White Christmas is named so you know that gorgeous song is inside it somewhere. Yes, this is the 12-year-younger and lesser remake of Holiday Inn that also stars Bing Crosby and also features the cry-your-guts-out, I-regret-everything holiday tune by Irving Berlin. The big difference is that in White Christmas, Bing sings along to a music box.
The plot centres on Danny Kaye and Bing as a duo of WWII entertainers who find success a decade after the war. Wildly popular, they’re on TV, on Broadway, wherever there’s an audience, that’s where they’ll be. One’s a lady’s man, the other isn’t. Both meet the girls of their dreams with sisters Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, who are also, conveniently, performers. It doesn’t go too smoothly as one set of lovebirds isn’t getting along while the other pair decide they ought to. A trip to Vermont, and a hotel without guests run by the boys’ old commander General Waverly (Dean Jagger), sets up a place to put on the darnedest show you’ve ever seen. As the original New York Times review says of this part of the film, “Someone's nostalgia for the war years and the U.S.O. tours has taken the show awry.”
Directed by Casablanca’s Michael Curtiz, this is a squeaky-clean, bright-eyed bit of holiday-tuned candy that has few sparkling moments but – like many other memorable films before and after it – it’s the theme song that makes the whole trip worthwhile. Filmed in brilliant Technicolor and VistaVision – Paramount’s then novel wide-screen technique – the remake lacks the tang and sass of the original, pretty though it is. Like many remakes and many more to come, its attempt to follow its luckier predecessor fails: it plays it a little too safe and a little too carefully to come up with anything really zingy. The best way to enjoy White Christmas is to listen to the theme tune, wipe away a tear and get back to the turkey til the tune comes around again. It's holiday schmaltz but it's just the right kind of holiday schmaltz - on the right side of corniness, smack dab next to sincere.
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