Holiday Inn (1942)

(On Cable TV, January 2020) Most of Fred Astaire’s musicals are good, and almost all of his good ones are easy recommendation. Holiday Inn, while ranking high on musical and dancing value alone (I mean— it does have Bing Crosby as a co-star, and it introduced the holiday standard “White Christmas”) now comes with warnings—the film is structured around seasonal songs, and one musical number comes with blackface. Like—a lot of blackface, Bing Crosby in blackface, a grotesque blackface getup for the female lead and real black people singing a verse but segregated from the film’s stars. Oh, and all of that to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday. Like—whyyy? You can’t even rationalize it as a homage (like Astaire in Swing Time) or as thematically apropos: Practically nothing about the song would have changed had been done without blackface. Anyway— that’s why Holiday Inn shown on non-specialist channels often cut out this sequence. I disagree with the edit (films should reflect their production era, warts and all) but I can’t quite find fault with those who want to show the film as a holiday classic without getting deep in the discussion of what’s appropriate for all audiences. The catch is that once you excise that blackface sequence, the rest of Holiday Inn becomes far less controversial. Parts of it are even fun: Crosby and Astaire make for a good on-screen match, with Astaire playing the fiancée-stealing cad, getting drunk and dancing while Crosby’s singing. The premise (a hotel only opens for holidays, with big musical numbers taking on a seasonal flavour) barely makes sense but we’re not really here for verisimilitude. The blackface may be the lowlight, but the highlights include firecrackers to enhance Astaire’s tap-dancing, a first draft of “Easter Sunday” (later re-used in one of Astaire’s better movies) and a funny Washington’s Day skit mixing all kinds of music. For Astaire fans, Holiday Inn ends up toward the middle of his filmography—good production values, decent music from Irving Berlin, a few interesting set-pieces, but dragged down by a scene that you almost want to fast-forward through and can’t really recommend to anyone.