Every Christmas, I try to write about our cinematic memories of an older America. We take stock at this time of the year, as our busy lives slow down a bit and memory acquires the importance usually held by hope or anxiety. But when that happens, given the rush of twentieth-century life, there’s no quick way back to our memories. Movies serve that purpose; they’re pretty much the national record at this point. After all, even our family lives fit to some extent in the patterns of the national movement recorded in moving images.

　　Holiday Inn (1942) is the only Christmas movie explicitly built around the American calendar of holidays, and the time off from work, which is instead filled up with a kind of longing that doesn’t find its place in our ordinary activities. There’s much in the story about both modern America and the older America, with Irving Berlin’s then-famous mix of nostalgia and confidence. It’s a fun movie, and yet it’s now famous for introducing White Christmas, a rather lonesome Christmas song, which won an Oscar.

　　The director is Mark Sandrich, who made some of the famous Fred and Ginger musicals: Top Hat, The Gay Divorcee. His stars are America’s best popular singer, Bing Crosby, and America’s best popular dancer, Fred Astaire. They represent the two aspects of the pain caused in us by beauty, glamour and feeling. Fred Astaire is a star and therefore distant; effortlessly graceful, he floats where the rest of us move (not to say plod). Bing is all-American; his expression and control in singing are somehow also what we experience listening to him. Fred and Bing compete for the love of Marjorie Reynolds, but also for the hearts of America, in a light-hearted comedy that audiences have loved for more than 80 years.

　　Home and Work

　　On Christmas Eve, Bing and Fred find themselves in a song and dance show about winning over a woman’s heart with song or dance (Virginia Dale). The joke is that Bing thinks she’ll marry him and settle down on a farm, to live out the old American promise of property, freedom, and being one’s own man. But dancing is more exuberant, more victorious, more American. The lady runs off with Fred for a life of glamour on and off the stage.

　　Bing learns the hard way over the subsequent year that he’s deluded about life on the farm. He’s a songwriter, not cut out for the hard life. It’s one thing to sell himself on it, but quite another thing to experience it, so he ends up in the sanitarium. But that does give him an idea with which to ring in another new year: he wants to start the Holiday Inn, where guests come for shows evoking the national past and enjoy an all-American kind of entertainment. It’s a compromise between the life of the stage, which is unnatural (always putting on a show and never living the life one showcases), and the unglamorous life of commerce (which doesn’t have much song and dance to it). It’s also a compromise between the forward-looking American life and the need to remember the past, between the showcasing of talent and the piety toward the great past that makes America what it is.

　　The artificiality of showmanship fits Bing so well not because he’s glamorous, otherworldly, but because he’s a square and he’s on the level—he needs fair play.

　　Art always has to mix patriotism with a certain kind of daring—after all, without conflict, we seem to lose interest. Of the two men, it looks like Bing has it made. As a singer, once he sets up a business like the Holiday Inn, he’s lovable enough and a success. The story becomes his quest for love, which also turns out to mean finding out where he fits in a modern America, where women as well as men are free. All he has to do is wait for the right kind of woman to come along, whatever brings her in. What’s good for Bing is good for America—that’s what we mean, after all, by being all-American. And yet the musical numbers he delivers for the holidays invariably leave him out of the picture and he finds himself unsettlingly easily supplanted by a returning Fred, whose dancing captures the meaning of the songs and the attention of the audience. Fred is both more passionate and more of a schemer, and therefore a natural leading man.

　　This has to do with the only specifically cinematic moment in the story, the 4th of July number that includes a montage somewhat like a newsreel, not to say a propaganda movie. While Bing sings about freedom—mixing the old First Amendment freedoms with FDR’s new four freedoms—we see the industrial, technological marvels that power American war, especially planes and warships. This must have impressed audiences at the beginning of WWII—Holiday Inn was a very successful movie in 1942—but it now looks out of place in a romantic comedy. Meanwhile, the anxious Fred improvises a dance with firecrackers which suggests a humanity absent from patriotism—almost as though something about beauty or art escapes war, although of course it also suggests that artists are playing with fire.

