Peter Canavese
2004-06-28 21:04:15 UTC
Night and Day, a Technicolor curiosity "based on the career of Cole Porter," bares scant resemblance to the life of Cole Porter. If not for flashes of flair from an uncomfortable-looking Cary Grant and Golden Age director Michael Curtiz—known for Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Adventures of Robin Hood (and the list goes on...)—Night and Day would be hopeless. As it is, the film is merely mediocre drama goosed with hit-and-miss production numbers of Porter's witty tunes.
Though Alexis Smith is a bit frozen as Cole's long-suffering wife Linda, Night and Day benefits from a veteran ensemble, including Jane Wyman, Eve Arden, Alan Hale, Sig Ruman, and, in an odd spectacle, Monty Woolley and Mary Martin as themselves. Martin recreates her "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" routine from Porter's Leave It To Me, and Woolley, who was a contemporary of Porter's at Yale, reinvents himself as a rakish professor who really wants to direct. As for the hard-working, conscientious Grant, he seems at sea with the square script and, when in doubt, simply flashes his million-watt grin. Grant fanatics will enjoy the handful of tremulous Grant vocals.
Night and Day includes 27 Porter songs in all, including "Let's Do It," "You Do Something to Me" (set to a remarkable cane dance), "What is This Thing Called Love?", "I've Got You Under My Skin," "It Was Just One of Those Things," "Anything Goes," "You're the Top" (sung by Grant), "I Get a Kick Out of You" (replacing Porter's reference to cocaine with "perfume from Spain"), "You'd Be So Easy to Love," "Begin the Beguine," and, in a snippet of vintage footage from Hollywood Canteen, "Don't Fence Me In" as sung by Roy Rogers. Ray Heindorf gets the credit for orchestrating and conducting the production numbers (Max Steiner also contributed to the score) and LeRoy Prinz for creating and directing the dance numbers.
As a biopic, Night and Day is standard stuff. One can excuse Yankee Doodle Dandy's inaccuracies because of that film's narrative brilliance, commanding musical numbers, and superior leading performance, but Night and Day has limited compensations for its rote fictionalization of Porter's life, from 1914 at Yale to his contemporary struggle with a crippling leg injury. Curtiz's film, which was authorized by Porter, shares some ground with Irwin Winkler's De-Lovely: the strain of workaholism on the Porters' marriage, his leg trouble, and the curse of wit (a producer tells Grant's Porter, "This song is clever and it's different, but it may be too clever and too different").
The four credited writers on Night and Day emphasize early struggles for success, romanticize Porter's war record, and depict Porter as a babe magnet (lathering several coats of gloss over his well-known homosexuality). Poky but sort of mesmerizing, Night and Day is only occasionally moody and relentlessly upbeat: even when Porter is down, Linda conspires to cheer him to success. As Cary Grant's first color film and the first "biopic" of Porter, Night and Day will doubtless draw audiences for years to come.
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