White Christmas

Last weekend I enjoyed another lovely evening at Britain's most beautiful cinema, The Rex in Berkhamsted, watching a digitally restored "White Christmas" in alarming Technicolor.  Lips have never looked so red, George Clooney's aunt is wonderful, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are just great guys, the old General is the salt of the Earth and it snows for the final number. Aw shucks! This is part of The Rex’s traditional Xmas line up before the holiday which starts with White Christmas, continues with Arthur Christmas and reaches a seasonal crescendo with two showings of A Wonderful Life. More on The Rex soon in this Blog!

http://therexberkhamsted.com/

The Rex, Berkhamsted

The movie White Christmas is a 1954 American musical film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Vera-Ellen, and Rosemary Clooney. Filmed in Technicolor, White Christmas features the songs of Irving Berlin, including the title song, "White Christmas". Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures, the film is notable for being the first to be released in VistaVision, a wide-screen process developed by Paramount that entailed using twice the surface area of standard 35mm film. This large-area negative was used to yield finer-grained standard-sized 35 mm film prints.

White Christmas was intended to reunite Crosby and Fred Astaire for their third Irving Berlin showcase musical. Crosby and Astaire had previously co-starred in Holiday Inn (1942) - where the song 'White Christmas' first appeared - and Blue Skies (1946). Astaire declined the project after reading the script and asked to be released from his contract with Paramount.  Crosby also left the project shortly thereafter, to spend more time with his son after the death of his wife, Dixie Lee. Near the end of January 1953, Crosby returned to the project, and Donald O'Connor was signed to replace Astaire. Just before shooting was to begin, O'Connor but had to drop out due to illness and was replaced by Danny Kaye, who asked for and received a salary of $200,000 and 10% of the gross. Financially, the film was a partnership between Crosby and Irving Berlin, who shared half the profits, and Paramount, who got the other half.

Now many think "White Christmas" is just a remake of "Holiday Inn" (1942), the hit movie starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire that introduced the song "White Christmas" to the world, but it's not.  "White Christmas" the film, though originally crafted as a project for Crosby, Astaire, and songwriter Irving Berlin, has a different story.  It tells the tale of two World War II Army buddies who partner up after the war and make it big entertaining.  As they follow a beautiful sister act to Vermont, they run into their old commanding general, (Dean Jagger, who looks and sounds like Dwight D. Eisenhower!) who's down on his luck because no snow is falling for his ski lodge.  So the men decide to bring their hit show up to his inn to help generate business for the general, all while romancing the two ladies.  It's a wonderful, classic-50s light romance with lots of fun songs, dances and comedy mixed in. As for their leading ladies, Paramount cast Rosemary Clooney (George's aunt) and Vera-Ellen as the Haynes sisters.

Corny in the extreme, White Christmas evidently struck a responsive note with film fans; it was the highest grossing picture of 1954, and a decade later proved to be a ratings bonanza when it was given its network-TV premiere. Of the four stars, Crosby comes off best, especially when singing the title song at the beginning and end of the film; Kaye is a bit overshadowed this time out, though he's quite funny camping it up in a "drag" version of Irving Berlin's "Sisters." Still a big favourite on the home-video circuit, White Christmas may not be the best Bing Crosby musical on the market, but it's certainly one of the most heartwarming.

"White Christmas," though named after the famous song, was , as I mentioned above, actually the third movie to include the tune.  The first was "Holiday Inn," song by Bing Crosby and Martha Mears (dubbing for actress Marjorie Reynolds).  The second time was in Crosby's, Astaire's and Berlin's next project together "Blue Skies" in 1946.  (Crosby sings a verse of it in a melody montage.)  Of all the holiday songs Berlin wrote for "Holiday Inn," he had the most difficulty writing a Christmas tune.  Once it was finally complete, he played it for Crosby at rehearsals, but Crosby didn't think there was anything extraordinarily special about it.  He just said, "I don't think we have any problems with that one, Irving."  Bing Crosby's version of "White Christmas" is now the best-selling single of all time. Music critic Stephen Holden credits this partly to the fact that "the song also evokes a primal nostalgia - a pure childlike longing for roots, home and childhood—that goes way beyond the greeting imagery."

