Sunday, December 05, 2010
Up front, let me just say that I’ve never liked Bing Crosby to begin with, have never seen what was supposedly so great or winning or charismatic about him, this cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking icon of mellow middle age, who seemed prematurely embalmed even when he was young. People of a certain generation have such warm memories of his voice and his public persona and his road movies with Bob Hope, but no one has ever gone farther in Hollywood with such a face made for radio, and by all accounts the man was an abusive son of a bitch who treated his own children like shit.
For those reasons and others, I’ve never gone out of my way to see any of his movies. This weekend, however, I was tasked to write a calendar item about upcoming matinee screenings of 1942’s Holiday Inn, so I thought I should check it out. Crosby co-stars with Fred Astaire in a story built tenuously around the songs of Irving Berlin, the most notable of which is, of course, “White Christmas,” which won Berlin the Oscar for Best Original Song and with which Bing is synonymous.
The conceit of the movie is that Bing’s character, Jim Hardy, is tired of the eight-shows-a-week showbiz grind, so he plans to leave it behind to become a gentleman farmer in the Connecticut countryside. But when farming turns out to be too much work, Jim falls back on what he knows best and conceives an inn that’s open only on holidays, with themed entertainment 15 days a year and easy living the other 350.
This is all well and good during the Christmas sequence that introduces Bing’s signature song and makes the audience feel warm all over, but the chill is soon to come.
After New Year’s Eve, the next holiday celebrated is February 12, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. At which point I must pause to ask, Really? Was there actually a time in this country when we recognized Lincoln’s birthday with something more than just department-store and auto-dealership sales promotions? That’s OK, though, because I’m nothing if not willing to suspend my disbelief at the movies. Up to a point, that is.
Jim and the ingénue Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds), an aspiring singer and dancer, meet cute when he falls off the roof of the inn and lands on her in the snow. Whether she actually auditions or merely charms Jim, she quickly cements her role as Jim’s co-star at the inn, and it takes less than a month for Jim to decide that he’s in love with Linda.
Now it’s February 12, and a resplendent Linda sits in her dressing room, preparing for the evening performance, when Jim enters and announces that he’s given it some thought, and he thinks that his big number will work better in blackface. The pretext here is that Jim doesn’t want his old partner, Ted Hanover (Astaire), to recognize Linda. You see, a drunken Ted danced with Linda at the inn on New Year’s Eve, and now Jim is afraid that if he finds Linda, Ted will steal her away, just as he stole Jim’s previous girl, Lila, who co-starred in their nightclub act.
That pretext is shoddy enough, but the subtext is even worse: As the besotted Jim lovingly applies the greasepaint to Linda’s face, he is essentially, but not exactly, proposing to her; Linda has to connect the dots herself. (Ordinarily one might describe such a scene as “eroticized,” except that Holiday Inn is pointedly, painstakingly naïve about matters of romance, let alone sex. As it is, the scene is just creepy.) Reynolds is certainly a beautiful actress, and the character Linda here expresses some disappointment about “how pretty I was going to look tonight,” but she willingly submits to Jim as he dabs the greasepaint on her face and speaks to her in that soothing, mellifluous tone that was Crosby’s only attractive feature.
Though we’re persuaded that Jim has devised the blackface plan at the last minute to foil Ted, when we cut to the big room, we note that the house band and the backup singers are all in blackface as well (though the women, for the most part, are given a lighter-skinned, Lena Horne-like appearance).
Enter Bing, hobbling onstage in period costume, with a gray Afro wig under his stovepipe hat and gray muttonchops applied to his face, looking like the stereotypical “wise old Negro” as he launches into the big number, a swinging spiritual saluting Abraham Lincoln. I’ve always hated hearing white people “sing black” when performing a Negro spiritual, and “Abraham” is of course composed and performed in that style here — a shame, as it wouldn’t otherwise be a half-bad tune, if sung straightforward and without theatrics.
The performance veers sharply from awful to horrific on the third verse, when Reynolds makes her entrance as a wide-eyed, jazz hands–waving pickaninny, her blond hair spiked in a dozen multidirectional pigtails, her white mouth encircled in the even more exaggerated style of minstrel blackface. It’s three minutes of excruciating musical atrocity from which it’s almost impossible for the film to recover, except for the saving grace of Astaire, who performs some typically amazing dance numbers throughout the film, none of which qualify as cinematic hate crimes.
“Abraham,” which comes near the film’s midpoint, doesn’t constitute the film’s first instances of race-baiting, though. Very early on, we’re introduced to Jim’s housekeeper, Mamie, and her two young children, Daphne and Vanderbilt. The children are exploited about as carelessly as you might imagine — note their appearance as Father Time and Baby New Year during the New Year’s Eve sequence — but special recognition is due here to the venerable character actress Louise Beavers, whose self-evident dignity cannot be hidden behind the mammy-fied dialogue she’s given. Every so often, you can hear in Beavers’ voice just the slightest little catch that signifies that she’s delivering a line dutifully as written, not as she’d speak it off camera, off the set.
Beavers even manages to maintain that dignity in the second-verse cutaway during “Abraham,” when she’s enlisted to sing the line, When black folks was in sla-ve-ry/Who was it set the darkies free?/A-bra-ham! A-bra-ham!
Louise Beavers appeared in more than 160 movies and television programs over a 37-year career during which she was credited as “the maid” no fewer than 50 times, “the cook” five times, and variously as “housekeeper,” “washroom attendant,” “beautician,” “laundry woman,” “black woman wanting a divorce,” “prisoner,” “prison inmate,” “black convict” and, in 1927’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “slave at wedding.” Holiday Inn marked one of three times she played a “Mamie,” and she was straight-up “Mammy” six times, amid a CV that includes Ophelias, Magnolias, Pansy, Hyacinth, Petunia, Opal, Pearl, Ivory, assorted Matties, Hatties, Gussies, Cleos and Nellies, Cornelia, Delia, Bedelia, Clotilda and Anastasia, to name just the standouts.
Holiday Inn is one of those classic movie musicals that is so dear in the hearts of so many, and yet, even if I could get past the flimsy narrative structure and “hey, kids, let’s put on a show” gee-whizzery, I could never abide by its racist overtones, whose presentation here can only be described as “merry and bright.” If nothing else, I am pleased to note that Louise Beavers emerges with her remarkable grace intact.
That’s more than I can say, though, for Bing Crosby, whose films I now have one more excuse not to watch, and Irving Berlin, that patriot and American institution, whose work, in my imagination, is now saddled with bewildering subtext: One hopes, after all, that there was no more nefarious sentiment behind the line and may all your Christmases be white.
