NFR Project: 'White Christmas' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “White Christmas”

Dir: Michael Curtiz

Scr: Norman Krasna, Norman Panama, Melvin Frank

Pho: Loyal Griggs

Ed: Frank Bracht

Premiere: Oct. 14, 1954

120 min.

I hate this movie. HATE it. Yet I watched it again, hoping to be fair and give it another chance before I wrote you. I took the hit for you. Because I love you.

I still hate this movie.

First of all, it’s a lackluster mutation of a much better film idea, which was Mark Sandrich’s 1942 Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire and featuring the words and music of Irving Berlin. This was the movie that introduced the song “White Christmas” to the world, and it’s done beautifully.

That movie is quite enjoyable, as it’s a romantic triangle backgrounded by an inn/nightclub only open on holidays (which gave Berlin a chance to lump all his holiday-related songs into one picture). That film is also marred by a blackface number, which pretty much disqualifies it from being shown today. It’s not incidental. It’s a plot point. It’s too bad that this number stops the movie cold, as the song it illustrates, “Abraham,” celebrating Lincoln’s Birthday, is not racist and is in fact quite catchy.

So, they decided to remake it in color. Minus Lincoln. They sent Fred Astaire a new script; he turned them down. Bing was in; they enlisted Danny Kaye to co-star. Crosby and Kaye don’t have that spark that Crosby and Astaire had. They completely rewrote the story, making it at once much more sentimental and more patriotic. Bing and Danny are pals from WWII, who served under a beloved general (Dean Jagger). They are a big hit as a song and dance team in the postwar world.

Alas, their general owns the financially distressed inn, and Bing and Danny pitch in and put on a show for him there, saving his bacon. In amongst all this they woo performing sisters Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen. Bing and Rosemary sing together; Vera-Ellen dances. Danny Kaye does his best.

And it’s just awful. This is the whitest film ever made. It was made by white people, for white people. It is the Caucasian experience personified. It is utterly generic and bland, lurching from one number to another in an overlit, garishly colorful sense-fest that bowls the viewer over. It is a surfeit of whipped cream.

Director Michael Curitz, a remarkably versatile talent, seems to phone it in here. He was possibly thrown by the new widescreen technique that Paramount developed and displayed here for the first time, called VistaVision, that called for a different compositional skill. Everything that needs to be visible in a scene, is visible, jumbled across the screen like a handful of nursery toys.

To top it all off, the Technicolor intensity of the hues is almost hallucinatory. It is loud. Art-directed to within an inch of its life, this feature shot obviously and entirely in studio lacks the breeziness and gusto of its predecessor. Still, we still get a lot of great Irving Berlin songs (the title card reads “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.”) There are “Sisters” and “Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep)”. Those are great.

But there is yet another problem. They perform a minstrel show. However, they do not wear blackface; you have a bunch of white people shucking and jiving, inexplicably. Aggressively storming the camera. It’s disconcerting. 

The designated singers are talented, of course; Clooney is still, I think, underestimated as a singer. Vera-Ellen is an amazing dancer. Kaye seems dimmed, not allowed to assume his trademark manic, surreal persona until he does a spoof of Martha Graham dance in “Choreography.”

 Of course, it’s a classic. What do I know? Bah humbug.

 The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Helen Keller in Her Story.