It always surprises me when a movie as old as 1942’s Holiday Inn has a meta moment in it. It will be obvious to contemporary viewers the titular building is a set, both inside and out, despite supposedly being a farm in Connecticut. The surprising bit is near the end, when the set that is supposed to be a real building in the movie we’re watching serves as an actual set of that inn when a Hollywood movie is made dramatizing the events at the real place. If that movie within this movie ended with them making a Hollywood movie, we would enter a wormhole we could never escape.
Bing Crosby starts the inn in Connecticut after a year of failing to become a farmer led to a stay in a sanitarium. Maybe he didn’t fully mentally recover during that convalescence, as he intends his place to only welcome travelers on holidays. And here I thought the “holiday” in the name was being used in same way Brits use that word for “vacation”. Instead, the business appears to be in operation only about ten days a year, which doesn’t seem like a sound business model.
I was also confused by the particular holidays he chooses: Lincoln’s birthday, Washington’s Birthday, Valentine’s Day, Easter, the Fourth of July, Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Why a travel destination wouldn’t be open on Memorial Day and Labor Day is beyond me. Also, St. Patrick’s Day seems like a natural to have some sort of Irish-themed musical number.
For you see, they perform a different, huge production for each of the designated holidays. Most terrifying is the blackface number for Lincoln’s birthday. White people in blackface singing an ode to “the man who freed the slaves”. Surely, somebody had to question the decision to stage this.
Crosby had started the inn only after Fred Astaire, his song and dance partner, had terminated their act to start a married life with Virginia Dale, who had been Crosby’s fiancée. Crosby takes on a new dance partner when he starts having shows at the inn (Marjorie Reynolds). Astaire becomes deeply drunk on the New Years’ Eve after Dale leaves him, and ends up at Crosby’s inn.
There, he ends up drunkenly dancing with Reynolds. The next morning, he can’t remember what his partner in this impromptu dance looked like, but he spends the next year going back there for one holiday after another to try to identify the mystery woman. Crosby is rightly worried what will happen once Astaire finds her as, when this happens, those two are swept up by Hollywood to make the movie I mentioned.
The drunken dance scene is impressive. Supposedly, Astaire downed eight shots over the course of the takes, but that story feels apocryphal to me. Even more impressive is the legendary Fourth of July dance number, where he explodes fire crackers to the beat of his taps. Watching this on blu-ray enables the viewer to watch scenes frame by frame, and this reveals some of the flashes were added in post-production. What I like is I’m still to sure how they added those.
I’m used to watching movies from a every era of cinema, including silents, yet I found a few moments here to be baffling. One is definitely the aforementioned blackface routine. A more minor, yet more confusing, brief segment has an animated turkey jumping back and forth between square on the calendar as Thanksgiving Day moves between Thursdays of two weeks. I had to listen to the commentary track to learn the gag was because, at the time, there had been debate as to which week that holiday would be honored.
I enjoyed Holiday Inn more than I had expected to, but still can’t imagine revisiting it any time soon. At least I enjoyed it more than White Christmas, a movie that uses the same set. So now we have a set that was used in a movie, and a movie within that movie, and another movie that is a sort of spiritual sequel. Oh, my poor head. I think I’ll just set both movies aside and revisit a different set of faux rural estate that is supposed to be in Connecticut, and rewatch Christmas in Connecticut.
Dir: Mark Sandrich
Starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds
Watched on blu-ray