Sadly, no original soundtrack exists for "White Christmas."  At the time, Rosemary Clooney was under strict contract with her record company Columbia Records and could not appear on any other label.  Yet, the soundtrack for "White Christmas" was being produced by Decca Records (the company who released Crosby's first "White Christmas" recording).  So Decca substituted Clooney with Peggy Lee for their soundtrack album.  Clooney made her own album under Columbia though, singing all the major songs from the film herself.  So, because of her contract, the only recordings of the actual cast singing together are the ones heard on film.

Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen

One person who is not on any song recordings though is Vera-Ellen.  She is actually dubbed by singer Trudy Stevens.  Also, all of Vera-Ellen's costumes in the movie have extremely high necklines, even her pyjamas.  This is because she was battling anorexia at the time.  With only a 21" waist, her anorexia had badly aged her neck.  Since she was supposed to be the younger Haynes sister (even though she was actually seven years older than Clooney), the aging had to be covered up. Another piece of movie trivia - The scene where Crosby and Kaye mimic the "Sisters" act was not originally in the script.  The two were clowning around with it on set, and the director liked it so much, it was written in, hence the men's laughter throughout the scene.

White Christmas may be corny, schmaltzy, uncritical, patriotic and flag waving but you must remember why, for it reflects the amazing story of Irving Berlin and his family and the well of gratitude he and others like him felt to America. Born in Belarus in 1888 as Israel Baline he spent the first five years of his life in poverty in the Jewish community of the city of Tyumen where his father was a cantor at the local synagogue. His only memory in later life of his first five years was watching from a distant road as Cossacks burnt the hut which passed for a family home as the one described by Lenin as “that idiot Romanoff, a person of no consequence” Tsar Nicholas II engineered a series of vicious anti-Jewish pogroms to “cleanse” Mother Russia. With great difficulty and danger the Balines smuggled themselves creepingly from town to town, from satellite to satellite, from sea to shining sea, until finally they reached their star: the Statue of Liberty.

All the family worked in the slums of lower East side New York taking jobs in sweatshops while living in a one room basement with cold water. His father took on gruelling manual work and died when Irving was 13. At 14 he left home to make his own way as a newsboy often sleeping under tenement stairs before getting jobs in saloons where he sang in the Bowery and got a breakthrough as a songwriter. In 1912, he married Dorothy Goetz, the sister of the songwriter E. Ray Goetz. She died six months later of typhoid fever, which she contracted during their honeymoon in Havana. The song he wrote to express his grief, "When I Lost You," was his first ballad.

Years later he fell in love with a young heiress, Ellin Mackay, the daughter of Clarence Mackay, the socially prominent head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company. Because Berlin was Jewish and she was Catholic, their life was followed in every possible detail by the press, which found the romance of an immigrant from the Lower East Side and a young heiress a good story. They met in 1925, and her father opposed the match from the start. He went so far as to send her off to Europe to find other suitors and forget Berlin. However, he wooed her over the airwaves with his songs, "Remember" and "Always." Their marriage remained a love affair and they were inseparable until she died in July 1988 at the age of 85. Berlin died the following year at the great age of 101 still unshakable in his belief in an America and the great city of New York which had shaped him where at the age of six he had gazed at the Torch of Liberty enlightening the World. He was the minstrel of the American Dream and his song penned after the phrase of gratitude frequently uttered by his mother “God Bless America” is its anthem.

The Finale - snow is falling in Vermont

So in the wonderful surroundings of The Rex when the final scene came on in White Christmas there was not a dry eye in the house as the doors behind the stage parted and snow could be seen falling in Vermont – actually the next door Paramount sound stage for the cast never left a studio in Hollywood! White Christmas is the cinema equivalent of an inappropriate festive snog under the mistletoe - you know you probably shouldn't enjoy it but you just can't help yourself.