Sun Valley Serenade (1941) on Netflix
Passed19411h 26mComedyMusicRomance
Pianist Ted Scott sponsors a refugee for publicity. At Ellis Island he finds Karen Benson is a grown woman, not the child he expected, before the band leaves for Sun Valley, Idaho.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.1/102,212 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Phil Corey's band adopts a foreign refugee for the publicity, and its members go to Ellis Island to meet her. She is not the child they pictured but Karen Benson, a young Norwegian woman, and the surprise comes just before the band leaves for Sun Valley, Idaho, for a Christmas engagement. Karen, whose sponsor is the band's pianist, Ted Scott, sets about winning his attention once the group reaches the resort, and her inventive schemes on the ski slopes begin to work on him. Vivian Dawn, a soloist with the band and Ted's girlfriend, dislikes the amount of time the two of them spend together.
Cast
- Mel Ruickas Band Leader
Show all 19 cast
- Tex Benekeas Orchestra Member (uncredited)
- The Nicholas Brothersas Specialty (as Nicholas Brothers)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sun Valley Serenade (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo" from the film received the first gold record ever awarded, for sales of 1.2 million, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1996.
- For the mirror-like "black ice" skating number the ice was flooded with water to sharpen the reflection, and the dye splashed onto the women's skates; they had to replace the skates out of their own pockets, while the men in black skates were unaffected.
- Released in the Soviet Union in June 1944, the film became a template for Soviet youth imitating the "American lifestyle" in the early Cold War, when American films and music were mostly banned there.
- Darryl Zanuck got the idea for the film while on holiday in Sun Valley, but despite the popular myth nearly all of it was shot on 20th Century Fox sound stages in Hollywood, with only a few actors sent to Sun Valley for exteriors.
- The film's success made it a recruiting effort for the elite ski corps of the 10th Mountain Division stationed at Camp Hale in Colorado.
- RCA Victor first issued "Chattanooga Choo Choo" as the B side, with "I Know Why" as the A side, but radio played the B side and it became the hit.
- Glenn Miller's recordings of "At Last", one instrumental and one with vocals by John Payne and Pat Friday, went unused apart from a 1954 LP; Darryl Zanuck reportedly said, "There are too many big ones in this. Let's save one for the next."
- Recordings containing multichannel optical sound, found in the Twentieth Century-Fox archives, let restorers present several musical numbers, including "Chattanooga Choo Choo", in stereophonic sound on the restored DVD and Blu-ray.
