Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds sing White Christmas in Holiday Inn.

Holiday Inn is the movie for which Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas".  It's overshadowed by the more successful 1954 remake, White Christmas, but this movie did it first and also did it better.  The song would go on to be one of the best selling records of all time and the remake has become something of a perennial holiday classic, but I've always preferred the original.

When the movie opens, Jim (Crosby), Ted (Astaire) and Lila (Dale) are a 3 person musical act.  Jim wants to retire from showbiz and he wants Lila to go with him, but on the night he and her are supposed to leave the act, Lila and Ted announce that they're not only in love, but they're going to keep the act going as a twosome. 

Jim retires to his new farm in Connecticut, but soon discovers farming is harder than crooning and so he hits upon the idea of turning the farm into the Holiday Inn (the hotel chain stole its name from him), a nightclub/restaurant that's only open on national holidays.  To help with the entertainment, he hires Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds) and soon falls in love with her.  When Ted shows up at the club one night looking for a new partner after Lila threw him over for a Texas millionaire, Jim has to do his best to hide Linda so that Ted doesn't steal her as well.  But who will get the girl?  The hoofer or the crooner?

This was the first of two movies to pair the singing Crosby with the dancing Astaire.  Sadly though, their scenes together are limited.  They only have two numbers together, which seems like a real wasted opportunity, especially since Astaire is one of the highlights of the movie, but he takes a backseat to Crosby through all of it.  Both of them were around 40 years old at the time of this movie and neither one of them were exactly good looking, but they both possessed talent and charisma, with Astaire's more relaxed charm playing off of Crosby's stiff, paternal figure quite nicely.

Apart from White Christmas, the two most famous numbers in the film are probably Astaire's 4th of July dance routine and the Lincoln's birthday blackface debacle.  On the 4th, Astaire does a routine with firecrackers.  Like a lot of his most famous, post Ginger Rogers dance numbers, he performs it solo.  For Lincoln's birthday, the decision is made to perform the song "Abraham" in blackface (in part to hide Linda from Ted).  This scene has been cut from many of the television airings of the movie.  It's not just the makeup that makes the scene so politically incorrect, but also the way that Crosby and Reynolds try to act "black" while they're singing.

The plot is simple and sappy in an old Hollywood kind of way.  It's also quite funny in places.  Astaire's drunk dancing scene and his attempts to find Linda on the dance floor are two of the comic highlights.  It's the kind of entertainment they don't make anymore and frankly couldn't.  I mean, who could you get today that would be the equivilant of Crosby and Astaire?

Although all the holiday's are covered, this is really a Christmas movie at heart.  Overshadowed by its more famous (and overrated) remake, Holiday Inn deserves more credit than it gets.

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