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During one of my charity shop rummages during the summer I picked up a VHS copy of the film Holiday Inn which we stored away with the Christmas films to watch at a more acceptable time of year. Neither of us have seen this film before so this was a treat for us, and tonight we settled down to watch it. As it contains the song 'White Christmas' we assumed it to be a Christmas film but the truth is that Christmas is only a passing moment in the story that follows a year in the life of the main characters (much like the inclusion of 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas' means that Meet Me In St Louis gets lumped in to the Christmas film pile). 

This is often packaged as a reworking of White Christmas although I can't see more than a tenuous link between the two, namely it has Bing Crosby in it and he plays an entertainer. Oh, and it has that song it in so that's three things. Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire star along with Virginia Dale play a club act, Bing and Virginia are planning on retiring from showbiz to run a farm but at the last minute Virginia backs out and shacks up with Fred instead. Bing fails at being a farmer so opens a hotel instead called Holiday Inn. The selling point of the hotel is that it is only open for public holidays such as Christmas, Easter and any other holiday that Irvin Berlin can write a song about.

The plot is fairly slim and only really there to join a collection of song and dance numbers including a rather bizarre sequence with Bing Crosby in 'blackface' make up to sing a song about Abraham Lincoln. I'm not a fan of condoning the entertainment of the past based on today's standards of decency but this whole routine really does shock. As with all movies made in this era, the only black actors you see are those portraying domestic servants. Louise Beavers played the role here and even gets a line of this song to sing although tellingly not on stage with the blacked up white performers but from the kitchen. In the 1940s this song was no doubt meant with good intentions, in particular the line (about Abraham Lincoln abolishing slavery) "Who was it who set the darkie free?", but in 2015 it just sounds wrong. In later years Louise Beavers campaigned and protested about the treatment of black actors in Hollywood and paved the way for better roles to be offered. White Christmas has a similar casting method with a black barman in the railway carriage scene and It's A Wonderful Life has a housemaid and a railway porter. We find this shocking now but what is even more odd is that the bigger names didn't speak out about it. Maybe they weren't allowed under the studio system in which actors were contracted to make films and behave themselves to speak out against this kind of thing, or maybe nobody thought it wrong. In their defence the films themselves aren't racially offensive (at least not by 1940s standards) and don't try to point out that everyone is white so there is limited damage and we can still watch them every Christmas (not counting the aforementioned sequence in Holiday Inn which research tells me is edited out these days unless you buy an old tape from a charity shop). Such things never occurred to me as a child and I just watched films because they were entertaining and festive and I'm sure that's how every new generation sees it. 

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