Ballads

23: A Certain Smile (1958)

This song puts up a front.

Composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster wrote this winsome, Academy Award-nominated song for Jean Negulesco’s A Certain Smile (1958) – a sweeping cinematic adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s uncompromising novella about love, sex and infidelity. Critics at the time found the film’s treatment of Sagan’s story to be average at best: a “glossy, emotional yarn” (Variety), a “tepid romantic interlude” (New York Times). The song has been infrequently recorded since the 1970s.

No-one:

Me: ‘A Certain Smile’ is integral – INTEGRAL – to A Certain Smile‘s re-articulation of Sagan’s book as a melodramatic touristic visual feast – yes, and in case you imagine this is a situation of FILM = BAD, BOOK = GOOD, the last of those is an aspect that weirdly resonates with Sagan’s own literary style, which makes much of staging things to look at!* Plus, existentialist cynic Sagan wrote romantic song lyrics for Juliette Greco?!**

NB. “no-one” meme format for me still fresh as daisy because not on Twitter and this too probably. Anyway, let’s get into it.

‘A Certain Smile’ has been a rabbit hole to fall down. Back in the spring, Spotify gave me Ted Greene’s 1977 night sky of a solo recording. Confusion descended: did I know the song already, or was this sparkling arrangement enchanting me into thinking I did? (Martin Taylor’s intensely beautiful 1993 solo guitar rendition did similar magic.) I listened to the inaugural 1958 recording by Johnny Mathis – who performs the song with verse in a nightclub set piece in the film – and was still none the wiser. I couldn’t decide if it was the sing-song pattern of the melody that felt familiar, or the song itself. When I asked my mum about ‘A Certain Smile’, she knew it immediately, lyrics and all. From the generational point of view, this makes sense: more than half of the vocal recordings to be released professionally were out by the late 1960s, with ten of those released in 1958. This smash hit – Mathis’ recording reached #4 in the UK – has been in the atmosphere for decades, with diminishing density over time.

The song’s apparent sweetness contrasts with Sagan’s A Certain Smile (1956) – a text that begins archly with an epigraph from Roger Vailland: “Love is what happens between two people who love each other“.

Dominique, in a relationship with fellow Sorbonne student Bertrand, tells the winding story of her short but unexpectedly emotionally shattering affair with Bertrand’s married uncle, Luc. For one critic reviewing the book in 1957, Sagan communicates the experience of “serene despair” with immaculate precision, featuring “none of the obsession with the details of external reality so common in her contemporaries: ‘and now I shall show you what Life is really like in Paris, Moscow or New York’, in attempts which finally show what? nothing”.

Paul Francis Webster’s lyrics, prepared for the film, are of a different order of business.

What do you meet down a crooked little street in Paris
Vendors who sell pretty flowers that tell of spring
Once in a while you may meet a certain smile in Paris
So excitingly gay that it seems to say ‘cherie, fall in love with me’

A certain smile, a certain face
Can lead an unsuspecting heart on a merry chase
A fleeting glance can say so many lovely things
Suddenly you know why my heart sings

You’ll love awhile and when love goes
You try to hide the tears inside with a cheerful pose
But in the hush of night exactly like a bittersweet refrain
Comes that certain smile to haunt your heart again

Set against a dramatic minor key, the verse’s clever internal rhymes and their fantasy of Paris resolve into the optimistic choruses, their rhyming couplets, and their protagonist, sharing the wisdom of their experience while presenting a brave exterior. It’s strangely labyrinthine in its temporal journey, and much more complicated than it first appears to be.

This isn’t unlike the movie – although I will say I found A Certain Smile to be a rough watch, at least first time around. It rearranges the essential components of Sagan’s book to produce a morality tale that visually “abounds with mouth-watering vistas of the French Riviera”. Characters bear only marginal resemblance to their sources: the ingénue (Christine Carère), her parents (Eduard Franz, Katherine Locke) in extended grief for the loss of their son, said ingénue’s feckless boyfriend (Bradford Dillman), his rich and selfish mother (Kathryn Givney), the playboy uncle (Rossano Brazzi), his long-suffering wife Françoise (Joan Fontaine), and a rogues’ gallery of assorted friends and associates. Dominique’s red beret amid the grey stone of the Sorbonne marks her out as a scarlet woman in the making. Her fate is confirmed when, soon after Luc hits on Dominique in a café-bar she has attended with Bertrand, Françoise airily offers Dominique a red coat during her visit to their home, declaring it “far too young for me” – misogynising, if you will, a more or less throwaway moment in the book, in which the couple extravagantly buy a coat “in a reddish woollen material” for their nephew’s new girlfriend in a shop.

‘A Certain Smile’ instrumentally underscores the beats of Dominique’s entire emotional arc, from her misguided entanglement with Luc to her rapprochement with Bertrand. So closely is the song woven into the fabric of the film that it’s almost imperceptible, smoothing the way for the romance’s compliance with the sanitising “shibboleths of the Production Code”.

