---
title: "Holiday Inn (1942) review"
description: "A Christmas movie about every holiday, including one particularly memorable one we don't celebrate anymore... Cough cough, Abraham Lincoln's birthday, cough..."
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/holiday-inn/
---

![A still from Holiday Inn (1942)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/holiday-inn/backdrop.webp)

# Holiday Inn (1942)

Dec 19, 2025 | Rated 3 out of 5 | Dir. Mark Sandrich

A Christmas movie about every holiday, including one particularly memorable one we don’t celebrate anymore… Cough cough, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, cough cough.

I watched this for the obvious connection to White Christmas - Holiday Inn is the loose inspiration, and you can tell they knew they had a banger with that song because they spun an entire movie out of it later. They were absolutely right. White Christmas is iconic.

The rest of this movie is more uneven. It’s plodding in places, and most of the musical numbers besides the title song don’t work for me. The Abraham Lincoln number is - aside from everything else wrong with it - just not a good song. But I do love watching Fred Astaire dance and Bing Crosby croon. The 4th of July tap number with the fireworks and little firecrackers going off? That was genuinely fun.

And I’ll admit - I teared up at the end when Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds reunite. Got me.

I don’t know if I’ll be revisiting this one. I definitely won’t be watching it with friends, for obvious reasons. But it was a fun time, I guess. With several significant asterisks attached.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/holiday-inn/)

## Works on My Machine

Get the next post by email. My newsletter covers homelab builds, AI tools and open source, and it goes out when I have something to say.

It's free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. You'll get an email to confirm first.

![Joe Karlsson at his desk, chin on hand, with a microphone in front of him](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/about/collage/studio.webp)

Joe  
Karlsson

I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side.

[More about me →](https://www.joekarlsson.com/about/)

[Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/joekarlsson.com) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekarlsson/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/JoeKarlsson)