WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) ** All I can figure is that after World War II it took awhile to get the economy going. A lot of guys who had risked everything to face down fascism were confronted with a new reality in which the government wasted its resources chasing communist ghosts, and used its military might to subdue egalitarian South Americans for the benefit of corporations. Of course it wouldn't play well to explain this in the farm belt, whose participants were also being groomed for takeover, so they gave ‘em a bunch of cheap rah-rah fables like this (See? Even greater people than you are hurting, too...just pull together, it's your fault if you don't!). It would be a waste of time pointing out all of the inconsistencies between reality and the script, and if you can't get ‘em on your own you probably never will anyway. Suffice to say that there's only about twenty minutes of convulsively ludicrous plot, broken up by big production numbers of the sort that deservedly mark the era as the least musically worthwhile in the history of mankind. Which is too bad, or more appropriately, it's too bad that Danny Kaye had anything to do with it. His own musical orientation, while not on a par with Beethoven, is usually whimsical and entertaining. Here, instead, he's all but buried by Bing Crosby schmaltz, the only worthwhile bit being the title classic, and even it suffers in context. For those interested in such things, Rosemary Clooney is even worse. Ah hell, maybe it's not all that bad. Dean Jagger's character is poignant and well-drawn; nicely evoking that time when military combat service was a source of pride as opposed to ambivalence. And Danny Kaye's Left Bank chic dance is a little bit funny...actually if you're in the right mood almost all of the choreography is funny, albeit unwittingly.
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