As recounted in Michaelangelo Capua’s Jean Negulesco: The Life and Films (2017), here is how Sagan – whose text features extra-marital sex, pregnancy scares and so on – reacted to A Certain Smile‘s screenplay in a meeting with Negulesco in Paris:

I gave her an appointment in a café not too far from where we were shooting. She was sitting on the terrace eating a ham and cheese sandwich in the company of young man. I approached her a bit confused.

‘Miss Sagan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Excuse me, I’m Jean Negulesco. Have you read the script?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘No.’
‘Could you tell me why?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to join me on the set?’
‘No.’
‘Would you allow me to pay for your sandwich?’
‘Yes.’

She then said to the young man: ‘It’s not him that pays, it’s 20th Century Fox.’

Despite Sagan’s understandable aversion to the film’s adaptation of her book, they end up at similar destinations. Rachel Cusk praises her “fearless and astute portrayal of love as a psychical event that has its roots in family life and the early formation of personality”. As I watched the film a second time, I realised that Dominique’s bizarre actions were imagined to hinge on the death of her brother and the consequences for her family, and that every character in their own way was struggling with loss. All three of these interconnected works – novella, film and song – are grappling with the depths of pain and its origins, though Sagan’s writing looks at them most directly and dispassionately.

*In both visual and psychological modes. A particularly economical example of narrative reflexivity from A Certain Smile‘s fourth chapter: “I couldn’t help feeling quite warm towards myself.” (p. 186)

**From a fascinating short biographical post entitled ‘That Charming Monster, Francoise Sagan’: “It is not widely known that Françoise Sagan dabbled in song writing, composing lyrics for romantic songs and even librettos for ballets. This aspect of her career came about when, at the age of twenty, haunting the bars and nightclubs of Saint Germain des Prés, she met the musician Michel Magne. Having already tried out over fifty lyricists for his songs, Magne thought Sagan’s style would be perfect. Her lyrics reflect a maturity beyond her years and lack the cynicism of her books. They are often about people wrestling with private pain and angst, deep into alcohol-fuelled nights. Vous mon Coeur (You my Heart) is a plea to a lover not leave: ‘You, my heart/You my life/You who smile/You who embrace me/You, one day…..will leave me, my heart.’”

21: Willow Weep for Me (1932)

This song isn’t having it.

Ann Ronell – a female trailblazer in the sphere of Hollywood musical direction and Broadway composition – originated this wonderful chronicle of heartbreak in 1932. A publishing colleague of Irving Berlin rejected it for being too technically complicated, but support from Berlin himself brought the song to radio broadcast and wider critical and commercial success.

Willow weep for me
Willow weep for me
Bend your branches green along the stream that runs to sea
Listen to my plea
Hear me willow and weep for me
Gone my lovers’ dream
Lovely summer dream
Gone and left me here to weep my tears into the stream
Sad as I can be
Hear me willow and weep for me
Whisper to the wind and say that love has sinned
Left my heart a-breaking, and making a moan
Murmur to the night to hide its starry light
So none will see me sighing and crying all alone
Weeping willow tree
Weep in sympathy
Bend your branches down along the ground and cover me
When the shadows fall, hear me willow and weep for me

While hearing out their lonely protagonist’s pain, these lyrics wink theatrically: love in its entirety has “sinned” because the “lovely summer dream” of a seasonal romance hasn’t worked out for you? All the stars in the night sky should be obliterated to conceal your unique misery? Come on. There’s no shame in sadness.

Ronell’s celebrated, much recorded composition warmly presses that argument forward – in particular the major key in the A sections, its sing-song octave leap (Ted Gioia: “a vertiginous plunge followed by a reassuring triplet bounce unlike anything else in the jazz repertoire of the era”), and the way in which, as Alec Wilder notes, “the accompaniment moves into double time and out again the next measure”. Edward Jablonski interprets this choice as signifying “agitated stress”, but I’m not sure that’s it. Consider, for example, Ella Fitzgerald’s 1959 recording. “Listen to my plea”, entreats the song’s protagonist. Amid the dreaminess of Frank DeVol’s orchestral arrangement, this rhythmic shift counterargues: no, you need to shake things up.

The song’s appearance in the Marx Brothers’ Love Happy (1949) – a crime caper which brings together a diamond heist and a Broadway revue – sets off its refusal of the role of romantic victim in an utterly surprising way.

Ann Ronell scored Love Happy, and oversaw Frank Perkins’ instrumental arrangement of ‘Willow Weep for Me’ for one of the Broadway revue’s numbers. Choregraphed by Billy Daniel, it presents an extraordinary burlesque staging of the figure of Miss Sadie Thompson.

