I’ve seen the Astaire-Rogers films so many times that I can practically name the dance steps, but I’ve seen very few of Bing Crosby’s movies. I wasn’t into him — I didn’t get the appeal. I knew him mainly from television and records, and the crooning style left me cold. (I don’t care for Sinatra, either, for what it’s worth. But I make an exception for Dick Powell, who had a comic edge to his crooning.) I like things a bit rougher. Then I saw a few of Bing’s good films and my opinion has begun to change. I still have a lot to learn. Anyway, all that is probably why I didn’t see Holiday Inn until recently, even though it may be the most popular of the Astaire films, with or without Ginger. I also detest the songs “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” which were introduced in this movie. Another reason I avoided it for years.
I’m not as fond of it as most people seem to be, but I can see its appeal. I can also see that the studio, Paramount, undertook a major cultural project with it. Astaire and Bing were the superstars of their respective movie arts and were held in parallel respect by movie audiences. The film was a supergroup enterprise.
Holiday Inn is the last Astaire film directed by Mark Sandrich (who directed some of the best Astaire films, imho), and the only one without Ginger Rogers. Without a star partner like Ginger or Rita Hayworth Astaire gets to be a character, not the Hoofer Genius. Partly because Bing represents the essence of smooth, Astaire gets to be more angular and eccentric, and the focus is on the playful boyish relationship between the two “artistes” (song vs. dance) instead of a boy-girl romance. The dances aren’t the usual epic choreographies, but they are fine. The Astaire-Rogers dances of the first six or so of their films are important cultural artifacts. They capture the way American dance was assimilating all sorts of influences — high-bourgeois European, African-American, Latin American, Anglo-Celtic, and rural North American. They are breakthroughs. The dances in Holiday Inn are nothing like that.
I knew nothing about Astaire’s two dancing partners, Virginia Dale and Marjorie Reynolds, who hold their own in a couple of fine routines. (There’s no record of a choreographer, so I’m assuming Astaire did them.) My favorite is his duet with Virginia Dale to the tune of “You’re so easy to dance with,” which has become one of my favorite Astaire songs. It’s the one that seems to have the joyous partner-spark energy of the Rogers routines.
The most famous routine, though, is the wonderful drunken New Year’s Eve dance with Marjorie Reynolds, who is great in the scene. (The studio legend has it that Astaire would drink a shot of bourbon after each take. They kept the seventh take.) It’s very much post-Ginger; Reynolds is clearly not quite a partner, but rather the straight-girl of a comedy team. The tune is again “You’re Easy to Dance With” played by the Bob Crosby (Bing’s younger brother) Orchestra. I don’t know who did the arrangement, but it’s worth just closing your eyes and listening to it. It’s a great band tune in the sweet swing style.
Astaire seems especially comfortable in the film, maybe because he’s not expected to keep up the pretense of a romance (Astaire was never comfortable with that) and he was “fancy free” from the Rogers partnership. He’s also playing opposite one of the most relaxed actors in Hollywood in Crosby.
And consequently, Holiday Inn lacks edge for me. Maybe Astaire was never about edge, but I think his dances were. Crosby definitely wasn’t. The script by Claude Binyon is tight and elegant, but there’s not much at stake. The phallic competition between Song and Dance is displayed at the start, in the opening routine. The two mega-stars are ostensibly parodying themselves, but the weight doesn’t fall equally. Bing makes fun of his own crooning, but Fred’s steps aren’t parodistic — they are the real thing. (Fred’s self-parody is the drunk dance scene, which comes much later in the film, after his role has been reduced to be secondary to Bing’s.)
But the main narrative focus is clearly on Song/Bing, who becomes the founder and manager of the Holiday Inn. The Inn itself is a sort of utopian compromise between the urbane life of the star dancers and Bing’s country life. In that sense it’s like Hollywood’s own image of itself, a dream factory run by New York immigrants in a county of orange groves. For me, this dominance of the Singing Innkeeper over the Genius Hoofer signals a change in Hollywood regarding the relative powers of song and dance. Song now does the heavy cultural lifting, as dance recedes — it’s easier for the populace to sing Bing’s (and Astaire’s) songs, than to dance like Fred. And like so many other musicals of the early 1940s a certain midwestern tepidness has set in, sharply contrasting with the sophisticated, sardonic wit of the Broadway and Chicago screenplays of the 30s. And as great as Irving Berlin can be, he can also be dull and sentimental. Most people seem to love the songs of Holiday Inn, but I’m not one of them (other than “Easy to Dance With,” which harks back to an earlier Astaire). [Note to self: check to see if Bing has more ironic wit in his earlier films.]
The “exhibition dance” (I recently learned that’s the technical term for such things) performed in the background as Bing sings “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” seems like a mere shadow of the Astaire-Rogers duets. And the song itself — it was expected to be the big hit, not “White Christmas,” which Bing apparently didn’t much care for — is negligible to my ears. (It’s well known that Bing was deep into jazz and befriended many important jazz artists. I’ll have to look into his bio to see if he chafed at being a latter-day Rudy Vallee. ) It’s a smooth schlager, and that’s not my cup of meat.
And of course in the middle is a Paramount attempt to display a social conscience. I won’t embed a video or an image of the blackface “Abraham” routine. Keep in mind that Holiday Inn was released a year after The Birth of the Blues, a Paramount Bing vehicle that tried to tell a jazz story — though not very well. (It’s an interesting film even so.) 1942 is also the same year as RKO’s Syncopation, a film about the career of jazz from New Orleans to Chicago that at least attributes its genius to African-Americans. I will have to write something about blackface, as soon as I can sort my thoughts. I’m sure the time will come when folks of all colors will acknowledge that blackface was a thing of its time and culture — but I’m not there yet personally. I’m not willing to throw any film with blackface into the dumpster, but I can’t watch it. The “Abraham” routine may involve interesting twists on blackface, but to me its good intentions are so condescending and strange that I don’t feel like accommodating it. Maybe later. But by then I may be dead.
In any case, Holiday Inn strikes me as more of an “event sociological” than a positive contribution to the development of American film comedy.