December Music: Days Ten, Eleven and Twelve Triple Feature -- The Strange Case of "Baby, It's Cold Outside"

Many holiday songs have their roots in movies of the thirties and forties, including "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Meet Me in St. Louis) and "White Christmas" (Holiday Inn), but I doubt any has a more incongruous film origin than the currently very-popular "Baby, It's Cold Outside," which introduced itself to audiences in the 1949 Esther Williams vehicle Neptune's Daughter. As I understand it, the composer Frank Loesser wrote "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in the late thirties and performed it with his wife at private get-togethers over the course of the next decade, but it wasn't formally released until MGM used it in Neptune's Daughter, at which point it won an Oscar for Best Original Song and thereafter became a perennial holiday favorite.

The strange part about the "Baby, It's Cold Outside"/Neptune's Daughter connection is that Neptune's Daughter is in no way a Christmas movie -- in fact, it's just about as far from being a Christmas movie as a film could get. Granted, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" isn't necessarily a Christmas song, either -- it's more a cold-weather song that's become associated with Christmas over the years -- but Neptune's Daughter isn't even set during the winter, or in a cold climate: like most of Esther Williams' films, it's an aqua-musical, and it tells the story of a swimwear designer (Williams) who, through a case of mistaken identity, begins a romance with a South American polo player (Ricardo Montalban); at no point in the film, which is set in sunny California, is cold weather even mentioned, and yet halfway through a flirtatious scene between Williams and Montalban, they break into the first-ever public performance of what is now a wintertime classic.

According to IMDb, Loesser offered "Baby, It's Cold Outside" for use in Neptune's Daughter after the Hollywood censors rejected his song "On a Slow Boat to China" for being too risque, but I can't believe that neither he nor anyone else failed to recognize what a non sequitur it would be in the film. I'd like to believe they went ahead and used it because the fact that, in this case, it's not cold outside increases the sly innuendo that already gives the song its charm, but I have a feeling MGM used it because they knew it would be a hit and didn't care that it doesn't make sense within the context of the story. Either way, it's a clever, fun song, and it probably would have been a hit no matter how Loesser chose to use it, unlike, say, the aforementioned "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which is a real bummer and probably became popular in large part because of the way Judy Garland sings it in Meet Me in St. Louis.

I couldn't find Williams' and Montalban's performance of the song anywhere online, but I did find the reprise, in which Williams' character's sister (played by Betty Garrett) sings the song with the man she believes to be the polo captain (Red Skelton), and which is arguably the better performance of the song anyway. It's also noteworthy as the only time I've heard a woman play the agressor in the song, as that part usually goes to the male singer.

Since 1949, countless numbers of singers have covered "Baby, It's Cold Outside," but it's had another surge in popularity over the past few years thanks to movies like Elf and Blaine and Kurt on Glee. I generally have mixed feelings on Zooey Deschanel, but her version of the song in Elf is one of my favorites, second only to Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton's live rendition of the song, which emphasizes the bawdy side to the lyrics that many other versions (including the Deschanel one) downplay.