This was a great year in vintage film for me, with my That’s Entertainment project starting at the beginning of 2013, and The Vintage Cameo starting in May, so I thought I’d go through and pull together a list of some of my favorite older movies I saw for the first time this year. I chose one for each month to cultivate some sense of order, and to restrict me from just talking about all the new Gene Kelly movies I saw.
As my New Year’s resolution, I’m newly committed to finishing my That’s Entertainment project (that is, watching the original, full-length films from which That’s Entertainment was compiled). I’m down to 23, 8 of which are available on DVD from Netflix; 4 of which are currently rentable on Warner Archive Instant; and 4 more of which will be airing on TCM in the next couple months. Considering for a bit of overlap in those categories, that leaves only 8 unaccounted for, but I’ll start with those first 15.
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.
One of my very favorite things in the world is old-school journalistic prose, especially film reviews, and MOST especially negative film reviews, so it was with a delighted heart that I came across this terrific pan from Frank S. Nugent’s review of Stage Struck in the New York Times, published September 28, 1936.
I’m digging further into the mass of Busby Berkeleys I accumulated last week, and I’ve run into another odd, very un-“Berkeley”-like picture: I Live for Love. It’s very interesting to look at these smaller films as a kind of career in and of itself, moving parallel to his more well-known musical spectacles. Here we see another highly melodramatic piece with little evidence of the signatures and trademarks he developed in his musical works.
I was delighted to spot this one coming up on my Rare Musicals list for October, as the sailor musical has quickly become one of my shortcuts to making my movie selections. I was particularly interested in Hit the Deck because of the stellar cast, as well as the fact that it’s both a late-stage MGM musical and late-stage for sailor musicals in general–coming nearly 10 years after the end of WWII.