Holiday Inn Review

Joe Hardy (Crosby), Ted Hanover (Astaire) and Lila Dixon (Dale) are New York club performers. Their act - pitching the two men and their respective talents for song and dance against one another for the love of the girl - bears an uncanny resemblance to their lives. Joe wants to leave the business for a lazy life in the country, but Lila, also his fiancée, chooses dancing and Ted over him. The trio is no more.

After trying his hand at agriculture, Joe opens his Connecticut farm as the Holiday Inn, a supper club that opens only on public holidays, to great success. When Lila leaves Ted, he comes back to his old pal Joe and promptly sets about stealing his new leading lady, Linda (Reynolds).

Holiday Inn is the kind of lavish, enjoyable, insubstantial musical that Hollywood excelled at in the 40s. Containing some of Irving Berlin's most well-known songs, including the debut performance of 'White Christmas', it takes a whisper of a plot and the somewhat awkward pairing of Fred Astaire and Big Crosby and constructs a delightful, if uneven spectacle around the famed talents of the two leading men.