It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Sun Valley Serenade is remembered today for being one of the two films that Glenn Miller and his Orchestra were featured in, the other one being Orchestra Wives for 20th Century Fox. Miller was the number one swing band in the country and his presence in the film was more important than stars Sonia Henie and John Payne.Payne's a pianist/vocalist with the Miller Band and his romancing of singer Lynn Bari gets the band a gig in Sun Valley during the ski season. Which is doubly fine for Payne because he likes all kinds of winter sports, indoor and outdoor.But then an old publicity stunt that manager Milton Berle pulled some months earlier comes back to haunt them. He had the band sponsor a refugee from one of the occupied countries of Europe and Chester Clute from Immigration arrives with the receipt while all this full blown courtship of Bari is going on. So the band goes to Ellis Island to meet their sponsored urchin, but instead it turns out to be a rather big girl who also likes winter sports, Sonia Henie.The band thinks to park her with Berle's aunt in New Jersey, but Sonia hears about Sun Valley and that sounds too much like home to suit her. And she's got a great advantage in that Bari isn't interested in skiing nor does she want to learn. Give you a guess who Payne winds up with.Of course this whole fluffy plot is just an excuse to hang some skating sequences and some music by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Harry Warren and Mack Gordon contributed a fine score. In fact Sun Valley Serenade was nominated for an Oscar for black and white cinematography and musical scoring.It also received a nomination for Best Song, one of the best known that the Glenn Miller Orchestra was known for, Chattanooga Choo Choo. John Payne gets to vocalize another great song I Know Why And So Do You which sold a few platters back in the day.I don't know if Payne could play a piano in real life, but even if he was faking it for the film, he got a rare chance to jam with Glenn Miller as he was doing In The Mood, probably his best known hit song. I'd have paid Darryl Zanuck to do that myself.The Miller Band's presence made a lot of folks forget this was a Sonia Henie film. Darryl Zanuck paid dear to sign Henie and she was first billed in all of her films. Her skating sequences or good, but I'm betting she didn't like being upstaged.Nearly all the big bands in their era which was roughly 1935-1945 got into one film or another. Some got into better films than others and Miller's band did well by their two films before Glenn Miller went into the army and to his untimely disappearance over the English Channel.Not to forget that the Nicholas Brothers and Dorothy Dandridge got to do specialty numbers. With all the talent in this film, you can't possibly go wrong giving it a look.

This was my first Sonja Henie movie which was reissued in support of House on 92nd St and what a great piece of entertainment that was! Of course we had been saturated with the great WW2 bands courtesy of AFRS/AFN including Miller's and it was great to see them all and those popular tunes against such an attractive background. "I Know Why" still remains my favourite recording with "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Moonlight Serenade". However, hard as I tried,I really could not accept the 30 year old strapping blonde & dimpled Sonja as an innocent little refugee and neither did Lynn Bari who was Hollywood's definitive gorgeous bitch. It wasn't her singing voice any more than in the later equally enjoyable "Margie" but it didn't matter & who cared? I never quite took to Joan Davis - she seemed too much like Martha Raye/Cass Dailey/Eve Arden/Zazu Pitts. The back projection for the hill skating sequences was too obvious but I would love to know how they managed to get that immaculate black mirrored effect to the huge rink. Much like those impossible dance floors in some of the Astaire/Rogers spectaculars. The Nicholas Bros were nothing less than sensational & an unknown young Dorothy Dandridge did well in her early brief appearance. Glenn Miller on the other hand may have played a cool slush pump but he was no actor! And there were always the real Modernaires. And all this without a hint of smut or sex. Best line - when Lynn Bari in the night club sequence in a fit of jealousy rounds on Henie and calls her a hillbilly and the latter with an expression of total bewilderment retorts "Hillbilly?" Well,I thought so.Both Joan Davis & Milton Berle made it to early 50s TV - the latter becoming known as "Mr TV" from his prolonged popularity & brashness. He even made it into the early 90s in one of his last guest bits for one of Fran Drescher's hilarious "The Nanny" episodes as a shyster lawyer.

Before there was television, before there were ice revues in 20,000 seat arenas, there was Hollywood. A figure skater wanting to translate her amateur sporting achievements into professional entertainment had an obvious choice. There was vaudeville and 'tank ice' -tiny stage rinks- but the mass audience was elsewhere.Sonja Henie in the 1930s was the first Olympic ice princess to seize the public's imagination as a spotlight-hogging diva. Singlehandedly, she pioneered the role of figure skating heroine in a series of lightweight cotton-candy Hollywood musicals, their scripts mere spun-sugar confections but their appeal to the ticket buyer undeniable. Almost seven decades after Sonja skated off Olympic ice for the final time, no one has yet laid claim to be her successor in this role."Sun Valley Serenade" lives on in Sunday-morning PBS television screenings and that ultimate mulligan for the golden age of film, home video. Its centerpiece original song, "It Happened in Sun Valley", along with other Henie musical offerings, has entered the canon as an exemplar of the wintertime theme. (Another time, her "Let It Snow" actually became part of the Christmas repertory). Sonja has been gone exactly 35 years now. Who will replace her? Katarina Witt of "Ronin" fame? Or whom?

Designed to provide some enjoyable light entertainment, "Sun Valley Serenade" does just that. There's plenty of variety, with good comedy, good (sometimes excellent) musical numbers, and some winter outdoors scenes. The story is lightweight, but it's supposed to be, and it is sufficient to tie the rest together.Sonja Henie brings energy and talent to her role as a war refugee who is taken in by a band member. John Payne is good enough, though he mostly allows Henie to take the spotlight, and plays off her and the situation around him. Milton Berle adds some amusing moments as the band's agent. Glenn Miller's band and the performers in the musical sequences get lots of screen time, making good use of most of it. In particular, the 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' number is quite a show-stopper.The atmosphere is quite pleasant, the story is enough to keep things moving, and the variety of material fits together well. It's more than enough to make for an hour-and-a-half of worthwhile watching.