White Christmas, Paramount’s belated follow-up to the 1942 hit Holiday Inn, was the studio’s first VistaVision production. A veritable warehouse full of oldie-but-goodie Irving Berlin tunes are woven into the film’s simplistic plotline, along with a handful of new songs, of which “What Can You Do With a General?” is the least memorable. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye (replacing an ailing Donald O’Connor) play nightclub entertainers Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, while Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen are cast as singing-sister act Betty and Judy. The foursome travel to Vermont to visit Bob and Phil’s WII commanding officer, General Waverly (Dean Jagger, who looks and sounds like Dwight D. Eisenhower!), who now runs a rustic old inn. Discovering that the general is in dire financial straits, the four entertainers secretly make plans to bail the old guy out with a big musical show, enlisting the aid of Bob and Phil’s army buddies. Corny in the extreme, White Christmas evidently struck a responsive note with film fans; it was the high-grossing picture of 1954, and a decade later proved to be a ratings bonanza when it was given its network-TV premiere. Of the four stars, Crosby comes off best, especially when singing the title song at the beginning and end of the film; Kaye is a bit overshadowed this time out, though he’s quite funny camping it up in a “drag” version of Irving Berlin’s “Sisters.” Still a big favorite on the home-video circuit, White Christmas may not be the best Bing Crosby musical on the market, but it’s certainly one of the most heartwarming.

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Billy Wilder directs the lighthearted romantic comedy Sabrina, based on the play by Samuel A. Taylor. Sabrina Fairchild (Audrey Hepburn) is the simple, naïve daughter of a chauffeur, Thomas Fairchild (John Williams). They live on an estate with the wealthy Oliver Larrabee (Walter Hampden) and his two sons: workaholic older brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart) and fun-loving younger brother David (William Holden). Sabrina adores the charming David, but he thinks of her as just a kid. Her father sends her away to Paris for chef school, where she meets Baron St. Fontanel (Marcel Dalio), and she returns a worldly, sophisticated woman. David immediately falls for her, but he is already engaged to marry heiress Elizabeth Tyson (Martha Hyer). Sabrina wants to break up the wedding in order to finally catch the man of her dreams, while Linus fights to keep the marriage on in the interest of family business and Mr. Tyson’s (Francis X. Bushman) fortune. In order to keep Sabrina away from David, Linus pretends to court her himself. In doing so, they eventually realize their true feelings for each another.

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Laid up with a broken leg, photojournalist L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined to his tiny, sweltering courtyard apartment. To pass the time between visits from his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and his fashion model girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly), the binocular-wielding Jeffries stares through the rear window of his apartment at the goings-on in the other apartments around his courtyard. As he watches his neighbors, he assigns them such roles and character names as “Miss Torso” (Georgine Darcy), a professional dancer with a healthy social life or “Miss Lonelyhearts” (Judith Evelyn), a middle-aged woman who entertains nonexistent gentlemen callers. Of particular interest is seemingly mild-mannered travelling salesman Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), who is saddled with a nagging, invalid wife. One afternoon, Thorwald pulls down his window shade, and his wife’s incessant bray comes to a sudden halt. Out of boredom, Jeffries casually concocts a scenario in which Thorwald has murdered his wife and disposed of the body in gruesome fashion. Trouble is, Jeffries’ musings just might happen to be the truth. One of Alfred Hitchcock’s very best efforts, Rear Window is a crackling suspense film that also ranks with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) as one of the movies’ most trenchant dissections of voyeurism. As in most Hitchcock films, the protagonist is a seemingly ordinary man who gets himself in trouble for his secret desires.

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The Barefoot Contessa begins at the funeral of Ava Gardner, a former Spanish peasant, cabaret dancer and movie star, who at the time of her death was a full-fledged contessa. Her life story unfolds in flashback recollections from her mourners. Film director Humphrey Bogart recalls how his career was saved when he discovered Gardner on behalf of Howard R. Hughes-like mogul Warren Stevens. Press agent Edmond O’Brien remembers how Ava was wooed and then abandoned by mercurial millionaire Marius Goring, and Italian count Rosanno Brazzi reflects on how he was able to wed the tempestuous Gardner, only to watch his world crumble after revealing on their wedding night that he was “only half a man.” O’Brien received Best Supporting Actor awards at both the Academy Awards and Golden Globes in 1954.

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Suddenly is the name of the small town invaded by professional assassin Frank Sinatra and his henchmen. Taking a local family hostage, Sinatra sets up a vigil at the second-story window of the family’s home. From here, he intends to kill the President of the United States when the latter makes a whistle-stop visit. The film’s tension level is enough to induce goose pimples from first scene to last. Sinatra is outstanding as the disgruntled war vet who hopes to become a “somebody” by killing the president. The parallels between his character and Lee Harvey Oswald’s are too close for comfort, so much so that Suddenly was withdrawn from local TV packages for several years after the JFK assassination. Sinatra would claim in later years that he himself engineered the removal of Suddenly from general distribution, though in fact he’d lost whatever rights he’d held on the film when it lapsed into public domain. Be sure and miss the notorious colorized version of this black-and-white thriller, wherein Sinatra is transformed into Ol’ Brown Eyes.

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