Rating:

For one reason or another, White Christmas is a movie that is always linked in my mind with Holiday Inn. Both pictures feature Bing Crosby and both have the song “White Christmas” (the song actually debuted in Holiday Inn and not the movie that’s named after it), but other than that they’re not much alike. Why do I bring this up? Well, I bring it up because I actually like Holiday Inn; unfortunately, that movie jumps all around the calendar and, while its best scenes take place in December, it’s less explicitly Christmasey than this one. So let’s take a look at White Christmas, even though I don’t like it and it’s two damn hours long.

Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are army buddies, then they’re a popular song and dance act. They do this, they do that. They eventually meet up with a couple of show biz ladytypes, specifically Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen. I don’t know which girl is which, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna go to the trouble of looking it up, but I do know that the one that’s Danny Kaye’s love interest looks like a drag queen. You know the type—big ropey-muscled tree-trunk legs, face like a prizefighter, that sort of thing. Crosby’s gal is all right lookin’, though. It disappoints me to not know who I’m insulting, but I can take some solace in the fact that both women are probably dead and thus will never be able to find out I think one of them looks like a blonde George Foreman.

Once Crosby and Kaye pair up with the women, they end up in a hotel in Vermont. The hotel’s going out of business, it’s owned by Crosby and Kaye’s C.O. from their army days, yeah yeah, whatever. People sing, people dance. They laugh, they love. It looks like people will break up, then they don’t and it all turns out fine. Ho ho ho and a merry Christmas to you.

Remember earlier when I said that this movie was more overtly Christmas themed than Holiday Inn? I realize now that was a miscalculation. This movie hardly seems to be about Christmas at all. Holiday Inn may have scenes that take place at Easter and the Fourth of July, but at least it’s Christmas parts feel like Christmas. Basically this movie just lies there like the famously unwanted turd in the famously unlucky punchbowl.

Okay, that’s not fair. It’s not all bad, I guess. It has a couple of good songs (“Blue Skies,” “Sisters”) and a couple of great songs (“Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep,” the title tune). There’s nothing about it that’s really oppressively awful, so you’ll never feel like you need to pry your eyeballs out with the claw of a hammer, as you might when you watch a movie like The Mummy Returns. But you’re not really ever gonna care about what’s happening or the people it’s happening to. The biggest problem is that there are about a billion other movies just like it and a lot of them are better. There are far better Hollywood tap-dancin’ movies and, more specifically, there are even far better Hollywood tap-dancin’ movies with Irving Berlin songs. Inoffensive but equally unremarkable, that’s the story of White Christmas.

Dammit, I knew I should have reviewed Holiday Inn instead.

IMPORTANT NOTE ONE: This movie features the partnership of Crosby and Kaye. A hilarious sitcom about Heathcliff Huxtable having a supercomputer for a partner could be called Cosby and Cray.

IMPORTANT NOTE TWO: The woman who plays the housekeeper in White Christmas definitely was one of the nuns in Sister Act. She was already old here, more than thirty-five years before she put on her habit and took sass from Whoopi Goldberg.

IMPORTANT NOTE THREE: At one point, Bing Crosby refers to Danny Kaye as a “weirdsmobile.”

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• How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
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• The Most Important Meal of the Year
• Batman Returns