing a carol across the snow, and set up the ruse. Then one tragic error sends things spiraling.

William Wharton wrote the novel it comes from, and he had lived it, wounded in that same battle before becoming a street painter in Paris who published his first book past fifty.

It was filmed far from Europe, in White Pine Canyon outside Park City, Utah, during the coldest winter in 83 years. Still, there was almost no snow, so the production had to truck it in from the mountains and shovel it onto the set by hand, wiping away every footprint between takes.

That frozen canyon location is now The Colony, a gated enclave of multimillion-dollar ski homes.