White Christmas

What’s the Story?

Featuring the Irving Berlin tune "White Christmas" and other music from the Berlin catalogue, this 1954 holiday musical centers on Bob (Bing Crosby) and Phil (Danny Kaye), two song-and-dance men who meet while serving in the army in Europe and now produce and perform Broadway revues as Wallace & Davis. When the pair meet the Haynes sisters (Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney), two blonde performers on the run from their landlord. Phil and Bob help the girls make a clean getaway, and then the ladies accompany the fellas to their next engagement, at an obscure and financially strapped Vermont guest lodge. By an amazing coincidence, the lodge is owned by the men's old Army major-general, Waverly (Dean Jagger). Bob and Phil decide to help their former CO by mounting an entire Broadway-level show at the venue to attract customers and while they're at it throw a surprise reunion for their whole combat division. Keeping this a secret from Waverly accidentally convinces one of the Haynes sisters that the good deed is just a heartless publicity stunt connived by Wallace & Davis , but the plot all ends happily, with a reprise of "White Christmas."

Is It Any Good?

The closing number includes a chorus of children, who, notably, have been absent throughout this rather stiff, old-school entertainment (though Kaye provides an ageless, overgrown-kid enthusiasm). Even with the Berlin songs and Kaye's dancing, the Paramount team, under dialogue-oriented director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), can't compete with golden-age Hollywood musicals like Singin' in the Rain that feature a deft pace and fleet feet. The most amusing piece here has Kaye making fun of minimalist modern-dance "choreography" (he even sneers at that word), and, like most of the rest of WHITE CHRISTMAS, it's just photographed flat-on, like a play.