The 1930s produced a great many brilliant stars for sound cinema, voices and music having very much shaped that decade's movies. But by the 40s many of these acts were running out of steam in pictures that were either too samey or no longer suiting. To the rescue came a new idea – the team-up movie. Take two big stars, put them together on the same screen. Success!
It might have seemed like a terrible clash putting the two most popular musical lead men together in a picture, but as "I'll capture your heart singing(/dancing)" acknowledges, the two stars of Holiday Inn complement each other well by being the best at the two opposite ends of the musical performance spectrum – Bing Crosby's warm, earthy crooning and Fred Astaire's light, ethereal dancing. Personally I rate Fred's singing quite highly, and posterity tends to agree with me. Crosby however had a great dramatic talent, and he proves himself fully able to handle the more poignant side of the romantic angle. That's not to disparage Fred's acting, and as usual he is allowing his grace and control to feed into a number of different moods. He even does a top drunken dance. As to their leading ladies, I was going to say Marjorie Reynolds has a lovely singing voice, but then I found out she was dubbed by Martha Mears, which was presumably just as well. She has a kind of earnestness to her performance though and despite not using her real voice she is very much able to bring the necessary emotion into her act of singing. Virginia Dale, while passable, is sadly no Ginger Rogers. But Holiday Inn is not really about the women. The two leads here are Bing and Fred.
Another coup for this production was the song-writing talent of Irving Berlin, who for my money was the best of that generation of pop composers. Berlin's ease with fluid song structures means he could come up with such whimsical efforts as "I'll capture your heart singing" which switches tone back and forth to suit the styles of Fred and Bing. Meanwhile numbers like Easter Bonnet and of course White Christmas are among Berlin's most beautiful, and it's fab to hear Crosby's golden vocal chords doing them the necessary justice.
Holiday Inn sees Astaire reunited with the most prolific director of the Fred and Ginger movies, Mark Sandrich. Astaire and Sandrich had such a great rapport after all their years of working together. The opening scene with Fred wiping the snow off a sign is such an Astaire-Sandrich moment, this combination of smooth, unedited camera movements and normal actions turned into dance. And even for Crosby's more sedate numbers, he's excellent at overseeing the choreography of something as simple as putting out food in "Let's Start the New Year Right" to give it a kind of natural visual rhythm. Sandrich also captures the poignancy of the later scenes with some wonderfully still and sombre close-ups.
As the 30s turned to the 40s and the old repetitious franchise movies made way for prestigious one-off productions, Holiday Inn is a perfect transition, containing all that was pure about 30s musical output but melding it into something a little grander. The dancing harks back to the best of the Fred and Ginger movies, where the choreography was inventive but not yet gimmicky (Astaire's firecracker dance being the finest example). And, dare I say it, Fred and Bob are a pairing equal to Fred and Ginger. No, they don't dance together, but really the movie is all about the chummy rivalry between them – two very different performers with different temperaments, but equal in likability.
It might have seemed like a terrible clash putting the two most popular musical lead men together in a picture, but as "I'll capture your heart singing(/dancing)" acknowledges, the two stars of Holiday Inn complement each other well by being the best at the two opposite ends of the musical performance spectrum – Bing Crosby's warm, earthy crooning and Fred Astaire's light, ethereal dancing. Personally I rate Fred's singing quite highly, and posterity tends to agree with me. Crosby however had a great dramatic talent, and he proves himself fully able to handle the more poignant side of the romantic angle. That's not to disparage Fred's acting, and as usual he is allowing his grace and control to feed into a number of different moods. He even does a top drunken dance. As to their leading ladies, I was going to say Marjorie Reynolds has a lovely singing voice, but then I found out she was dubbed by Martha Mears, which was presumably just as well. She has a kind of earnestness to her performance though and despite not using her real voice she is very much able to bring the necessary emotion into her act of singing. Virginia Dale, while passable, is sadly no Ginger Rogers. But Holiday Inn is not really about the women. The two leads here are Bing and Fred.
Another coup for this production was the song-writing talent of Irving Berlin, who for my money was the best of that generation of pop composers. Berlin's ease with fluid song structures means he could come up with such whimsical efforts as "I'll capture your heart singing" which switches tone back and forth to suit the styles of Fred and Bing. Meanwhile numbers like Easter Bonnet and of course White Christmas are among Berlin's most beautiful, and it's fab to hear Crosby's golden vocal chords doing them the necessary justice.
Holiday Inn sees Astaire reunited with the most prolific director of the Fred and Ginger movies, Mark Sandrich. Astaire and Sandrich had such a great rapport after all their years of working together. The opening scene with Fred wiping the snow off a sign is such an Astaire-Sandrich moment, this combination of smooth, unedited camera movements and normal actions turned into dance. And even for Crosby's more sedate numbers, he's excellent at overseeing the choreography of something as simple as putting out food in "Let's Start the New Year Right" to give it a kind of natural visual rhythm. Sandrich also captures the poignancy of the later scenes with some wonderfully still and sombre close-ups.
As the 30s turned to the 40s and the old repetitious franchise movies made way for prestigious one-off productions, Holiday Inn is a perfect transition, containing all that was pure about 30s musical output but melding it into something a little grander. The dancing harks back to the best of the Fred and Ginger movies, where the choreography was inventive but not yet gimmicky (Astaire's firecracker dance being the finest example). And, dare I say it, Fred and Bob are a pairing equal to Fred and Ginger. No, they don't dance together, but really the movie is all about the chummy rivalry between them – two very different performers with different temperaments, but equal in likability.