Bing Crosby, "Happy Holidays (Beef Wellington Remix)"
Holiday Inn is the movie that got me into classic film. The year that I saw it, I was a freshman in college and taking a class in early film history, and one of the last films we watched (because we were watching chronologically) was Judy Garland's Meet Me in St. Louis, which follows one year in the life of a family living in St. Louis during the turn of the twentieth century. I thought St. Louis was just okay when I watched it in class, but I was also aware that this opinion might have derived from the fact that, again, I was watching it for a class, so when I went home for Christmas break that semester and found myself up late on Christmas Eve with St. Louis playing on TCM, I decided to give it a second chance. As it turned out, I still didn't like it all that much, but the movie that played next on TCM was Holiday Inn, and...well, the rest was history.
Make no mistake, Holiday Inn is not a great movie, whereas Meet Me in St. Louis is, objectively speaking. I am in no way suggesting that Holiday Inn is the better of the two films. It's a slight, almost-gimmicky affair -- Bing Crosby moves to New England and opens a hotel called The Holiday Inn, where they stage musical numbers for just about every holiday you could think of, from Christmas right down to President's Day -- and its main claim to fame is introducing the song "White Christmas," which went on to become an immensely popular single and spawn a more-famous holiday film of its own. I even knew as I was watching it that Holiday Inn wasn't very good, but what it had going for it (that a lot of the movies I watched for my film history class didn't) was that indefinable, magical "old movie" feel, that sense of looking at a different time and place where everything is far cozier and more elegant than real life. I've watched enough old movies now to have gained a greater appreciation for the sort of timeless, more realistic films I watched in class, but escapist pieces like Holiday Inn have their place too, especially around Christmas.
The video above has scenes from the movie underneath a remix of the song "Happy Holidays," which I assume was intended to be the main song from the film, until "White Christmas" became so popular. I'm not sure at what point "White Christmas" turned into such a hit, if it was right when the movie came out (during World War II) or later on in the forties, but I do know it was the first song where the recorded music outsold the sheet music -- prior to the forties, the way people consumed music was drastically different from the way we consume music today, or even twenty years ago, because the relative newness of radio and the lack of anything as convenient as a CD player meant that when people bought music, they often bought the written music and learned to play the song themselves on their pianos. "White Christmas" began the process of changing all of that.
The video above has scenes from the movie underneath a remix of the song "Happy Holidays," which I assume was intended to be the main song from the film, until "White Christmas" became so popular. I'm not sure at what point "White Christmas" turned into such a hit, if it was right when the movie came out (during World War II) or later on in the forties, but I do know it was the first song where the recorded music outsold the sheet music -- prior to the forties, the way people consumed music was drastically different from the way we consume music today, or even twenty years ago, because the relative newness of radio and the lack of anything as convenient as a CD player meant that when people bought music, they often bought the written music and learned to play the song themselves on their pianos. "White Christmas" began the process of changing all of that.
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