Everybody loves Christmas carols and everyone loves Christmas movies, but did you ever consider how your favorite films use your favorite music? Seventh in a 12-part series.
Musically speaking, Michael Curtiz’ White Christmas (1954) is an odd duck. The entire film was essentially a cash grab for Paramount Pictures, as the studio hoped to parlay the enormous success of Bing Crosby’s song “White Christmas” from Holiday Inn into a proper Christmas movie – which is to say, a proper Christmas moneymaker. They re-recruited Crosby for the quasi-remake, replaced Fred Astaire with Danny Kaye (after Donald O’Connor became unavailable), and perhaps most vitally brought back composer Irving Berlin to write the songs, as he had for Holiday Inn.
What could possibly go wrong? Not a thing, I suppose, unless you were expecting to catch lightning in a bottle again. White Christmas was released on Christmas Day 1954, and became the top moneymaker for that year. To this day it remains the film most often cited when movie fans are asked to name their favorite Bing Crosby holiday movie. But do you remember any of the songs that premiered in the film? (Remember, “White Christmas” doesn’t count.) I didn’t think so
To me the film’s most memorable original tune is “Snow,” an upbeat number sung by the four leads – Crosby and Kaye, with Vera Ellen and Rosemary Clooney – in the bar car of a commuter train heading to a holiday stage show in Vermont. It’s daring and fresh in a classic live-theater sort of way, and yet each time I watch the movie I get this minor rush – as if I’m hearing it for the first time. It’s like listening to the B-side of an old 45-RPM hit record (please tell me you know what I’m talking about): The song is legitimate and time-honored, but as it never made a splash outside of this limited venue, it’s never been overplayed. Even at nearly 60 years old, it still maintains the spark of the new.
As has been established in an earlier post, I’m a Holiday Inn junkie, but I have nothing bad to say about White Christmas – inferior Crosby is like inferior pizza, still pretty good. But “Snow,” in its way, is the minor composition that ironically provides the film’s major hook. It’s a twinkly good time.