Trivia

Put into production by Warner Bros. solely on the strength of the success of the same studio's Giant (1956), also based on an Edna Ferber novel--some critics dubbed it "Giant on the Rocks"--four years earlier. The same year also produced a big-budget MGM remake of yet another Ferber novel, "Cimarron" (Cimarron (1960)), but neither that film nor "Ice Palace" succeeded with critics or audiences.

Edna Ferber later said she felt as though she'd rushed the novel's completion. She had experienced a recurrence of neuralgia in the aftermath of a car accident, which led her to submit "Ice Palace" for publication instead of doing another draft. "I felt if I didn't finish the book I would never be able to write again," she said.

Edna Ferber's novel was published in March 1958. In its review, the "Los Angeles Times" remarked that it was "not one of her better works." Still, it became a best seller based on Ferber's faithful following, and is thought to have contributed to Alaska becoming a state the following year.

Filming began in August of 1959, with background footage shot at Mendenhall Glacier, ten days spent at Juneau and Petersberg on Mitkof Island, and three days of filming at Fairbanks. There was so little snow that the unit was forced to recreate many of the blizzard scenes back at the Warner studios in Burbank, which ultimately lent the film a highly artificial, studio-bound look upon which critics pounced.

A commercial and critical failure. described by Edna Ferber's biographer as "glacial at the box office." While primary interest had mounted over supposed location shooting in a brand-new American state that had not yet been explored by the majority of its citizens, the "New York Times" reviewer called it "as false and synthetic a screen saga as has rolled out of a color camera" and "no more authentic than cornstarch snow on a studio set."