1942’s Academy Award for Best Original Song went to Irving Berlin for his song ‘White Christmas’, created for the song and dance film, Holiday Inn.
Irving Berlin
Holiday Inn film poster, 1942
Singer Jim (Bing Crosby) loses his girl Lila (Virginia Dale) to his dancing partner (Ted), and retires to the country. He decides to make his country farm into an inn that is only open on holidays. He and Ted create holiday song and dance routines and come into opposition over yet another girl, Linda (Marjorie Reynolds).
Linda, Jim and Ted, 1942
As each suitor pursues Linda through dance and song, she’s increasingly annoyed at being the center of attention because, in various scenes, she’s directed into a river, delayed in her appearance, and all at her supposed lovers’ whims.
At Christmas, Jim has closed the Inn, but Linda turns up in distress, and he tells her what the evening’s show would have been, closing with White Christmas.
The first sing-through at the closed inn
Holiday Inn | Bing Crosby Sings “White Christmas”
Later, when Hollywood decides to make a film of the inn – all those song and dance numbers! And Irving Berlin! The final scene is set up with Linda, who comes into a reconstruction of the Inn and sings the song. Jim has been messing around behind the scenes to make sure that she remembers him, and with the addition of one personal object, his pipe, he makes his case.
Holiday Inn (1942) – White Christmas & Ending Medley
Ted and his manager are too late to change Linda’s mind. Jim gets Linda, and Ted is left alone until Lila turns up again (she left him earlier for a Texas millionaire). Happy ending for all!
The song ‘White Christmas’ was a major hit for Bing Crosby – in 1942, it was at No. 1 on the Billboard Charts for 11 weeks, and in December 1943, it returned again in 1944, 1945, and 1946. In the following years, it would hit the top 10 over a dozen times. Selling an estimated 50 million copies for Crosby, it is thought that other versions of the song bring record sales to over 100 million.
Berlin called it ‘the best song I ever wrote’, and it established a new style for non-religious Christmas songs. Crosby didn’t think much of the song, but as it grew in popularity, its mix of home and hearth, with those evocative words ‘dreaming’, ‘like I used to know’, visions of ‘treetops glistening’, and so on found a ready audience, particularly during WWII. One story Crosby told was the hardest performance of the song he ever had to do, which was in 1944. He was in northern France doing a USO tour with Bob Hope and the Andrews Sisters where ‘they had to stand there and sing ‘White Christmas’ with 100,000 G.I.s in tears without breaking down himself’.
White Christmas was also the start of creating annual Christmas songs for the popular music scene – we can blame Irving Berlin’s 1942 original for the annual earworms of Whams!’s ‘Last Christmas’, Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, and ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’!
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