Review of Holiday Inn (1942) by Edith N — 25 Dec 2008

I seem to recall liking [i]White Christmas[/i] better. But [i]White Christmas[/i] has Danny Kaye, after all, and that cuts the treacle nicely. I've always liked Gene Kelly better than Fred Astaire and Bob Hope better than Bing Crosby. (You see, I know the [i]Road[/i] pictures of old.) Bing Crosby did a lot of this sort of movie, and I suppose we'll work our way through most of them as time passes. This one, on a disc with [i]Going My Way[/i], conveniently arrived from the library just before the snow closed it. (We're certainly having a white Christmas here!) It's as pleasant as having gotten the [i]Frankenstein[/i] collection just in time for Halloween as we did.

Jim Hardy (Crosby) is in love with lovely singer/dancer Lila Dixon (Virginia Dare). However, she abandons him for his friend, Ted Hanover (Astaire). In despair, Hardy leaves the nightclub circuit and buys a farm on the principle that he works a double show on holidays and farmers get the day off. Of course, this principle is ridiculous, as he quickly discovers. So he decides to put the farm to a different purpose as a, well, a roadhouse, essentially. However, this roadhouse will be open only on holidays. (Not St. Patrick's Day, but both Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays; more on that latter anon.) He acquires a singing partner, Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds). Eventually, Hanover shows up and steals Mason away, too, as Dixon has run off to marry a Texas millionaire.

Frankly, the plot doesn't make much sense. Hardy must have one hell of a bankroll going in, as he's able to front costumes and sets and dancers and orchestras. The place should be losing money hand over fist. Besides, how many people would truck all the way out to Connecticut for an evening's show and then truck all the way back to New York? You see, the "inn" part of Holiday Inn is misleading. There are no rooms to let. One suspects that there won't be many rooms in town, either. So these people are going to drive the however-many miles home after a night of partying? Ridiculous. Also, Mason works awfully fast; the main story of the movie takes place over the course of about a year, and she's engaged to two men in that time. She and Hanover go from nightclub hits to movie stars in about six weeks. The whole movie sort of whips through time as though it doesn't matter, which is troublesome in a plot so theoretically based around time.

So let's talk about that infamous Lincoln's Birthday sequence. It isn't aired on TV a lot of the time, which is not all that surprising. Graham, who was making dinner while I watched the movie last night (I saved the review for today), came in during that part and was frankly stunned. It's bad enough that Bing Crosby is in blackface and faking back pain, pretending, I suppose, to be an old freed slave. It's even worse that it seems that all the dancers are in blackface, too, and I can't tell about the band. Worst of all is the horrible, horrible combination of blackface and blonde wig in the mess of braids sticking out all over that some white people thought mimicked black people's hair. (And it's a blonde wig, yet!) One rather wonders what Louise Beavers, who played the housekeeper, thought of the whole thing.

[i]Holiday Inn[/i] is the lesser of the pair in public perception, too, even though it was nominated for a total of four Oscars (winning for the song "White Christmas") and [i]White Christmas[/i] was only nominated for one, for a song I've never heard of. ("Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep"?) It's been an awful long time since I've seen [i]White Christmas[/i]--as I said, I'm not much of a Bing Crosby fan. As I recall, though, it's the better movie, and I know that I'm one of the few people who doesn't care for [i]On the Waterfront[/i], which swept a bunch of awards instead.