　　Freedom and Love

　　Initially, Holiday Inn seems to be a story about the dangers that glamour poses to America. Hollywood and showmanship are indicted for the conniving and deception that is inevitable in art. Our temptation to beautify some among us, we may say, invariably tempts them to act as though they were free of moral restraints, and so they find they have to lie to have their way. Another way of putting it, to paraphrase a quote in the movie, is that in showbiz everyone loves everyone—there are no limits. Fred indeed plays a rather unscrupulous seducer, but it soon turns out the lady he stole from Bing has in turn stolen away with someone else. Meanwhile, Bing finds a nice girl (Marjorie Reynolds), less glamorous, more sensible, but perhaps just as talented. And they’re in love, they’ll marry, and they’ll entertain America. Freedom in that sense is happiness. But of course, there’s drama even in a romantic comedy musical, so he gets the girl, loses the girl, and has to win her over again.

　　But there’s something wrong, as I suggested, with Bing’s songs. They are nice enough, but he seems to want life to work according to script, as though expressing and eliciting sentiment is the same thing as life. As any good artist, he, too, is something of a plotter. He’s only sure that things are working out if he’s having his way and, having been traduced, he’s in no mood to take risks. He wants to defend himself and his fiancee from a repeat of Fred’s predatory love; having been abandoned, Fred wants a new partner, and there’s no denying that he and Marjorie dance beautifully together—they’re made for glamour, a possession of all Americans.

　　Perhaps, therefore, patriotism is a new defense for Bing, to replace the previous, unsatisfactory one (farm life) in an attempt to add something more solid to song and dance. Ultimately this is the law, the ground of our way of life. But as soon as Bing’s showbiz turns American history into entertainment, it in turn becomes obsolete, as America modernizes again, and Hollywood comes calling—showmanship itself becomes content for a new medium and we get to see how movies are made. Far from needing to go out to an inn, entertainment will come closer and closer to home, by the halfway house of the movie theater, where the Holiday Inn can be expertly recreated and preserved. That, too, is a kind of freedom from ordinary life, and again, freedom means beautification.

　　It’s of course his black maid Mamie, the voice of common sense, or perhaps of nature without the sophistication of modern life, that pushes Bing to go to Hollywood and save himself from misery by throwing himself on the mercies of the woman he loves. His scheming previously to keep her from the temptations of glamour was both inexpert and patronizing, so he lost her to Fred. The artificiality of showmanship fits Bing so well not because he’s glamorous, otherworldly, but because he’s a square and he’s on the level—he needs fair play. It is only in this concluding sequence in Hollywood that Bing figures out how to woo a woman, which is more or less the same thing as musical art, but with a smaller audience. That’s the remarkable thing about the story: it had never occurred to him how similar his work in entertainment and American life really were. 

　　The Arts

　　A funny thing about Holiday Inn is that everything seems to happen twice. The singing of White Christmas, Bing losing his love to Fred, Bing meeting cute with Marjorie. Christmas Eve happens twice and the calendar year visual gag is repeated, too, juxtaposing the realities of work with the beautification of showmanship. Partly for that reason, it’s a film worth watching at least twice; the first time around, Bing looks innocent and cruelly put upon—the second time, not so much.

　　Bing is a superior artist and faces a problem all artists must now face: Is America some kind of sophisticated lie they tell to easily fool audiences, merely a song and dance? Or is it a reality they have to come to understand, including finding their place in it, which is much more at the mercy of audiences than spellbinding them? Orchestrating the national memory is no mere joke and it does suggest artists have remarkable power in America, but that it accrues slowly over time, as each generation looks to remember its formative years.

　　In the end then, keeping his distance from the country, from Hollywood, and from the girl turns out to be impossible for Bing. What seems like conventions of romantic comedy, or demands we as an audience make on our artists (such as giving us a happy end), turns out also to be part of the artist’s education for freedom, encouraging a certain daring and risk-taking which we all share in at least at a national scale. There’s always room for something new with us, and the surprise of Holiday Inn is that what seems most wholesome, folksy, and even naive is the proper way to explore the difficulties of modern life, including the problem of the artist in a commercial society.