Sadie Thompson is a character in ‘Rain’ (1921), a short story by W. Somerset Maugham set in American Samoa. A ship’s crew member contracts measles, and its passengers are required to remain in port at Pago Pago for a period of quarantine: Dr and Mrs Macphail, missionary couple the Davidsons (ordinarily stationed elsewhere), and Sadie Thompson herself. All are offered accommodation in rooms above a shop. Sadie Thompson entertains sailors in her quarters, playing her gramophone loudly, to the the Davidsons’ infinite disapproval. They quickly infer that, having boarded at Iwelei (“plague spot of Honolulu. The Red Light district”), she is a prostitute, and Davidson himself undertakes to convert her. The missionary programme is vicious: the Davidsons expunge local practices of dancing and dress, impose fines on those who refuse to comply, and delight in destroying associates whose morality they deem insufficient. Davidson’s patriarchal fanaticism – of Sadie, he declares: “‘I want to put in her heart the passionate desire to be punished so that at the end, even if I offered to let her go, she would refuse'” – culminates in what the story very strongly implies is his rape of Sadie and his grisly death by cutting his own throat.

For Victoria Kuttainen, ‘Rain’ dramatises how missionary, medical and cultural regimes collide in the the “colonial, modernising Pacific”. She proposes that Somerset Maugham – both a literary figure and prolific writer for stage and screen – was acutely aware of the imagistic power of “fantasies of seductive starlets and beguiling tropical scenes”, and that his narrative choices comment on the performative power of speculation: other characters are given to report on Sadie’s conduct. In the diverse theatrical and cinematic adaptations of ‘Rain’,* meanwhile, “spectacle replaces speculation”. Stagings of Sadie melodramatically exoticise and evacuate the story of critical force.

The number in Love Happy quotes and exaggerates elements of these adaptations. It sweeps almost every hint of violence away, and reimagines the scenario as a comedy.

In this cartoon tropics, Sadie’s beau, Sergeant O’Hara (played by ‘Paul Valentine’, played by Mike Johnson) – a character introduced in these adaptations – places the needle on the gramophone, and the siren rasp of ‘Willow Weep For Me’ summons Sadie (played by ‘Maggie Phillips’, played by Vera-Ellen) to the stage. Marines gawp as she struts in, her hand magically conjuring her own spotlight. She roams about the stage with comic suggestiveness, occasionally knocking these uniformed men down like dominoes, while O’Hara gazes at her with deep desire. When, as in the story, Davidson (House Peters Jr.) stops the gramophone’s music, a drumbeat commences and a group representing Samoan dancers wearing what resemble lavalava enter the stage, supporting Sadie to continue – a section which trades in racialised stereotyping, places Sadie at its centre, but suggests collective solidarity between she and the islanders against the forces of missionary control. Davidson has failed, and exuberant music and dancing prevail. The gramophone resumes, and a whistle sends the Marines back, who have rushed Sadie like a pack of dogs. The number concludes softly: Sadie and O’Hara stand intimately together before the auditorium of the Broadway theatre to scattered applause.**

This larger-than-life musical rendition both sends up and luxuriates in the cultural habit of looking at Sadie. The lyrics and their sadness ghost the scene, a reminder of the tragedy of ‘Rain’, but here underscoring how Sadie just gets to go about her business.

Before watching the film, I had heard ‘Willow Weep for Me’ only in versions accentuating its bluesiness, as in the powerful recordings by Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Etta James, and Sarah Vaughan’s magical and hilarious live performance. With the exception of Stan Kenton’s 1946 arrangement featuring June Christy, the handful of recordings that precede Love Happy are a lively mix of foxtrot and cabaret, and a far cry from the sorrowful sentimentality of other later versions: Frank Sinatra, Julie London, Tony Bennett.

It begs so many questions: about the mood Ann Ronell originally intended for the song, how this scene in Love Happy was conceived and by whom,*** the direction of subsequent recordings. Regardless, it strikes me that its author’s well-documented determination, ambition, kindness and vivacity are of a piece with ‘Willow Weep for Me’. It is a song that “does exactly what it pleases”, recognising social and emotional limits, but isn’t about to accept them.

*John Colton & Clemence Randolph’s play Rain: a Play in Three Acts (1923); Sadie Thompson (1928), starring Gloria Swanson; Rain (1932), starring Joan Crawford; and Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), starring Rita Hayworth.

**Paul’s subsequent instruction to Maggie – “now go change into your ballet costume” – is arguably a misogynistic gag playing on the historical intersection of ballet and sex work.

***An edition of Film Music Notes speaks favourably of “the producer who allowed the composer select co-workers of her own choice wherever possible, thus assuring maximum of compatible tastes and efforts to musical production with minimum personnel”.

20: My Ship (1941)

This song is about how we got here.

NB. Major spoilers ahead for Lady in the Dark (1944) and Phantom Thread (2017).

I first heard ‘My Ship’ several years ago – probably Nancy Wilson’s very beautiful big band recording from 1963, whose choppy instrumental introduction soon settles into golden plain sailing. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics fantasise luxuries arriving from far away, which are as nothing without the delivery of a soul-mate:

My ship has sails that are made of silk
The decks are trimmed with gold
And of jam and spice
There’s a paradise
In the hold
My ship’s aglow with a million pearls
And rubies fill each bin,
The sun sits high
In a sapphire sky
When my ship comes in
I can wait the years
Till it appears
One fine day one spring
But the pearls and such
They won’t mean much
If there’s missing just one thing
I do not care if that day arrives
That dream need never be
If the ship I sing doesn’t also bring
My own true love to me

Despite its sun, the song’s story reminded me of Christmas, most likely because of the carol ‘I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In)’. The nursery rhyme ‘I saw a ship a-sailing’, about a merchant vessel packed with treats and crewed by mice-sailors with “chains about their necks” was probably somewhere in my mind too: it appeared in ‘Ship in a Bottle’ (1974), the very first episode of Bagpuss.

