White Christmas

White Christmas (1954)
Director: Michael Curtiz
Actors: Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney

Synopsis: Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and Phil Davis (Danny Kaye), two showmen who meet during the war, decide to perform a huge event at a lodge in Vermont when they discover their hard-up old general runs it.

Review: Probably best known today for its titular song that plays at the beginning and end of the film – and even then it’s a rehashing of ‘White Christmas” original appearance in Bing Crosby’s Holiday Inn (1942) – there are one or two other diverting aspects to keep the film from being a mere exercise in waiting for Crosby’s seasonal number.

It was Paramount’s first experiment with VistaVision (a technology based around expanding the frame of the film), and it undoubtedly bore some fruit in the beautiful and ingenious tableaux that book-end the film. Just as Crosby’s rendition of ‘White Christmas’ starts and ends the narrative, so does an image of an idealised, snowy Christmas. At the beginning though, it’s only a mirage: a painting wheeled on to the troops in France in 1944, to give them a little cheer on Christmas Eve, before the canvas is pulled back to reveal their actual, depressing vista of a war-torn French town. However, at the end, when all the various romantic dilemmas have been resolved, and the hard-up general has received some money and support for his depleted lodge, the idealised Christmas is finally realised by some much desired snowfall. One of the characters pulls back some curtains to reveal this quintessential Christmas scene, and it’s a sign of the narrative having gone full circle and made good on the mere promise of a happy, white Christmas as painted on the army canvas.

Outside of the song and snow motif, the film’s characterisations and politicking haven’t aged quite as well. Crosby’s character attempting to seduce Rosemary Clooney’s sassy singer has an awkward moment when he courts her one night in the lodge by boasting about the different types of women that come to him in his dreams depending on the food he eats! There’s also a slightly cloying conservatism regarding the military theme – although it’s perhaps permissible based on the fact that the Second World War had ended less than ten years previously, and clearly some veterans would be nostalgic for their military memories and endeavours. (January 2018)