Andres Salama This very agreeable romantic musical comedy from 1941 links two seemingly incompatible elements, both very popular at the time it was filmed: Sonja Henie's ice skating and Glenn Miller's big band jazz. It's admittedly fluffy, but is also very hard to dislike.The slim plot of sorts: Ted (John Payne), a pianist in a struggling jazz big band headed by Glenn Miller (though he is given another name here), has volunteered for publicity reasons to take a refugee from war torn Norway. He expects to get a small child, but she gets the grown, beautiful Karen Benson (Sonja Henie). Karen is too eager to get involved romantically with Ted, the problem is he already has a girlfriend, the temperamental Viv (played by Lynn Bari), who is also a singer with the band. Henie's character is just short of grating - we are supposed to find her a sympathetic character, and mostly we do, even as she tries to steal a man from other woman. When Ted and Viv goes to the ski resort of Sun Valley for a performance there in the middle of the winter, Karen decides to join them hiding in the train with the help of the band manager (Milton Berle).Of course more than the plot, the important thing here is the music (In the Mood and Chattanooga Choo Choo are some of the pieces included) and Henie's skating. There is also a nifty prolonged scene of Henie pursuing Payne in skis (even if the close ups were obviously filmed in studios, and doubles were used in distant shots).

roslein-674-874556 This musical has the Glenn Miller band and some wonderful songs-- Chattanooga Choo Choo (charmingly performed by Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers), I Know Why, At Last. It has John Payne, a real sweetie, and the unusual snow-filled setting. But it also has Sonia Henie, a horrible little pep pill from Norway. The character she plays is utterly obnoxious--manipulative, insensitive, and deceitful in her shameless campaign to get Payne away from Lynn Bari, a mature, glamorous woman who, uniquely for such a plot, is kind and sensible and does nothing wrong. Looking younger than her age (she is short, slender, and flat-chested), and a great deal younger than Bari, she comes across as an oversexed teenager and makes Payne look like something of a pedophile. One can only imagine how much damage this kind of plot did to young, innocent girls, who thought that the way to make a man love you and propose to you is to stick to him every minute and to manipulate him into kissing you and being alone with you. And one can also imagine how women Bari's age felt at seeing her dismissed in favour of a pushy little pest who is always whooshing gaily down mountains and flashing her panties at everybody in her ice routines (her skirt must have had a little tube of compressed air underneath it at the rear--I've never seen a short skirt fly up so many times--and the camera even shoots up between her legs when they're both in the air, as someone is holding her up!). It seems Henie was as repellent in person as in this film--she was a Nazi sympathiser, and, as a biography written by her brother said, extremely nasty and utterly self-centred. Watching her in this movie, it's easy to imagine she's just playing a nicer version of herself.

writers_reign This movie was released at the tail-end of the Big-Band era when it was par for the course for 'name' bands to go 'on the road' playing to packed houses in venues all across the US. This meant that fans got to know the members of the band by sight and so would have had no difficulty in recognizing more than half the Glenn Miller orchestra on screen, from the rhythm section, Moe Purtill, Trigger Alpert, Chummy MacGregor, to trumpeters Billy May, Johnny Best and Ray Anthony, saxophonists Al Klink and Tex Beneke (who 'duelled' on In The Mood) vocalist Paula Kelly (the 'boy' singer Ray Eberle was missing on this one but appeared in the follow-up Orchestra Wives) and not one but TWO vocal groups, The Modernaires and Six Hits And A Miss. Arguably in 1941 the average Big Band fan would have been satisfied with just the orchestra and not asked for a story but for the benefit of run-of-the-mill audiences Fox concocted a storyline that had 'pianist' John Payne falling for the band vocalist Lynn Bari until the arrival of Sonja Henie as a refugee he has unwittingly sponsored provides the conflict. Henie - who was, by all accounts a royal pain in the ass to work with -was also, of course, an ex-Olympic ice skater and as such Fox's answer to swimmer Esther Williams. Comedy was provided by Milton Berle and Joan Davis but the icing on the cake was the standout score by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon which included I Know Why, Chattanooga Choo-Choo and The Kiss Polka. Something for everyone and there WAS a war on - or, in the case of the USA, there very soon would be and all in all a pleasant wallow in nostalgia.

Bari2 For the first time the 'Sun Valley Serenade' was shown in the USSR at the time of WW2. It was never forbidden by the Soviet censorship, so it could be watched in the following years as well. The film made formidable impression on Soviet citizens. It conjured up 'the American dream' in which the USA appeared as a country where everything is excellent, all women are beautiful, life is extremely easy and cheerful, where money lies on the streets - bend down and take!Opposite to that paradise picture they saw around them a surly Soviet reality, lack of liberty, empty shops, shabby life in overcrowded communal apartments where people had to stand in turns to get to WC, etc.Surely, Stalin made a great mistake permitting his subjects to see this film.A friend of mine watched this film 46 times. Glen Miller became the greatest composer to him. I saw it twice, and at the second time left the cinema long before the end.That dream about America continued to live in hearts and minds of many people in the Soviet Union. It had been one of the factors which gave birth to the dissident movement, and at the end, made a contribution to the fall of Communism in Russia.I'm sure that there are some people who participated in creation of the movie who are living now: do they know about their part in the History?From the point of view of pure art, the rating, I think, is 6 out of 10.