With Ira Gershwin, Kurt Weill composed the song for Moss Hart’s stage musical Lady in the Dark (1941). Liza Elliott, ambitious and successful editor of fashion magazine Allure, is in crisis. Her doctor recommends psychoanalysis. In the 1944 film dramatization – one of the highest grossing movies of the year – Liza (Ginger Rogers) finds herself humming a phrase from ‘My Ship’ repeatedly: an elusive echo of a repressed trauma. Psychoanalysis allows her to recall that as a young child she tried to perform the song at a family party. Her self-absorbed mother, preoccupied by male attention, is indifferent; the guests are thoughtlessly unkind, saying she is plain. As a child, Liza begins to hate her appearance. When her mother dies soon after, she is unable to grieve. She tries on her mother’s special blue dress, and her father chastises her angrily: a terrible rejection.

As Bruce McClung writes, ‘I saw a ship a-sailing’ is “the song’s predecessor”; further, “the gradual decoding of what ‘My Ship’ signifies sustains the drama, a process like the ‘Rosebud’ cipher in Citizen Kane“. In relation to the song’s image of a ship bearing bounties, Lady in the Dark is also, mindblowingly, ghosted by Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596) – a play that dramatizes, amongst other things, “the new set of economic interactions that accompanied the birth of capitalism”. McClung notes that Moss Hart’s own experience of psychoanalysis was formative of the story, but that Freud’s ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1913) is what gives Lady in the Dark its structure. In the essay, Freud theorises the lottery for Portia’s hand in The Merchant of Venice: a choice between gold, silver and lead caskets, one of which contains her portrait. Like Bassanio, Hart has Liza select between three ‘caskets’ – publisher Kendall Nesbitt (Warner Baxter), actor Randy Curtis (Jon Hall), and her magazine’s advertising executive Charley Johnson (Ray Milland), who represent simplistically “the roles of father, lover, and husband”.

This film is a gorgeous waking nightmare, and watching it I was furious from beginning to end.

Amid the opulence of Allure‘s offices – the film’s lavish design and dream sequences subvert its maniacal heteronormativity – Charley attacks Liza continually, questioning her gender, sex life, and style, and brazenly declaring his desire for her job. When unusually she wears an evening gown on a date with Randy – a garment of sequin and mink that cost Paramount an eyewatering $35,000 dollars to produce – he jibes “you look wonderful – you actually look like a woman!” Her psychoanalyst Dr Brooks (Barry Sullivan) meanwhile proposes that, stemming from her childhood experiences, her distress lies with her reluctance to embrace femininity and “compete with other women”. Ignoring the injustices it so clearly lays out, the film egregiously weaponises psychoanalysis to confirm the “sex/gender system” and everything it supports. It ends with Liza agreeing to co-run the magazine with Charley, her literal tumble to the ground as he grabs her editorial chair for himself, and a kiss of unlikely passion between the two. This great review including on point picture captions (“Ray Milland is a shithead with a whip and Ginger Rogers is the lady in a cage in the circus dream”) fully has the measure of the film, as do these others on Letterboxd.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s extraordinary Phantom Thread (2017) includes ‘My Ship’. And Lady in the Dark seems to me to haunt the film in other ways, not least Freud’s essay.

At its conclusion Freud correlates the caskets to the mythological Fates (Moirai), the “three weaving goddesses who assign individual destinies to mortals at birth”, and thus to

the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman – the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him; or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man’s life – the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of a woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.

The relationship that Paul Thomas Anderson concocts between celebrated and exacting dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his lover and model Alma (Vicky Krieps) attempts to have this cake and eat it. So consumed is Reynolds with his mother, and control over himself and his surroundings, that he cannot tolerate interruption or vulnerability, keeping his shrewd sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) close by as his safe companion. In these constrained, even hostile emotional circumstances, Alma (‘soul’) undertakes to derail his “games” by bringing him close to death: she feeds him poisonous mushrooms, then nurses him back to health, thereby impossibly occupying all three relations. This sadomasochistic gambit allows Reynolds to let go, to fall in love, to commit to her totally, and they have their own child. And so another cycle begins.

Oscar Peterson’s performance of ‘My Ship’ plays in the tearoom in which Woodcock first encounters Alma as a waitress, where he orders a ridiculous breakfast. Learning of Paul Thomas Anderson’s passion for big band jazz, I’m convinced that the narrative structure of Reynolds and Alma’s relationship is based on Nelson Riddle’s wonderful orchestral arrangement: brass and woodwind signal ‘watch out!’ before the song moves to surging strings, the solitary multiplicity of Peterson’s piano, and so on, periodically undercut by ambiguous, if not outrightly sinister harmonic choices. Key changes mark new phases, ascension to new heights. It’s almost unbearably poignant but also weirdly unserious somehow. It finishes with a steadying rallentando and fluttering flutes: a happy ending.

