De-Lovely vs. Night and Day

Have you gotten around to seeing De-Lovely yet? And did you watch Night and Day before, after, or at all? My choice was to revisit the oft-reviled 1946 biopic of Cole Porter before taking in the 2004 version of the songwriter’s life.

Only a few minutes into Night and Day, we see that this picture will do anything to shoehorn any Porter song into the plot. First, we get the hoariest device of a musical movie biography: A song is played long before the character actually wrote it. Here, on a snowy winter night, kids arrive outside law student Porter’s window to sing Christmas carols — and then they sing “In the Still of the Night.” Pretty soon, we see Porter composing “Let’s Do It” and “You Do Something to Me” for his initial Broadway musical, See America First. If he had actually done so, that show might not have received the lethal reviews it did, which caused Porter to leave the country in disgrace. (The movie insists that the show had to close immediately because the Lusitania sank on its opening night; I guess this was face-saving for Porter, who was still alive when Night and Day was filmed.)

The Porter songs in Night and Day are mostly standards, though room was found for “I’m Unlucky at Gambling” and “Miss Otis Regrets.” There’s nothing from his comeback hits Kiss Me, Kate or Can-Can, for good reason: Those shows were written after the movie was filmed. On the other hand, the fact that the biopic was made so early meant that it didn’t include the tragedy of Porter’s having both legs amputated in 1958.

Night and Day has Mary Martin reprising her famous breakthrough role in Leave It to Me by singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” And that brings me to De-Lovely, in which pop artists sing songs of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s in a distinctly 21st century way. There are plenty of people around today who could have well replicated Porter’s café society and old Broadway style — Steve Ross and Karen Akers immediately come to mind — but the director went with current stars who sing in a contemporary, melisma-laden fashion. I guess he did it to appeal to today’s youth, but I doubt that the ploy will help any more than it does with the ratings for the Tony Awards telecasts when hot but irrelevant-to-theater stars perform and/or dole out the honors. In the theater where I saw De-Lovely, there were very few young people, yet the place was packed: Out in force were senior citizens. If you film it, they will come.

Of course, what really sets De-Lovely apart from Night and Day is the frank depiction of Porter’s homosexuality — how his wife Linda knew about it from the outset and did her best to accept it. The earlier picture made the songwriter’s workaholism the problem in the Porter marriage. Every time the two planned a vacation alone, an offer for a show would come along and Porter would grab the assignment. But could it be that he took these jobs in order to avoid his, shall we say, husbandly duties? Were the powers behind the picture subtly indicating the real issue?

Something else about Night and Day, if intentional, is even more abstruse. Notice the expression on Cary Grant’s face when he pulls away from Alexis Smith after kissing her for the first time: He looks as if he’s thinking, “Well, I was hoping that would turn me on, but it didn’t.” In fact, virtually every time Grant goes to kiss Smith, he veers a little to the right and she has to move her mouth over to meet his. Could it possibly be that Grant and director Michael Curtiz did this on purpose to show that Porter didn’t have the hots for his wife? It could, for those old Hollywood directors often found ingenious ways to get around censorship.

But just like Night and Day, De-Lovely often depicts Porter writing certain songs much earlier than he actually did. When Kevin Kline’s Porter sits at the piano writing and singing “It’s the wrong time and the wrong place,” I found myself muttering, “Boy, are you right about that!” By the way, neither picture visually backs Porter’s claim that, after a horse fell on him and he was in excruciating pain, he wrote “At Long Last Love” while waiting for help to arrive. Maybe the brass on both pictures felt that no audience member would buy this — or
maybe they felt that not enough people would know and appreciate the song. De-Lovely doesn’t offer any of Porter’s lesser-known songs; it’s a hit parade.

The movie fails in other ways. The scenes that take place inside theaters were shot in what distinctly look like British playhouses. When Porter yells “That costume’s all wrong,” I must stifle the urge to yell back, “So’s the theater!” Never mind that Porter is seen holding a Jubilee program that states “Imperial Theatre.” The house is definitely not the one we know and love on West 45th Street.

When all is said and done, the new film isn’t any better than the old one in terms of the phony Hollywoodisms that movie makers foist on unwitting audiences. As Cole and his beloved Linda walk down a boulevard in France in the ’20s, there’s “I Love Paris” playing in the background — three decades before it would be written. Later, during the opening night performance of Kiss Me, Kate, Petruchio and Kate sing “So in Love” and the audience stands and cheers. The two singers turn forward and, out-of-character, take a big bow right then and there! So the difference between Night and Day and De-Lovely isn’t like the difference between night and day.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]