Ghost Town (1988)

 

Bing Crosby and the Sounds of Christmas (1971)

    The internet can only do so much. For anything older than around 1990 it depends on people cataloging and uploading information and indexing everything in order for it to be in any way searchable. If none of that happens at worst it simply isn’t aware of its existence, at best it might be included in some dump of scanned images or papers sitting on a server somewhere waiting on the slow grind of Google or Amazon or some such service to eventually unleash AI-learning onto the raw data and spit out something possibly useful.

Not entirely un-Orwellian.

    When a fairly prominent television special from 1971 opens with a title card for “Bell System Family Theatre” emblazoned with the old ‘Ma Bell’ logo even if you haven’t heard of that specific imprint before you can start casting searches with some degree of certainty you’re going to find out what it is fairly quickly. This improbably turns out not to be the case.

    For those completely unfamiliar with US Anti-trust law in the 20^th century there was simply nothing comparable to the breakup of AT&T initiated in 1974 and finalized by settlement in 1984. It had enjoyed monopolistic status for around a hundred years and more or less controlled all telecommunications in the United States and Canada. Its breakup into what is today AT&T itself and seven smaller “baby Bells” gave birth to the start of the telecommunication systems we enjoy today.

    Before that breakup it’s hard to overstate the dominance of Bell Systems in Americans’ everyday lives. They owned the phone lines, both local and long distance, as well as owning Western Electric which made the lines, the phones, and all of the rest of the equipment. There was no such thing as competition. It was so all-pervasive that I was taken somewhat aback by its invocation at the start of this show. What reason would Bell Telephone need to advertise or sponsor a television special? The internet was singularly unhelpful here. The name was attached to a number of NBC productions over the years, was listed as part of individual shows’ Emmy nominations, but it doesn’t exist on IMDB and a Google search for the name has this very program as the eighth result. I find it a genuine mystery.

    All of which is going a very long way to say that I’m already sick of Bing Crosby and his Christmas specials and wanted to write about anything else. Everyone around him is at least trying but he clearly doesn’t care at this point. This was a pre-taped special recorded on stage over four days in September without an audience and the silence between the musical numbers and skits is a bit off-putting. I hate having to go back to the Como well but at least his pre-taped specials were on locations where a lack of appreciative crowds made sense.

    Crosby strolls on stage singing ‘A Time to be Jolly,’ the name of his new Christmas album released that same season. The fake trees at least look a little better. He gets through a few minutes before a preening Robert Goulet is carried onstage by a moving staircase in a very odd effect. Robert Goulet is a fine singer but he is just awful in this special, very obviously lip-syncing, mugging for the camera, and speak-singing about half of his songs. His mustache is a full 70’s mustache, at least, and his hair is lacquered into immobility. After a few lines opera-singer Mary Costa is wheeled in on her own moving staircase opposite to join in. Costa’s an interesting one, we’ll get to her in a moment. They are soon joined by the rest of Crosby’s family, still not really able to sing or act, and The Mitchell Singing Boys, a bunch of kids in lederhosen.

Not one of the kids in lederhosen.

    After a break we come back to a gaunt Crosby walking us through the guests for the night. It’s more than a bit morbid to point out he would pass on less than six years after this special aired. His family then does a version of ‘Deck the Halls’ where the kids bang on pots and pans as part of the melody and Crosby makes disapproving faces to the camera which, hmm, that must have played interestingly in the room. Robert Goulet then takes a truly disastrous swing at ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ where you can just see him trying to wring out every last drop of pathos with his overwrought delivery.

No, Robert, I clearly don't.

    Then there’s this vaguely O. Henry song-skit about a homeless man during the winter, except it’s not an accurate homeless man but some kind of showbiz approximation. It’s Crosby in vague rags and a beat up hat and those gloves where the finger tips are missing. He goes on about how he can’t stand working or welfare and so decides to commit a crime so he’ll get locked up during the winter months, which is something that does sometimes happen but not in the bumbling played-for-laughs version presented here. He tries to dine-and-dash from a fancy restaurant, tries to steal a rich man’s cane, breaks a window with a brick, and the joke is that no matter what he does he just can’t get arrested, which, yeah, okay. Finally he hears a church choir, pledges to improve his life, and while he’s standing there and reflecting on the changes he’s going to make gets arrested for vagrancy. For people watching from home in 1971 I guess this was funny?

Wacky.

    Mary Costa comes on next to do an operatic rendition of ‘Jingle Bells.’ As I said before she’s an interesting one. She’d been appearing on the radio since the late 40’s with personalities like Edgar Bergen and Martin & Lewis. In 1952 she landed the role of Princess Aurora in Disney’s ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ Unlike more recent Disney animated productions she provided both the speaking and singing parts. She went on to a long and distinguished opera career as well as making frequent tv guest appearances on shows such as this one. Like so many of the other female guests on this show she reminds me of the famous quote about Ginger Rogers backwards and in heels.

Princess Aurora doing all right for herself.

    Next we have that oh so familiar staple of all of these shows, the medley. She and Crosby run through a number of staples, including ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s,’ for once a Crosby movie reference that isn’t ‘White Christmas.’ She runs rings around him. Next up is the Crosby family decorating a tree while he himself sits and watches because of course he does. The kids have some back and forth lines, nothing I’d call actual acting, limp through a couple of numbers including one where the Sugar Plum Fairy comes to life to dance a bit, then a horrifying nightmare is unleashed upon us. One of the interchangeable children opens up a box and two little puppets or marionettes or something pop out and through “television magic” have his parents’ faces and hands superimposed over the little abominations as they sing a song about Christmas Island and jiggle about. I have no idea what tone they’re going for but I’m guessing it wasn’t soul-destroying.

Words won't help you now.

    While we’re all clutching at our temples trying to hold in what little sanity remains we have a stranded little sketch about Crosby, Goulet, and Costa doing some kind of Santa Claus sing and dance review while they sing ‘Christmas Alphabet.’ They’re all dressed as Santa and apparently are Santa and they do little dances and this is not helping with the sanity one bit. Again the female opera star overshadows the two male light entertainers.

Nixon would go on to a landslide victory the very next year.

    We then get our closing medley, like I knew that we would, and they all takes turns at verses and lines and songs and I am done pretending any of it is necessary or even interesting. The show has ten minutes left, this is all that’s left. There’s another odd moment when the medley has wrapped where Crosby is clearly moving to break out ‘White Christmas’ again when he’s approached by the guests one after another to ask if maybe they could take it this year and he responds with cold, flat refusals. It’s structured like it’s meant to be funny and the guests ham it up that way but Crosby is not messing around with these denials. He sings the song, everyone joins in at the end, and he wraps things up by thanking everyone for sharing the “Christmas sounds” with the Bell System Family Theatre, and hopefully you got that the ‘sounds’ in the title was referring to telecommunications well before I did because I didn’t connect the two until around this point the first time through. He mouths some words about “the sound of peace on Earth” then the credits roll and we are out.

    Unlike the last Crosby Christmas special I did at least take one thing away and that was an appreciation for the talents of one Mary Costa. Any time she’s onscreen she’s at worst interesting and makes me want to punch Goulet in the stomach all the more. One more of these to go and I’m looking forward to seeing exactly how coked out of his mind David Bowie appears to be.

She holds this face for several minutes.  Just pointing that out.