Aleksandar Hemon in the New Yorker concludes that Phantom Thread is “nothing if not propaganda for patriarchy”, and for sure I agree that it is in one sense a deep stitch-up, leaving little room for its women’s own desires beyond surviving these conditions, and doling out punishment for their perceived infractions. But like the stunning arrangement of ‘My Ship’ that it features, it is laced with compassionate unease, skewering power and fantasy with a delicate comic touch.

19: Moonlight in Vermont (1944)

This song is unexpected.

Karl Suessdorf and John Blackburn’s 1944 classic ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ features on Stardust (1978), Willie Nelson’s first album of jazz standards. His spacious interpretation became the surprise favourite of its lyricist. Blackburn’s nephew Bill Rudman reflects on his uncle’s reaction for jazz podcast I’ve Heard That Song Before:

He just couldn’t hear in his head how ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ could sort of cross over and be done by ostensibly a country singer. So he just didn’t believe that it was going to be any good at all, and when the LP came out he was just blown away by it.

Willie Nelson’s arrangement is tender and expansive: a solitary moonlit wish in the autumn is realised as a shared enchantment in the summer. Hope and desire are there, but they are unhurried. Things grow at their own pace.

For musicologist K. J. McElrath, Suessdorf’s beautiful composition’s “harmonic progression – quite advanced for its time and heralding the advent of ‘cool’ – makes sophisticated use of simple elements”. The same sophisticated simplicity applies to Blackburn’s lyrics.

Pennies in a stream

Falling leaves, a sycamore

Moonlight in Vermont

Icy finger waves

Ski trails on a mountain side

Snowlight in Vermont

Telegraph cables, they sing down the highway

And travel each bend in the road

People who meet in this romantic setting

Are so hypnotized by the lovely

Evening summer breeze

Warbling of a meadowlark

Moonlight in Vermont

You and I and moonlight in Vermont

The song conspicuously lacks a rhyme scheme. Less obvious is the haiku structure of its A sections. Each phrase obliquely describes an event, trusting its audience to make their own sense of what’s happening without the need for exposition. “Pennies in a stream”: have these coins been thrown there recently, or are they the rusted evidence of past wishful visits, or do they perhaps signify the people (who are not necessarily lovers) at the heart of the song’s story, or represent an idea of the flux of human existence? These four words in combination harbour all these possibilities and more. And the sensate evocations of “icy finger waves”, electric telegraph cables that “sing”, luminescence of “snowlight” – together, these images refuse pastoral nostalgia, instead tracing out modern holidaymaking amid the larger magic of seasonal change. The transition from the B section to the final A uncannily skips over spring, spiriting us directly from winter to summer – a time when, having nested, meadowlarks begin to sing again. It is brilliant.

It seems bizarre that people would want to mess with this poetry, but mess with it they have. The most radical example is Jo Stafford’s recording for an album entitled Ski Trails (1956), whose comprehensive rewrite makes winter of the whole thing. In Andy Williams’ live concert performance, the lines “snowflakes in the wind, blanketing the countryside” likewise obliterate the balmy summer of the original.

These specific lyrical choices, and the song’s rocketing popularity in the 1950s, could arguably be to do with skiing. As historian Andrew Denning has it, skiing was “the quintessence of that defining strain of postwar consumer culture: democratized luxury”. This was certainly the case in Vermont, where magazine Vermont Life aggressively promoted “the slopes of Vermont as a nearly year-round vacation destination” throughout the 1950s. To be ultra-specific, it presented Vermont as “a series of vacation areas catering to the modern family man from out of town looking for an all-encompassing winter escape”. What better snowy venue for a departure from routine, for the experience of the once-in-a-lifetime, unrepeatable romance fantasised by these recordings.

The many vocal interpretations of the song run the full stylistic gamut. Particularly enjoyable is its first outing, Billy Butterfield’s big band arrangement with Margaret Whiting – also Betty Carter’s early performance with the Ray Bryant Trio, the excessive vocal harmonies of the Lewis Sisters, Billy Stewart’s soulful re-imagining, Ella Fitzgerald’s intimate dialogue with Joe Pass. But I will say that it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Listening to tens of performances of once-in-a-lifetime, unrepeatable romance fantasies on the bounce is akin to eating a lot of cake: beyond a certain point the experience is empty and just a bit much.

Among the handful of films that include the song is the recent Hallmark TV movie Moonlight in Vermont (2017): “After Fiona [Lacey Chabert] gets dumped, she escapes to her family’s Vermont Inn for a few days to evaluate her life. When her ex Nate [Jesse Moss] shows up with a new girlfriend, Fiona devises a plan to win him back: pretend head chef Derek [Carlo Marks] is her new boyfriend.”

