My favourite movie of all time is White Christmas. I watch the movie every year. When I spent Christmas at home I would watch it on Christmas Eve night, yet now that Mark and I go down east for the holidays, I watch it the night before I leave for Halifax (or close to it). For the first time since I acquired a projector five years ago, during this past Christmas season I watched the film projected onto the bare white wall of my guest bedroom. It was like being in a movie theatre. The audio, to my surprise, was loud coming from those speakers.
I collect White Christmas movie paraphernalia and each year I put out a display of some of what I have. I love to collect the various media types of the movie. I have five different versions on laserdisc and two versions on videodisc. Yesterday I received a two-minute 8 mm reel of the movie’s trailer. I would love to get the full movie on 16 mm. One such rare item appeared on eBay last month yet sold for over $1100 US (plus $116 US for shipping). So there’s no way I am going to get this ultimate movie collectible anytime soon.
The movie soundtrack has been released in various media formats and I am trying to collect them all too. Good condition early versions of the LP, released in 1954 at the dawn of the LP era, are hard to find. I got the soundtrack on CD when it was included as part of the movie’s fortieth-anniversary deluxe box set edition in 1994. The official soundtrack is constantly on play at my house however it is an incomplete recording in that not all the movie’s songs are included. Yet what will strike the listener as the most shocking is that Rosemary Clooney herself doesn’t even appear on the soundtrack album. Since she was signed to another record label at the time, she could not record the album with Bing Crosby, so Peggy Lee sang her parts instead. Rosemary did release a solo version of the soundtrack album to try to make up for it, but the voices of Crosby and Clooney singing the movie’s songs were never released on the soundtrack album, until now.
Nearly seventy years after the movie’s release, the genuine soundtrack has been released. I try to keep track of all White Christmas releases and rereleases, yet was not aware that in 2022 this came out:
Included for the first time were such songs (absent from the 1954 official release) as the opening VistaVision fanfare; the White Christmas main title orchestration heard over the opening credits; the song simply called “Santa Claus”, which was sung by Crosby and Kaye yet not included in the movie, however the instrumental we hear on the makeshift stage during the 1944 Christmas Eve show at the start of the movie sounds as if it is this song; the “Heat Wave”/”Let Me Sing and I’m Happy”/”Blue Skies” medley; “Sisters” sung by Rosemary Clooney and Trudy Stevens; the “Sisters” reprise when the Haynes sisters perform the song in a slightly different version at the Pine Tree Inn; “I’d Rather See a Minstrel Show” with the “Mr. Bones” lyrics; the “Abraham” instrumental that Vera-Ellen and John Brascia dance to; the movie version of “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me” which is different from Rosemary’s own soundtrack version; “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army” with the verse about “the shows we got civilians couldn’t see”; plus the closing version of “White Christmas” with the boys choir and the army chorus.
The track listing includes some of Rosemary’s own soundtrack versions as songs 24-28, yet “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me” as track 28 appears to be a live version. The final track was an announcement played in theatres about the movie over Bing singing “White Christmas”.
For extreme White Christmas fans as myself, I noted that still missing from the soundtrack are yet another version of “Sisters”, the one which Wallace and Davis lip-synch to which is different from the other two versions; as well as the improvised brief verse from “Snow” when Wallace, Davis and the Haynes sisters arrive in Pine Tree. That audio snippet is the only time that Vera-Ellen’s own voice is heard in the movie. Also missing is the Kaye-Crosby improvised song that begins Little old snowflakes, Eskimo pie… and a slow snippet of “Mandy” that Rosemary sings, almost imperceptibly, as background music in a scene when the Haynes sisters are in their Pine Tree Inn cabin.
I ordered this CD in November and because of the Canada Post strike, I did not get it until my return from Halifax on December 31. I played it for the first time in the new year.
The CD booklet back cover:
I hate to say it, but I may never play the 1954 soundtrack (with Peggy Lee) ever again.
There have been official 55th, sixtieth and 65th anniversary editions of the movie on DVD and blu-ray yet I was expecting something would come out to commemorate the seventieth, yet saw nothing. With fewer people buying movies on physical media I wonder if the studio felt it wasn’t worth it. I never got the 65th anniversary releases–which I saw still for sale this Christmas season–since the only special feature on the packaging was a hype sticker. At least for the 55th and sixtieth anniversary editions, the DVD and blu-rays came out with a special slipcover and hype sticker. I never saw any special releases for the fiftieth anniversary but other movie paraphernalia did come out, such as a puzzle.