Night and Day
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Movie Reviews of Night and Day
Movie Review: NIGHT AND DAY reviewed
Summary: 3 Stars
Cary Grant and Alexis Smith star in this movie about the life of Cole Porter. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the biography, but it does include many of Cole' best-known songs.Movie Review: It's a good thing Cole Porter had a sense of humor
Summary: 2 Stars
Night and Day is probably the worst of the reverential "biographies" of America's great theater composers which Hollywood cranked out in the Forties. Rodgers & Hart, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, the list goes on, were all smoothed out, glossed over, given awful dialogue and had to see their songs so over-produced at times it must have seemed that they were hearing the heavenly choir.
Night and Day gives us a number of Cole Porter songs polished and massaged with the lush sound stage treatment. The movie also gives the songs pretentious orchestrations so foreign to Porter's style, plus bowdlerized and rewritten lyrics to insure little of Porter's naughtiness would survive to possibly offend middle America.
Most surrealistically, we have Cary Grant as Cole Porter...and that is the kind of casting that makes the Hollywood studio system so wonderful to read about. In addition to being one of the great theater composers, Porter was short, enthusiastically gay, a bit pop-eyed and a terrible social snob. On the other hand, he was supposed to have had a great sense of humor, and reportedly was highly amused when Cary Grant was chosen to portray him. (Another odd bit of Hollywood casting was choosing Mickey Rooney to play Lorenz Hart in Words and Music.)
One or two good biographies have been written about Porter. As a film biography, though, Night and Day is largely a work of hack Hollywood fiction. But don't we at least get a bunch of his songs? Sadly, the songs have been so over-produced, treated so respectfully and have been so sanitized, that watching the numbers often is just downright irritating.
Porter, such a social snob and living the kind of high-maintenance life some might consider simply frivolous, is worth knowing because of his songs...and his songs are best enjoyed when they are performed with impudence and style. It's smart to remember that when he wrote...
I love you
Hums the April breeze.
I love you
Echo the hills.
I love you
The golden dawn agrees
As once more she sees
Daffodils.
It's spring again
And birds on the wing again
Start to sing again
The old melody.
I love you,
That's the song of songs
And it all belongs
To you and me.
...he wrote it to win a bet that he couldn't write a hit love song using mundane images. Porter won the bet and thoroughly enjoyed seeing what he consider a mediocre string of cliches become widely popular. If you enjoy detective work as well as Cole Porter songs, track down the CD's produced by Ben Bagley, the Cole Porter Revisited series of albums. I think Porter might have enjoyed them. And there is also this essential book, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter
Movie Review: I get no kick from this movie
Summary: 2 Stars
Very little of the actual Cole Porter exists in "Night and Day," a scrubbed-down version of the legendary Broadway songwriter's life. While Cary Grant is wonderfully charismatic, the movie itself is both fluffy and stretched out, with the holes patched by colourful musical numbers.
We're introduced to Cole (Grant) as he finishes one year at Yale, but disappoints his grandfather by saying that he's quitting to be a songwriter. He and his professor Monty Woolley (played by self) manage to scrounge up the money for a brilliant musical -- only to have World War I break out on opening night, thus destroying the show.
But after being injured, Cole regains his musical skills, with the help of his soon-to-be-wife Linda (Alexis Smith). Soon he's world-famous for his sparkling songs and brilliant dancing... but fame has a price, and Linda is growing tired of being second-fiddle to Cole's career. Things get even worse when he has a crippling fall from a horse.
Given that this movie was made in 1946, Porter gets the deluxe whitewashing -- inner demons, depression, chronic pain, homosexuality and a platonic marriage are all watered down into a typical Hollywood romance. Only the final close-up of Grant -- looking stiff and slightly ominous -- may hint at the lack of a storybook ending.
Unfortunately, the movie before it is rather corny, with melodramatic confrontations and the hokey handling of real-life tragedies (Porter's near-crippling). It's just fluff. And being turned into fluff, there's too little material included to spread around, so the filmmakers patched it with kitschy versions of Porter's songs, all in eyepoppingly garish colours. Okay, I loved that mad tap-dancing number, but that's about it.
Grant plays a purely fantasy Porter, but he does so with suave charm and style, as well as good chemistry with the elegant Alexis Smith. And Monty Woolley -- the real friend, albeit much older -- is fun as a professor with a great love of the theatre. He gets all of the funnier lines too ("The face and chin belong to me -- the beard belongs to the world").
"Night and Day" is an amusing fluff piece with good acting from Grant and Smith, but not much else to recommend it. It's too in love with Porter's songs and Technicolor to register a real story.
Movie Review: Night and Day on DVD
Summary: 2 Stars
Others have addressed the travesty this movie makes of Cole Porter's life, so I will not rehash. Historically, both Linda and Cole were supposed to have been quite pleased with the flic, which, given the times, probably was the only public reaction they could have had (I'd hope they laughed histerically in private). On the plus side, we have Alexis Smith as beautiful and elegant as she always was, but younger (presumably Linda Lee Porter suggested her for the role); Jane Wyman vital and sparkling, as far removed from Douglas Sirk as one can imagine; Mary Martin innocently raunchy; Eve Arden putting on a French accent, straight-faced; and about the most gosh-awful-kitschiest rendition of Begin the Beguine I have ever seen, on or off film. Not campy but garish, it becomes fascinatingly repellent .... definitely worth seeing. It is the movie's "Big Number" .... seriously tasteless and ill-conceived, following relatively close on the heels -so to speak- of an acknowledged masterpiece: Begin the Beguine, the "Big Number" in "Broadway Melody of 1940," danced by Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire.(Available in a pristine transfer to DVD).
What is absolutely shameful is the minimal care evidenced in the movie's transfer to DVD. Scratches and dirt are easily discernible...... worst: whole sections go by in thoroughly faded technicolor, yet there are isolated spots when one is reminded how glorious the process could be. It doesn't appear WB went to a negative but rather picked from various prints in varying degrees of deterioration. I can think of many movies deserving full-fledged restoration before Night and Day,
but, c'mon...... surely Warner can do better than this.
WB partially redeems itself by including a musical short featuring a singing Desi Arnaz and His Band, and a truly charmless, through-composed oddity called "Musical Movieland." Nonetheless, on the balance, if it came to a choice, I would have opted for a better transfer.
Movie Review: Hoaky and inaccurate
Summary: 2 Stars
The main tension of this film, Porter's devotion to his career vs. his wife's longings for his attentions, is sad and pathetic, all the more so because the movie's conclusion seems to be some kind of romantic reunion between the two. Is it celebrating it, or does Grant's tortured look over Linda's shoulder betray darker, more forboding elements in their relationship. Be that as it may, they never really delve into Porter's life in any gripping, realistic way. You can hear the music better performed many, many places. It's fun to watch Wooley and Martins' performances, as well as the cameos by the likes of Eve Arden. Not a keeper, but worth seeing once if your a fan of any of the performers in the film or whom the film is about.