(courtesy IMP Awards)
Returning to a much-loved Christmas classic many years after it was last watched is an interesting exercise.
Our minds are fiendishly clever things but one of the interesting dynamics they employ is to appropriate snatches of a plot in your memory so you remember certain things that meant something to you and completely edit out others.
Just how profoundly well this works is evident in 1954’s White Christmas which was pitched by Irving Berlin to Paramount in 1948 and which was intended to reunite Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, following their successful partnerships in Holiday Inn (1942), which is where the song ‘White Christmas” first debuted, and Blue Skies (1946).
While you may remember the film, which stars Bing Crosby as Bob Wallace and Danny Kaye as Phil Davis as two ex-army buddies who form a super-successful singing double act after World War Two, as an all-Christmas, all-singing and dancing festival of festiveness which it most assuredly is, it also has some darker elements to it which, rather than detracting from its heartwarming Christmas focus, add some real emotional heft to it.
White Christmas actually begins Christmas Eve 1944 when Wallace and Davis are leading a festive show, partly designed as a moral booster for the troops but also as a farewell to their beloved commanding officer, Major General Tom Waverly (Dean Jagger).
It’s set against a raging series of explosions in the background, and while the precariousness of their positions is designed to place Wallace in Davis’s debt after the latter saves the former’s life – and Kaye has the time of his life, mischievous grin and sparkling eyes, reminding Crosby’s Wallace of the fact that he performed this act of heroism – it reinforces that the passion and dedication that informs the majority of the film’s plot comes from a very real place of darkness and war.
It’s a bold move to kick off what is essentially a movie this way but it works, and works magnificently well, emboldening a script that could simply been a cute reunion of old army buddies but which comes to mean so much more.
Cut to well after the war and Wallace and Davis are superstars, the sort of people you want to have notice your own act, which is precisely what Judy Haynes (Vera Allen) sets out to do when she fakes a letter which gets the superstar duo to a Florida night club just as the Judy and her sister Betty (Rosemary Clooney) perform their number “Sisters” (while they deliver it as a duo, Clooney apparently supplied the vocals for both performers).
As is the way with musicals, the two duos go on to fall in love, though it takes a while in both cases, most pronouncedly with Bob and Betty who spar with each other, experience a one-sided falling out and reunite in the sort of classic rom-com style that adds some nicely judged romantic storytelling to White Christmas which fits it perfectly.
It is, after all, a movie all about romance.
The romance of Christmas, of showbiz, of friendships and of life itself, with the latter very much top of mind for people who went through a terrible world war and lived to tell the tale.
Full of memorable songs that are delivered in sumptuously superlative style – though quite how the small inn in non-snowy Vermont owned by Waverly which is in trouble and which Bob & Phil set out to save with a big extravagant show right on Christmas Eve fits everyone and everything in is a thing best left to the magical imagination of a Hollywood production – and a sensibility that screams escapist festiveness, White Christmas is the sort of film that lets you fall into seasonal rom-com delightfulness while giving something emotionally real and meaty to hang onto.
While you might just remember all of the richly done musical numbers, and the musical froth and bubble they contain to a gorgeously uplifting degree, once all the more meatier, darker elements are added back into the mix, you realise what a sophisticated delight the film really is.
The result, reportedly, of some intense script rewriting by Mel Frank and Norman Panama – “It was a torturous eight weeks of rewriting”, said the latter writer with the former saying that “writing that movie was the worst experience of my life.” – White Christmas is the kind of Christmas film that, if by magic, manages to be simultaneously light-as-air escapism and emotionally weighty humanity.
It’s a precarious balancing act but it works and as you enjoy the frothily lavish musical numbers and the rom-com shenanigans which underpin the very Hollywood musical idea that it’s possible to fall in love in one night, it all hits home all the more because the people involved have gone through a lot to get this point.
Buoyed by the luminously wonderful songs off Irving Berlin, White Christmas is one of those films that gives us what we want as Christmas which is to feel as if anything is possible and that friendships can be honoured and love found and lives changed in one very concentrated period of festive-soaked time.
Real life may have a way of darkening things and leaving loose bloodied ends everywhere but in films like White Christmas all that can be healed and fixed and resolved, and done in a way that is warmly lavish and visually sumptuous.
It’s a love letter to all kinds of good and wonderful things but mostly to the magically elusive idea that while the rest of the year may struggle to deliver on our hopes and dreams, Christmas delivers in spades, and the brilliance and joy of White Christmas is that gives us this happy-ever-after sense of life being made better in a host of different ways but with some real emotional substance behind it, making this one of those festive pieces of storytelling that you suspect won’t disappear in a puff of seasonally escapist smoke but will stick around, proof that the most wonderful time of year might actually be able to inform the entire year with love, friendship and wondrous possibility.