Staff Reviews: Bing Crosby Double Feature
As the holiday season comes to a close, I’d like to present a superb Christmas double featuring singer and actor Bing Crosby, both with music from composer Irving Berlin, and the song White Christmas: 1942’s Holiday Inn (co-starring Fred Astaire and Marjorie Reynolds) and 1954’s White Christmas with Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen. Both films revolve around a country farm occupied by Bing Crosby, who decides to turn the spacious rural home into a wintertime entertainment venue. The movies are so tied together that the set of the country home used in White Christmas is actually a remodeled set from Holiday Inn.
1942’s Holiday Inn showcases Bing Crosby’s velvety singing voice and Fred Astaire’s flawless dancing skills (the 4th of July firecracker dance scene is a masterpiece). Crosby plays a performer who is ready to retire to (what he thinks will be) a quiet, lazy country life in Connecticut. Before he goes, he finds out his partner, Astaire, has stolen his fiancée from him. Fred Astaire is meant to appear likable and mischievous (what is love in this movie??) but in 2021 he comes off as a snide, underhanded womanizer who dances VERY WELL. Crosby moves to the country anyway and after a year of hard labor he is not cut out for, decides he’d much rather open his country home as a music venue. There he can have acts tailored to be performed on certain holidays. Soon, his old “pal” Astaire joins in with the hopes of stealing Crosby’s new partner and love interest played by Marjorie Reynolds.
In Holiday Inn’s climax the now-famous classic White Christmas is introduced, and is played romantically, circling back on a moment that Crosby and Reynolds shared earlier in the film. In 1954’s technicolor dream White Christmas, the movie opens on a somber rendition of the song. Battered American soldiers during World War II take a moment to watch Crosby and band perform White Christmas, the romantic lyrics making them homesick not just for their quiet lives they left behind but for a time before the world was torn up by the war. It’s a beautiful version of the song and it really drives how much has changed between both films, 1942 to 1954.
As much fun as Holiday Inn is, 1954’s White Christmas is a movie with much more life to it. After Danny Kaye’s character saves Bing Crosby’s character from a falling wall (was it an Acme brand wall?), Kaye nudges his way into Crosby’s act. Years later after a successful career, their lives not only become entangled with the lives of a traveling up-and-coming down-and-out sister act, but with an old respected General the men served under during the war, who now occupies a country lodge in Vermont, his best days behind him. It’s up to Bing and crew to ensure this man feels dignified.