L'amour chante et danse

I am most certainly under 70 and I absolutely adore this movie! Fred and Bing are great together. The songs are some of Irving Berlin's best. With Bing's voice together with Fred's dancing...it is a first class classic! My sister & I always looked forward to watching this at the holiday season.

It is amazing how much the world has changed in the last 58 years. 58 years? Yes!

Reviewers who fault this movie for it's patriotism and display of martial force in the midst of a "holiday" movie are obviously too young to know what the world was like when this was made. It was a time of greater innocence, greater danger and greater racial discrimination. The innocence was that of the children and the general public who could take a "standard Hollywood plot" at face value. It was a time of danger, not necessarily from within society itself (as now when crime makes streets unsafe) but from the outside with dictators killing millions while they battle for world domination. Those tanks and planes WERE freedom. Without them we would be yelling "Seig Heil" today and would not have the right to critique a simple movie. The State would have made it for you and "you Will like it"!

As the "black face" routine was showing I turned to my family and said that I was sure that despite the "classic" status of this film there were probably a lot of people wincing as they watched Bing Crosby with burnt cork all over him.

I'm sure that before he died Bing too winced a little bit at that number, but taken in the context of history it was to be expected. Al Jolson made a career of blackface and never regretted it for a minute. Most of the American population accepted that that's "the way it is". Only in the last 40 years have we learned that's NOT the way it is.

Things change and it's understandable that after almost 60 years certain depictions of society as it existed then would be out of place today. 20 years ago the movie was popular but the music was certainly out of style. With the resurgence of the "big band sound" in the last 5-10 years people are noticing that Bob Crosby and the Bobcats were participants. No doubt a certain amount of nepotism existed, but Bob Crosby was not Billy Carter to Bing's Jimmy Carter. (Anyone under 20 can now run and look up Jimmy and Billy Carter.) Bob Crosby achieved a certain amount of star status with some of his recordings. He had 4 chart topping hits and led bands for almost 50 years. He was always eclipsed by his older brother, but then Bing Crosby was THE biggest star of that time, at least among singers.

Bob's music was a Dixieland style and it lent a lightness to the big band orchestrations of Irving Berlin's songs that might have otherwise made the music ponderous, too much so for this light comedy at least.

Remember, finally that when Holiday Inn came out we were losing WW2. The Pacific was a Japanese ocean, the Atlantic was virtually controlled by German U-Boats and Allied ships were being sunk within sight of American cities. The Axis also controlled all of Europe and the Russians were being rolled back into their own homeland.

Holiday Inn was escapist entertainment from this bleak reality and it is understandable if some martial patriotism was included to hearten the home front.

For 90% of the U.S., snow at Christmas is the exception rather than the rule, but the emotions expressed by the song White Christmas hit exactly the feelings of millions of soldiers taken from their homes to fight a war. If Holiday Inn did nothing else, it gave Americans something to believe in and remember when things were at their darkest.

"May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be White."

They don't get much better than this: Astaire with the drop dead dancing cool, and Crosby with the honey crooning, both competing for the same gal. Crosby decides to let it all go and settle in the country, then on a whim realizes he can open his country house as a club open on holidays only. The girl he ends up drafting for the floor shows ends up being the love of his life, and the dancing partner Astaire has always been searching for.

Astaire, Crosby, and Reynolds have great chemistry together: I thought it quite convincing how Crosby's overprotective zeal scared Reynolds away for a while, and Astaire was very cool and believable as a kind of an inoffensive opportunist who exploits Crosby's passionate responses to whatever threat he perceives in Astaire.

Top it off with many of Irving Berlin's best classic tunes, performed in interesting interpretations, and you have a very good musical film.

The source of the song "White Christmas" would be worth watching just for that, but in addition the movie has a bunch of wonderful dancing, and quite a lot of charming songs; "I'll Capture Your Heart Singing", "Come To Holiday Inn", "You're Easy to Dance With", "Oh How I Hate to Get up in the morning", "White Christmas", and "Happy Holiday" (all by Irving Berlin) are some of the highlights.

Anyone who is a fan of Crosby or Astaire will enjoy this movie. Marjorie Reynolds and Virginia Dale play perfect foils for Crosby and Astaire, supporting them.

The plot, what there is of it, is just enough to hang enough Muscial numbers on to keep the movie running along apace.

This is truly one of the great musicals to ever grace the silver screen. Between the great song, the dance numbers and the chemistry between Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, this film really is one of the the all time classics. What really makes it great is that it pretty much plays like a great Broadway review that uses the different holidays as an excuse to display the individual talents of each of the film's stars. However, the thing that this film will truly be remembered for is the fact that it introduced one of the all time classic song's to the world, "White Christmas".

Another thing that makes this film so beloved is that it came out during a time when America needed somewhat of a diversion, World War II. This film helped to give people something to put smiles on their faces as the whole world was going to hell. At least for two hours, this film helped America to forget its troubles and put a smile on everyone's faces.