Movie Report: White Christmas (1954)

Well, after watching Holiday Inn, of course I put this videocassette into the VCR the next evening. The label on the video indicates I paid twice as much for it as Holiday Inn, but they both look like church youth group garage sales. Probably different years. They haven’t had one of those sales in years, which explains why have accumulating boxes of “donations” in my garage.

This film starts with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire Danny Kaye putting on a show near the front in France, 1944. It’s Christmas Eve, and their division is about to move up, so they want to give the guys something pleasant before they do. And they want to honor their outgoing General Waverly who is being replaced with someone straight from the Pentagon. After the show, Phil Davis (Kaye) pulls Bob Wallace (Crosby) from a falling wall, saving his life. When they meet in the hospital, Wallace expresses his gratitude and offers to do anything for Davis–and Davis responds by showing him a song, which is a duet–although Wallace claims he works alone, he now has a partner.

A decade later, they are a successful act on tour with their show when they meet two sisters, Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy (Vera-Ellen) Haynes, a sister act whose brother served with Davis and Wallace. When the girls announce that they’re heading to Vermont (and have to get out of town fast), Davis gives the girls their plane tickets and stalls the local law while the girls escape. He then connives a trip to Vermont with Wallace with the girls, and they discover that the inn where the girls are to perform is owned by General Waverly. The inn might as well be closed: with no snow in Vermont this year, no guests are staying at the inn. But Wallace and Davis bring their show to the inn for rehearsals and then call their old service mates to come see it to support the old man. And finis!

Watching them on consecutive nights leads one to compare the two, and I definitely prefer Holiday Inn. The songs are better, and this film has a couple or three song-and-dance numbers just grafted onto the narrative under the pretense that they’re parts of the show being rehearsed. One, the “Choreography” number, laments that the talents of individual singers and dancers are being lost to the large song and dance numbers that are merely synchronized movements of masses. Crosby and Clooney share a good number that fits into the plot as does “Snow”, but they’re almost exceptions.

The film has Vera-Ellen in the role of the young attractive woman. Too young for Crosby’s character, she pairs up with Kaye. How does she compare to Marjorie Reynolds?

Vera-Ellen was a natural dancer who played in numerous films in the 1940s and 1950s, dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in addition to Danny Kaye. She was briefly the youngest member of the Rockettes and appeared on Broadway before breaking into pictures.

Yes, very pretty, but not as incandescent as Marjorie Reynolds.

While watching some of the dance numbers and her high kicks, I thought she would be an excellent martial artist, which is not something I would say of Reynolds.

She retired from acting in the late 1950s as the movie musical waned, perhaps killed by Broadway-style choreography instead of relying on the charisma of individual performers (I’ll never be a musical expert who can speak authoritatively on the subject). She died at the age of sixty in the early 80s, far too young.