GetTV kicked off the holiday season earlier this month with “Happy Holidays from Bing and Frank,” the 1957 Christmas episode from the “Frank Sinatra Show”—airing again tonight in celebration of Sinatra’s 99th birthday. It’s a charming, if slightly bizarre, holiday special… as I think many classic holiday specials are. The boys certainly encourage—and partake in—some holiday libations throughout the show, …
Still looking for something special to give to that special someone? Well, if they’re one of those rare breeds known as a “classic movie fan,” I’ve got you covered—whether your finances run more towards Eliza Doolittle than Charles Foster Kane. As a general note, DVDs or blu-rays from Warner Archive and the Criterion Collection are generally a …
Holiday Inn, the 1942 musical that teamed up Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire for the first time, is… mostly a Christmas movie. It begins and ends at Christmas, of course, and won an Oscar for spawning the classic song, “White Christmas”–which later became a star on its own, in the sort-of-sequel, sort-of-remake, White Christmas, as well as holding the record as the best-selling song for over 50 years. But Holiday Inn was never designed to be a vehicle for delivering Christmas songs unto a willing audience. Rather, the point was to cover a whole range of holidays throughout the year, from New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve, and allow people to accent nearly every moment of their life with a specialized Irving Berlin song. (People at this time already had “God Bless America,” but were sadly lacking any Berlin tunes to play for Thanksgiving, Washington’s Birthday, or many other holidays.) So, though I’m comfortable calling it a Christmas movie, it is a bit of an accidental Christmas movie.