High Society is a musical remake of George Cukor's Philadelphia Story (1940) starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly in the roles originally played by Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Katherine Hepburn. The Cole Porter songs in the film are pleasant enough, especially the ones performed by Louis Armstrong, who is nicely integrated into the film (Crosby puts his arm around him when they sing "Now You Has Jazz" together). There are, however, two major problems in the movie: there is almost no dancing and the film is in Vistavision. I much prefer musicals with dancing. We know Frank Sinatra could dance (On the Town, 1949) but there is no one in High Society for him to dance with; Bing Crosby was strictly a crooner and Grace Kelly did not dance. Director Charles Walters had little chance to show his skill with choreography, as he had in Good News (1947). Vistavision was a wonderful process for Westerns (John Ford used it beautifully in The Searchers, also in 1956) and Hitchcock's dreamlike films (Vertigo, 1958, was shot in Vistavision) but its high resolution produced little intimacy among the characters and a great deal of empty space in the sets representing the "high society" of Newport, where Walters's film took place. I'm not sure whether "high society" was meant to have a double meaning, by the way, but the characters were sloppily drunk during a good part of the film.
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