After the horrors of Silent Night Deadly Night, it was a relief that the next movie that showed up in the pile of holiday DVDs I drunkenly knocked over while prepping for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon was a good old-fashioned heartwarming musical. Of course, a lot of people really, really hate musicals, and would rather watch jolly old St. Nick ventilating craniums with a wood axe on endless loop than hear some cheeseball from the Golden Age of Hollywood belt out a single rousing number, so for some of our readers, this might be a significant turn for the worse. However, I will tell you now that those readers are wrong. White Christmas is a wonderful movie, and despite not having any killing in it (well, except for the World War II stuff, I guess), it is superior in every way to our previous movie.
White Christmas is what was once known in the biz as a "jukebox musical". This is where, rather than writing new songs for a production, a bunch of already-existing hit songs are thrown together, a half-assed 'plot' is woven to tie them loosely together, and they are unleashed on an audience who, it is reasoned, will make the jukebox musical a huge success, because you already know that they like these songs. Contemporary audiences tend to think of the jukebox musical as a relatively recent invention, the result of postmodern game-playing like Moulin Rouge and Broadway cash-ins like Mamma Mia!, but in fact, they've been around for centuries -- in the past, when popular songs were generally renowned for who composed them rather than who wrote them, the jukebox musical was ubiquitous.
There was no better acid test for the notion that jukebox musicals were more likely to meet with success thanks to the audience already being familiar with, and well-disposed to, the songs featured in them than White Christmas. Every song in the movie was by the incredibly successful and well-liked Irving Berlin, and the title track is one of the most popular songs in the history of the English language. (There's an old joke on The Simpsons where Mr. Burns laments that he once lost the chance to buy Picasso's "Guernica" for a song. "Luckily," he says, "that song was 'White Christmas', and by hanging on to it, I made billions.") It had been a massive hit all throughout the Second World War, and White Christmas used it as its can't-miss finale.
Paramount wasn't done stacking the deck, though. Besides hiring Bing Crosby, whose recording of "White Christmas" was the best-selling song of the 1940s (and subsequently became the best-selling single of all time), to play the lead, they crammed the cast with appealing superstars: Danny Kaye plays Crosby's war buddy and singing partner, and the two work with -- and fall for -- a dancing duet played by the gorgeous Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney at the peak of her singing skills. Directing chores were handed to the beloved and prolific Michael Curtiz, the script -- flimsy as it was -- was written by comedic pro Norman Panama, and the filming was done in VistaVision, Paramount's version of CinemaScope, and rich Technicolor that makes it one of the most gorgeous movies of its day. All this scheming paid off in spades, as White Christmas was far and away the top-grossing movie of 1954.
As for the plot...well, don't ask. It's as paltry as the plot of any other musical: Bing and Danny, war buddies under the command of a hideously toupeed Dean Jagger, visit a failing country inn their old CO operates in peacetime. Hoping to help him out, the two decide to put on a show, with the aid of the lovely and talented Mmes. Ellen and Clooney and an all-star assortment of background players, including a scene-stealing Barrie Chase in her first movie role. It's not really any more complicated than that, but with killer songs like "It's Cold Outside", "Heat Wave", "Blue Skies", and the song that its author called "the best song that anybody's ever written", who cares how slender the story is? If you can't be happy with some incredible songs sung by some purely brilliant entertainers, you should watch A Christmas Carol again and figure out which character is you.
12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A wild ten Lords a-leaping, one of which is the indefatigable Danny Kaye, brought in to replace first Fred Astaire and then Donald O'Connor. Rarely has a third choice been so inspired -- and inspiring. This is a great one to watch while you're not really paying attention, like when you're cooking or eating dinner or opening presents: it allows you to ignore the hokey plot and just let the tremendous music wash over you.
Related Posts:
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: It's a Wonderful Life
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Muppet Christmas Carol