A Kindle search for the movie’s novelisation unexpectedly revealed other, self-published novels of the same name. These include a 2013 country house murder mystery on the model of Agatha Christie (page turner, holds out promise of subverting patriarchal constructs, just doesn’t) and the eleventh instalment in Olivia Gaines’ Modern Mail Order Brides series of romance novels, released in 2020 (the same, to an outlandish comedic degree).

But back to the movie. Moonlight in Vermont, a classic opposites attract scenario, is totally enjoyable, escapist, and implausible. Its characters say and do the most illogical things. Savvy and practical Manhattan real estate agent Fiona wears four inch spike heeled boots to walk in the snowy fields with Derek so she can look hot in front of her ex. Chef Derek, a man whose profession is predicated on the capacity to follow instructions, insists on savouring pancakes slowly in the context of a ‘how many pancakes can you eat in 60 seconds’ contest at the town’s annual Maple Faire. The town’s mayor presides over this contest, and later adjudicates a maple syrup tasting contest in a completely different shop, as if contests are his only job. The ex Nate, crazed with competitive jealousy, snippily declares to his new girlfriend “I’m counting on you here” to beat Fiona and Derek in the maple syrup tasting contest. Thus the movie sets up the beginnings of romance between Fiona and Derek: an enjoyable dinner at the inn, in which each listens with genuine interest to what the other is saying. In the light of the movie’s other strange situations, this conversation seems like the height of real intimacy. It was weird and I loved all of it.

What I take from Moonlight in Vermont is this: some of the appeal of this kind of romantic plotline may be to do with the promise of respite from what Jane Ward calls the tragedy of heterosexuality. Part of that tragedy consists in attachment to “the heteroerotic fantasy of binary, biologically determined, and naturally hierarchical gender oppositeness” (cf. all of the above, plus the leads’ opening barbs: “Vermont lumberjack” / “New York princess”). In moments of beautiful utopian connection, this powerful and damaging nonsense falls away. Supplementary evidence: Baby Boom (1987), ‘Moonlight in Vermont’-having comedy of the nightmare struggle of career woman J.C. (Diane Keaton) against a patriarchal culture hostile to motherhood. Here, having found a new life in Vermont, she is getting together with vet Jeff (Sam Shepard).

Of course heteroerotic fantasies are inevitably re-established: for a female romantic protagonist, it’s true love or bust, and four days in to her visit, Fiona decides to quit New York and move to Vermont. The openness of ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ as a song makes it highly amenable to whirlwind stories of romantic destiny, but also to performances like Willie Nelson’s, a story of ease and grace that makes no demands, is in no rush at all.

18: I’m Thru With Love (1931)

This song is all about show.

Until it isn’t, that is. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

‘I’m Thru With Love’ is a work of necessary contradiction. A deep ocean of a song, twinkling with glorious sunlight, it brings grief and optimism into sweet contact. Its lyrics, by the prolific Gus Kahn, see a depressed, abandoned character talking to their ex-lover, uncompromisingly declaring time not only on all future relationships, but on love itself. But amid Matty Malneck and Fud Livingston’s bright composition, this story shifts its shape. It’s so much more than a “melancholy torch song that also has a touch of hope in it“, though it is also exactly that.

With the exception of the 1931 recordings by Lee Morse and Bing Crosby, and some later versions like Tony Bennett’s and Joe Williams’s, few vocalists address themselves to the verse:

I have given you my true love,

But you love

A new love.

What am I supposed to do now,

With you now,

You’re through now?

You’ll be on your merry way,

And there’s only this to say:

In this subtle passage, “love” is something bestowed, an action, and an object of desire, and “now” both a moment in time and a state of being. “You” becomes a psychological problem to be solved somehow. The nuance of these simple repetitions shows their author, as Gottlieb and Kimball write of Gus Kahn, to be “a superb and meticulous craftsman who made a lyric seem easy, even inevitable, rather than calling attention to its ingenuity or wit“. And although the choruses can stand alone magnificently, the verse frames “I’m through with love” as an embittered retort.

At least as it reads on paper, this retort comes from someone whose limited horizons, through this relationship, were briefly extended beyond their own front door. Now it’s over, they have “Said ‘Adieu’ to love / ‘Don’t ever call again'”. The staginess of these quotation marks, as printed in Gottlieb and Kimball’s book, suggests a certain kind of uptight formality – as does the terrible tragedy of the second chorus:

I’ve locked my heart,

I’ll keep my feelings there,

I have stocked my heart

With icy frigidaire.

And I mean to care for no-one,

Because I’m through with love.

Frigidaire! Not only is the warm human body correlated with an (empty) household appliance, but the refrigerator as such is the reference of choice for this person! Fridge facts: Frigidaire launched the first electric “self-contained refrigerator” onto the market in 1923, the brand quickly becoming synonymous with the thing itself.

