DVDs: The Beat, Beat, Beat of the Tom-Tom

Perhaps to coincide with the upcoming opening of De-Lovely, a new screen biography of Cole Porter starring Kevin Kline, Warner Home Video has issued on DVD Night and Day, the first Porter biopic, released in 1946. It's said that the film was the idea of Irving Berlin, who felt that Porter's ability to surmount a terrible riding accident might serve as an inspiration to servicemen who had recently suffered war injuries.

But it's more likely that the film was the result of the success of Rhapsody in Blue, Warner Bros.' 1945 biography of George Gershwin. This was indeed the period for composer-lyricist biographies. The same year Warners put out Night and Day, MGM released its Jerome Kern picture, Till the Clouds Roll By. Two years later, MGM did Words and Music, the story of Rodgers and Hart.

If these films are generally notorious for being heavily fictionalized, Night and Day may take the prize for evincing barely a shred of authenticity. Of course, the film could not deal with Porter's homosexuality, something that does indeed figure in De-Lovely. But little in Night and Day rings true, right from forty-two-year-old Cary Grant's first appearance as a 1914 Yale undergraduate on through a series of musical numbers from Porter shows that look and sound nothing like the actual numbers looked in those shows.

The technicolor picture was produced for Warner Bros. by Arthur Schwartz, a major Broadway composer in his own right, and directed by Michael Curtiz. And it borrowed one of Rhapsody in Blue's stars, Alexis Smith, cast to type as Porter's wealthy bride. Porter, who got the studio to pay him $300,000 for the rights to a life story that would barely be used, requested that Grant play him, just as Porter's wife, Linda, suggested Smith. Ashley Judd plays Linda in De-Lovely. Porter admitted privately that Night and Day was largely fiction, but he went along with it, enjoying it as little more than an excuse to present the Porter song catalogue.

Night and Day has its share of howlers. The sinking of the Lusitania spoils the opening night performance of Cole's first show. We watch as Cole hears the "beat, beat, beat" of a tom-tom during his made-up military service, then, back home, puts that sound together with the ticking of a stately clock and the dripping of raindrops to create the lyric to "Night and Day." We see a program for the show The Gay Divorcee, but there never was such a show: That was the title of the film version of a show that was actually called Gay Divorce.

There's virtually nothing dramatic about Porter's story until his accident, which occurs about twenty minutes before the film ends. Ethel Merman, a key figure in Porter shows, is absent; a bland singer named Ginny Simms stands in as a composite of Porter leading ladies, while Jane Wyman plays another. Eve Arden has a few bright moments as a French song stylist, and Monty Woolley manages to have fun playing himself, even if he's been improbably rethought as a Yale law professor who quits academia to join Cole in show business. Allan Corduner plays Woolley in De-Lovely.

But the film's only really valuable sequence has Mary Martin, playing herself, singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," the star-making showstopper she delivered in Leave It to Me. Otherwise, Night and Day is mostly preposterous; De-Lovely has got to be better.

The DVD includes a couple of amusing bonuses in a twenty-minute technicolor short called "Musical Movieland," which offers a tour of the studio lot set to music, and an elaborate, song-and-dance short built around Desi Arnaz and his orchestra.

THE HAPPIEST MILLIONAIRE Buena Vista

A year from now, the Sherman Brothers could have two musicals --Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins-- running simultaneously in the West End, and one --Chitty-- on Broadway. Recently reissued on DVD is Walt Disney's The Happiest Millionaire, a Sherman Brothers film that happened between the Poppins and Chitty films.

The 1967 musical picture was based on the successful Broadway comedy The Happiest Millionaire, which had enjoyed a 271 performance run beginning in 1956 at the Lyceum Theatre. With Walter Pidgeon in the title role and young George Grizzard as the millionaire's daughter's suitor, the play was the work of Kyle Chrichton, based on the memoir My Philadelphia Father by Cordelia Drexel Biddle and Crichton.

For the film, set, like its source, in 1916 Philadelphia, Disney miscast genial Fred MacMurray as the eccentric millionaire who keeps alligators around the house and thrives on a diet of chocolate cake. As the young lovers, The Happiest Millionaire "introduced" the attractive pair of John Davidson and Lesley Ann Warren. Both had done Broadway, he in Foxy 1964, she in 110 in the Shade 1963 and Drat! the Cat! 1965. Warren had already been introduced to a wider audience in the 1965 TV version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. Cast as the family's Irish butler was Tommy Steele, at his most aggresively adorable. This was one of three Hollywood musicals the others are Half a Sixpence and Finian's Rainbow that Steele shot almost simultaneously.

Directed by Norman Tokar and with a screenplay by A.J. Carothers who wrote the book for the Sherman Brothers stage musical Busker Alley, The Happiest Millionaire is an extravagant, overlong production. It has been exhibited in a variety of lengths, but the DVD restores it to its full 172-minute, reserved-seat running time, including an overture, entr'acte, and exit music.

Making The Happiest Millionaire tolerable are such veterans as Geraldine Page, who brightens the second half as Davidson's mother; Gladys Cooper as the family dowager; Hermione Baddeley as the maid; and Greer Garson as MacMurray's wife. Also present as one of the sons is Eddie Hodges, who had created the role of Winthrop in Broadway's The Music Man a decade earlier.

The Happiest Millionaire was the last film Disney worked on before his death. The Sherman Brothers' score is, at best, mediocre, containing one of their trademark items, a big song built around a made-up word, in this case "Fortuosity." In general, The Happiest Millionaire is pretty bad, but it may be worth a look for the cast and as a late example of a grand-scale, book musical written directly for the screen. But don't expect a stage version of The Happiest Millionaire.

Coming on DVD in July: A 1968 Disney-Sherman Brothers film musical, The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, also with Warren and Davidson.

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