Michael Curtiz | White Christmas / 1954

my white christmas

by Douglas Messerli

 

Norman Krasna, Norman Panama, and Melvin Frank (screenplay), Michael Curtiz (director) White Christmas / 1954

 

It’s a bit odd to realize, as I have gradually come to see it, that Michael Curtiz’s beloved film White Christmas (1954)—Paramount studio’s first picture in “VistaVision”—is primarily a war buddy movie that, through comedy and music, attempts to ease the returned soldiers who might not have yet settled down in the eight years since the end of World War II into the 1950s’ concept of the American way of life, while at the same time reconfirming the choices of those soldiers who immediately married and hunkered down to raise families.

    This is the kind of movie that someone even like my father, who hated musical romances and seldom saw movies (I have written about the three drive-in movies to which he took me and my mother in my childhood, Carousel, Oklahoma! and a revival showing of Wings, the first two clearly through my mother’s prodding). Yet suddenly, about two years after original release of White Christmas, he drove his entire family an hour-and-a-half away from our hometown in Newhall, Iowa (population 400), through Cedar Rapids, to Marion—where we would move a year later—to see the film together. In retrospect, that seems to me almost a miracle, given that it only two times later would we see a movie as family, the occasions being Davy Crockett and Ben Hur. My father clearly related to this movie because it spoke to the wartime veteran in him.

      This Christmas tale begins, if you recall, on the wartime batttlefields where Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and Phil Davis (Danny Kaye) are performing a Christmas entertainment for their fellow soldiers. Major General Tom Waverly (Dean Jagger) interrupts their celebration to announce he’s leaving the force to be replaced by another, and his men who clearly love him, tear up before the performances continue, only to be finally interrupted by Nazi bombings. Phil saves Bob’s life by pulling him away from a falling wall, the two becoming friends, despite their vast differences, and after the war performing successfully together, by the time the movie formally opens having become noted producers. 

       At the moment they are in a Florida performing in their newest stage musical “Playing Around,” while nearby two sisters, Betty Haynes (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy Haynes (Vera-Ellen) are performing in a nightclub, Novello’s. The always amorous Phil, on the prowl for any girl he can find, is becoming frustrated with his partner Bob’s endless work ethic. Bob insists they haven’t time to enjoy the company of two chorus girls which Phil wants them to entertain because they have to look at an act, which just happens to be the Haynes sisters. Judy and Phil get on immediately, both hoping that Bob and her equally reluctant sister Betty might like one another enough that they might spend a little time with each other, and if things work out, find a few hours in their hard-working regimens to enjoy the opposite sex.

       This film is after all, a boy-meets-girl romance in which, after the usual diversions in the plot, they wrap their arms around each other and engage a deep kiss and the promise of marriage, except in this case it is a double helix which weaves in and out of their friendship with their beloved General, Waverly, who’s now running a failing ski-lodge in Vermont in a year—so Bob, Phil, and the Haynes sisters discover—in which there is no snow to be found. Hence the endless search through this pleasant diversion for the final “white” Christmas which closes the deal on all their romantic longings. Thank you Irving Berlin for all your lovely songs along the way! “May all your Christmases be white, and goodnight.”

       I loved this film, in part, because it was one of the most joyous moments spent with my not so generally harmonious family, and because of the fact that quite by coincidence, it took place in the very town which we would soon call home and in which I grew up, Marion, Iowa. The owner of that small movie theater, Gilbert Rathburn, would later become a friend of my parents serving on my father’s school board, my father hired a year later as the Superintendent of Schools.

       Seeing the film today 65 years later, I’m rather startled at what I now observe and could not have way back then, when I was probably just nine years of age. At just 13 minutes into the film, as they stand backstage at the Florida Theater where the run of their show has apparently come to an end, their young male stage manager and assistant Albert comes strutting in to shoo-off the girls to their positions on-stage and report to Bob that he’s gotten them booked on a train to New York City, which given the season, was a difficult task. Although not overtly effeminate, it’s clear he’s a gay boy, as I now know him to have been, since he is my beloved friend poet Bob Crosson, who I knew only during his last decade before his death in 2001 at age 72. The role is so small, that for years I never even noticed it, but now it receives my full attention.

     Only 7 minutes later, Wallace and Davis are in their seats at the nightclub watching the Haynes girls perform their charming hit number, “Sisters,” and only a few dozen frames later, Phil and Judy have drifted out into the lakeside boardwalk to perform one of what I later realized was my favorite film musical dance numbers. I do recall even at 9 being absolutely mesmerized by their duet at the very moment I am certain my brother and father were rolling their eyes with impatience awaiting the next development of the plot.

       Although most people knew Danny Kaye as a kind of clown, he was also one of the best dancers of his day. Although he was married to Sylvia Fine, who wrote a great deal of his material, he was long rumored to be bisexual and, in particular, was said by Olivier’s biographer Donald Spoto to have had a ten-year secret affair with Laurence Olivier. That latter great actor, it is now pretty evident from the reports of Scotty Bowers and others was actively bisexual. I’ve read another report that Kaye and Olivier would regularly meet at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, with their wives’ knowledge, retreating to the bedroom, locking themselves in, remaining behind doors for several days.