On the left is an ad for a 1927 model costing $180 – a value of $2,613.29 in 2020. And on the right, the front cover of a Frigidaire catalogue from 1931, the year of ‘I’m Thru With Love”s release. This image introduces a fascinating blogpost on Frigidaire by Liza Cowan, who gives this shrewd take on its idealisation of domesticity: “nothing says loving like a full fridge“.

All this is to say that the song’s images propose the protagonist as someone who naively thought that they were bopping their way to marriage, or a lonely wife whose affair with someone popular and sociable (“You didn’t need me for you had your share / Of slaves around you to hound you and swear, / With deep emotion, devotion to you”) lifted her beyond marital disappointments.

It’s all very melodramatic, and the song knows it. The major melody in the A sections soothes the narrative’s histrionics, while gut-wrenching chord choices and a sorrowful blue note gently affirm suffering. The B section makes a dramatic leap up to a minor key to emphasise its opening rhetorical question (“Why did you lead me to think you could care”), but doesn’t linger there long. Music puts the words at a distance from themselves, opening out all kinds of alternatives to unadulterated misery.

There are some devastating interpretations – see Etta Jones, Diana Krall, Mark Murphy, Arthur Prysock – but even these performances can’t help but slide into a kind of reflexive self-staging. Some versions are absolutely gigantic (Sallie Blair, Joan Merrill). Others exude an affecting warmth, even contentment (Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald). Still others are in ‘wash that man right out of my hair’ high spirits (Sarah Vaughan, Jane Monheit). It’s a range of moods well sketched out in Swedish pianist Matti Ollikainenin’s ironic solo performance. Listening through multiple recordings on the trot makes for an experience not of utter desolation, as might be expected, but fun born of sadness that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

It seems apt then that the song’s most famous outing on screen should be in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), a film comedy hingeing on disguise and an homage to multiple cinematic genres. As New York Times critic Manohla Dargis puts it, the film “feels like it was directed inside gigantic quotation marks“.

On-the-run jazz musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) pass themselves off as ‘Josephine’ and ‘Daphne’ to join an all-female touring band. (Sidenote: the film’s musical supervisor was Matty Malneck, and its unreal lineup of musicians included Barney Kessel, Art Pepper and John Williams (yes).) To entice its chanteuse Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), who intends to overcome her “thing for saxophonists” by snagging a Miami millionaire, saxophonist Joe masquerades as magnate Shell Oil Junior, and contrives to have her seduce him aboard a yacht appropriated from actual millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), himself in hot pursuit of Daphne.

In the wake of Junior’s sudden departure, heartbroken Sugar sings ‘I’m Thru With Love’, her unhappiness unnoticed by everyone but Josephine, hidden behind a drape, realisation gradually dawning.

Marilyn Monroe’s tremulous performance musters stock gestures of feminine anguish, melting them into other, more authentic-seeming moments of emotion. The depth of her sadness and the euphoria and poignancy of the kiss she and Jo(e)sephine then share are totally conditional upon the layers of comedic artifice the film painstakingly constructs.

“None of that, Sugar. No guy is worth it!” ‘I’m Thru With Nonsense That Is An Obstacle To My Own Flourishing’,* we might then say, as love is discovered to be its own reward.

*Adaptation after Lauren Berlant.

15: What’s New? (1939)

This song is within and without.

Bob Haggart and Johnny Burke’s ‘What’s New?’ dramatises one side of an at-first casual conversation between two ex-lovers, set in some social gathering or other. Time has elapsed (“You haven’t changed a bit”). As the song unfolds, the protagonist’s studiously dispassionate small talk (“How is the world treating you?”, “How did that romance come through? / We haven’t met since then”) is revealed as a cover for their still-interested broken heart. The final choruses subtly speak of the pain of being pitied, with an ending that could be delivered either as a lonely retreat into the self or a moment of confessional exposure.

What’s new
Probably I’m boring you
But seeing you is grand
And you were sweet to offer your hand

I understand, adieu
Pardon my asking, what’s new
Of course you couldn’t know
I haven’t changed, I still love you so

(I didn’t realise the line was “I understand, adieu” until I saw it written down, having consistently misheard it as “I understand, I do”. “Goodbye forever” is definitely in keeping with the song’s tragedy, but I think I prefer the mistake.)

‘What’s New?’ offers plenty of scope for lovelorn wretchedness – for example, the orchestral melancholy of the recordings by Frank Sinatra and Linda Ronstadt – but others take it in unexpected directions.

One of the earliest, by Jess Stacy & His All Stars with singer Carlotta Dale, is supremely self-assured: this woman knows her worth and has no issue admitting how she feels. Maxine Sullivan’s is not remotely tortured. Carmen McRae and Betty Carter exude joy in female friendship and mutual admiration. Then the acres of instrumental interpretations that exist, way outnumbering vocal performances, conjure a million different, sometimes optimistic, situations – from the undulating sea of Ahmad Jamal’s recent solo version, to Hal McKusick’s deserted after-hours bar, or George Benson’s hot dance floor reunion. And the exquisite ambiguity achieved in Helen Merrill’s 1954 recording, stunningly arranged by Quincy Jones, bears no trace of nostalgic melodrama. The arctic sadness of her engrossing performance fuses public words and private thoughts. At any moment in the song she could be talking to someone directly, or imagining to herself how their conversation would go, gazing across a crowded room. Its beauty verges on the uncanny.

