Halloween -- Musicals and Monsters

Halloween is missing from the roster of holidays celebrated in musical numbers from Holiday Inn (1942).  At the time the film was made, Halloween was barely clawing its way out of the era of time-honored street urchin vandalism of petty theft and streetcar derailment to something different – an adult-supervised, tamer holiday of parties, party favors, and treats.  By the time the Boomers were kids, trick-or-treating exploded across suburbia.

Today, it’s the second-largest holiday of consumer spending in United States, with the National Retail Federation predicting that this year Americans will spend more than $10 billion on Halloween.  This is amazing considering the economy’s fragility while still dealing with a pandemic, and even more so that this is an increase of some $8 billion over last year.  So far, consumer spending on Halloween is still behind the level of Christmas—but for how long?

The single day of Halloween has become a season of a month or even more of decorating indoors—and most dramatically—outdoors.  One wonders if this is merely yet another example of the arrested emotional development of Boomers, Gen-X-ers, and Millennials not so much yearning for the fun times of childhood, but being oblivious to the fact that they might have to actually grow up at all. 

I confess a monstrous craving for candy corn this time of year (similar to the unaccountable monstrous craving I get for candy conversation hearts as Valentine’s Day approaches), so perhaps, like most of us, I have become well trained by the retailers. Though we joke about pumpkin-spice everything this time of year, at least that’s innocuous compared to the severed heads and skeletal displays of sometimes questionable taste on the neighbor’s lawn.

For classic film buffs, society’s growing enthusiasm for Halloween has led to that transfer of movies-as-holiday props such as we see during the approach of Christmas.  Christmas is a holiday wrapped up in nostalgia as much as consumerism, and for fans of old movies, this means dragging out not only decorations, Christmas music, and favorite recipes—but also the retrieval from our own vaults of Christmas movies to watch during December.  To be sure, Turner Classic Movies is there for a reliable backup, but we who have amassed our private stock of movies without which Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas really don’t rely on it, do we?

Holiday Inn is a teasing, tantalizing hybrid of holidays as Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Louise Beavers, Marjorie Reynolds, and Walter Abel parade through the calendar.  Most classic film buffs watch it during Christmastime, and are familiar with the tale that the song “White Christmas” was created for the movie and become an almost instant hit, now a national treasure.  Other songs written specifically for the movie include “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” for Valentine’s Day, “Happy Holidays” (for those smug, hypocritical fools who think saying “Happy Holidays” is somehow a sacrilegious insult to Christmas, a Bing Crosby recording should be played over and over as an answer to their foolishness), and “You’re Easy to Dance With,” which has no holiday connotation at all.

If precious filmstock was being devoted to non-holiday musical numbers, then why, we might wonder, could they not have filled that gap in the movie between Independence Day and Thanksgiving with a Halloween song?  Irving Berlin actually did write a couple that might serve:  “Down Where the Jack O’ Lanterns Grow” written sometime around World War I about a rural love nest and not particularly spooky.  I would vote for “The Haunted House,” a really cute ragtime ditty you can listen to here on YouTube:

As for giving September a little attention, perhaps a Labor Day sequence could have been thrown in with Berlin’s song “And Father Wanted Me to Learn a Trade” written sometime in the middle 19-teens.  We do have that burst of industrial war worker footage montage during the Independence Day sequence, so factory work had achieved a nobility not seen since. 

Also for the war, Irving Berlin wrote the pleasant if unintentionally comical “I Paid My Income Tax Today” which you can listen to here:

Maybe Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire would have a tougher time putting across Income Tax Day in their musical romp.

But it is on the calendar.

It does feel like something of a wrench for us these days to have no Halloween in Holiday Inn, but likely nobody missed it in 1942.  Halloween was strictly for kids.  For the grownups, there were scarier monsters afoot, and they came home to us when as partway through the filming of the movie, Pearl Harbor was bombed.

But classic movie fans, partly as a celebration of Halloween, have revived the popularity of the Universal monsters: Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, et al.  Because of Halloween and our movies-as-holiday props habit, monsters walk the earth again, at least once a year.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.