        I wrote of Kaye’s dance with Vera-Ellen a few years ago in my collation of “My Favorite Film Screen Dances”:

 

     “I am a particular fan of Vera-Ellen, in part because she worked in some of the best musicals of film over just two decades before withdrawing from public life. But in the second major song of White Christmas, 'The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing,' it's Danny Kaye, dressed in a blue-slate suit and matching slate suede shoes, who truly shines.

 

   The dance begins just as another ends. Leaving the dance floor for the outside, the couple gradually move from the waltz to the fox trot as Kaye finishes the song's lyrics, and, crossing a small bridge whipped up, obviously, just for this piece, they use its metal posts for acrobatic swings, she moving out and around while he swoops higher over her petite body. An upside-down canoe is the perfect place for the couple to tap out the fox trot beat, a short tap-dance version of the jazzy rhythms, before they execute—the music accelerating—a series of spins, lifts, and falls, Vera Ellen ending with her body draped across Kaye's lap just as sister Betty Haynes (Clooney), wondering where they have gotten to, exits the inside dance floor to discover them.

      If Danny Kaye is usually goofy, his whole body awkwardly lurching forward and backward like a heap of Jello, in this dance he is expertly solid and graceful, a Romeo who has moved suddenly from the comic to romance, as he sings, ‘Even guys with two left feet come out all right if the girl is sweet.’ He seldom got other chances to so clearly display his dancing talents.”       

   In the very next scene Bob and Phil are performing in semi-drag (pants rolled ups, blue kerchiefs around their neck, and butterflies in their hair) version of “Sisters.” No one in my family gave it a second thought that their swishy performance was imitating many a gay camp rendition of drag performers

      Before long the quartet has gotten together on the train to sing “Snow” in the lounge car, and instead of heading for the RKO Theater in New York are now all on the way to Vermont and, unknown to them, Wallace and Davis’ former General commander. There, they call in their entire company to rehearse, performing the embarrassingly racist “Minstrel” number (although fortunately not in blackface) which they attempt to justify by contextualizing it within an historical context; and Danny Kaye mugs, this time as an effete gay priss, the song “Choreography” (“Chaps who did taps, aren’t tapping anymore, they’re doing choreography.”), which must have been a complete puzzlement to my parents who I imagine had never even previously heard that word.* 

    Although it is quite apparent that things are finally warming up romantically between Bob and Betty, the Waverly housekeeper Emma (Mary Wickes) overhears what she mistakenly believes is a deal between Bob and the TV variety program host Ed Harrison (read Ed Sullivan) to tape the entire show from the Waverly’s Pine Tree Lodge, which will advertise the General’s misfortune and Bob’s kindness. When she gossips to Betty the elder Haynes sister becomes furious with her would-be lover, breaking off her relationship with the producer and eventually heading off to New York to perform as a songstress in a club.

      Meanwhile Judy, totally misunderstanding the reasons for her sisters’ abandonment, believes that if only she wouldn’t think she had to care for her young sister, things might be rectified. As Dan Butler describes actor Danny Kaye in Mark Rappaport’s The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (1997), “In role after role he’s identified as a soft man. Danny, in short, is your basic ‘girlie-guy.’” Faced with Judy’s proposal, his character Davis immediately attempts to get out of the situation by insisting as gay men had done for centuries, “I’m not the marrying kind!” When Judy assures him “It’s just an engagement,” he moves even further way, commenting that he’s not “the engaging kind either.” Her question, which Butler posits is never answered: “Then what kind of man are you?”

      In her new club gig, Clooney sings the memorable “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me,” accompanied by a male quartet of pretty-boy dancers, including a young pre-Bernardo George Chakiris, looking every bit as gay as some claim he has been throughout his lifetime. The gay director Jacques Demy must certainly have thought so in casting him as another pretty dancer in his Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967

 

       Predictably, Betty discovers the truth, that Bob just wanted to get the old boys together again to prove to the General that they still love him. Everyone gets a Christmas kiss, and of course it snows, covering everything over in white as the movie has been effectively doing all along.

      The White Christmas I so enjoyed in 1955 or 1956, I still find to be full of pleasures—except for very different reasons.

*Even I could not have known just how truly gay the last-named number was. “Choreography,” a spoof on the modern dance techniques, according to gay historian William J. Mann is particularly based on the chorographical talents of one the men who were described of as “Freed’s Fairies,” Jack Cole, “one of the most visible gay presences in Hollywood [who] created some of the most overt gay images on the screen since the days before the Code.” Arthur Freed, a heterosexual, headed up MGM’s famed Film Musical unit, who with his assistant Roger Edens, a gay man, hired some of the best and gayest talents in Hollywood for work on their numerous musical compositions, librettos, dances, scoring, wardrobe, sets, and everything in between.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).