Royal Wedding has an astoundingly formidable pedigree within the world of classic musicals: it boasts two featured dance numbers in That’s Entertainment, a cast that includes Fred Astaire, Jane Powell, and Peter Lawford, and a director (Stanley Donen) who was smack dab between directing On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain when he worked …
Somehow, throughout these last four days, time had continued progressing in a forward motion to the point that we now reached the LAST day of TCM Fest, a thought that seemed unimaginable on Thursday, or even still today. But we festival-goers now faced that terrible chasm of darkness after Sunday evening, determined to make the best of our final …
After last month’s “break” from rarities, with a focus on Oscar’s best, brightest, and, logically, most easily available, TCM’s interestingly obscure programming returns in March with a whole slew of rare musicals. This includes several of my remaining That’s Entertainment entries, so I’m very excited to check a few more off of my list thanks to my DVR. There are also a few easily acquired That’s Entertainment titles (Anchors Aweigh, Gigi, and so on) airing this month, if you’ve missed any of those and need to catch up.
The reasoning behind the short lifespans of some of Oscar’s retired categories is obvious: Best Title Writing, for instance, required films to actually have written intertitles; Best Assistant Director, while a noble effort to reward the hardworking crew, probably wasn’t a sexy enough award for a black-tie gala; and the need for a Best Engineering …
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.
TCM rounds out the end of the year with a spectacular lineup, thanks in part to its choice of Fred Astaire as December’s Star of the Month, which was, of course, a fantastic decision.