What goes said and unsaid is at the centre of two of the films that feature ‘What’s New’ – Michael Curtiz’s WWII aviation medicine story Dive Bomber (1941), and Harvey Fierstein’s four-hour Broadway comedy drama Torch Song Trilogy (1988), radically cut for the screen. Both tell stories of intimacy between men, though only Fierstein’s is explicit on the matter. In Dive Bomber, as in so much literature, rituals of smoking stand in for physical connection, and unusually, caring relationships. Female romantic interests fall a distant second to the initially abrasive relationship between Lieutenant Doug Lee (Errol Flynn) and Lieutenant Commander Joe Blake (Fred MacMurray).

The song’s line “Probably I’m boring you” cues in a dinner dance to which Doug and Joe have taken dates Linda (Alexis Smith) and Helen (Ann Doran). The men distractedly ignore both women, preoccupied by their shared task: the design of a pressure suit to combat pilots’ altitude sickness.

The scene is rich with subtle and not-so-subtle clues regarding the dynamics of the pilots’ friendship, from the visual emblazoned on the band’s bass drum –

Dive Bomber 20--band

– to a sequence in which, as they sketch suit designs on a tablecloth, Linda’s lipstick furnishes the inspiration for “a slide valve with a fine screw on the stem. Each turn opens it just a hair. This is it!”

The phallic emergence of the red lipstick from its tube, seen in close-up, is eye-popping. Bored and annoyed, the women go, despatching a young waiter to recite a short poem to Doug and Joe: “We don’t like quarrels, we don’t like scenes / The Navy’s too busy, we’ll try the Marines”.

After Joe sacrifices his life in testing the pressure suit prototype, Doug commemorates him at a naval ceremony as “my friend and co-worker, Lieutenant Commander Blake, a very gallant gentleman”. In a solitary moment at this event, he kisses his hand and plants it on Joe’s plane, before taking to the skies with other pilots, and ritually throwing Joe’s special cigarette case into the clouds (an act that would surely kill anyone unfortunate enough to be standing where it landed). It is a story of love, but the film can claim it’s just about men working together for the war effort.

The three acts of Torch Song Trilogy give us years in the life of New York drag performer Arnold (Harvey Fierstein). At the end of the second act, a gang of men murder Alan (Matthew Broderick), his first real love, in a homophobic attack. Billie Holiday’s recording of ‘What’s New’ accompanies a scene early in the third (here, at 1:24.56), starting mid-way through the penultimate chorus. Arnold returns home to find his on-again, off-again lover Ed (Brian Kerwin) asleep on the couch, where he removes Ed’s glasses tenderly. At this point the song seems to signify Arnold’s affection, and the extent of what Ed, a man who isn’t open about his sexuality, can offer in their relationship. But then Benny Carter’s saxophone solo begins, and we see Arnold get into bed, now in his pyjamas. He takes Alan’s portrait, which sits on his bedside table, in his arms, then rolls his eyes, saying “how Alice Faye can I get?!” The shot cuts to the morning kitchen radio, where Carter’s solo continues. Time jumps but the song flows on unbroken: love is unending and loss ever-present.

Torch Song Trilogy ultimately refuses a tragic ending. Put together, I see both films mapping and subverting the sexual limits heteropatriarchy laid down in the twentieth-century. What they share with ‘What’s New?’ goes beyond the specific lines they use concerning conversational distraction and lost love: all speak of how social convention and desire interact.

13: Violets For Your Furs (1941)

This song is the epitome of shifting sands.

Matt Dennis and Thomas Adair wrote ‘Violets For Your Furs’ together in 1941. Appearing on The Rosemary Clooney Show in 1957, Dennis reminisced about the process:

Well this is probably the corniest songwriting story of all time, but my partner and I were sitting in the pub one snowy night back in New York and he was having a beef with the girl he was dating at the time. Sitting there just listening to a combo play the blues, and well, feeling kind of moody anyway, he came up with this song title. It sounded pretty good to me, so I just started working on the melody right there. Believe it or not he wrote the lyrics right on the tablecloth too, and before the evening was over we’d written ourselves this song.

The wintry context of its creation makes its way into Adair’s lyrics. A kind of theatre of memory, the song sketches out a scene between two lovers, nostalgically recalled by the song’s protagonist. As snow drifts down in the Manhattan streets, a man buys a posy of violets for his beloved’s fur coat, which has the enchanting effect of making the chilly situation seem like spring. The song concludes adorably: “You smiled at me so sweetly, since then one thought occurs / That we fell in love completely, the day that I bought you violets for your furs”.

On one level, it’s a simple story of a simpler time: men were chivalrous, women were graceful, furs were the height of sartorial elegance, and love was new. But even on its own terms, setting aside any questions that may or may not arise concerning ‘men’, ‘women’, courtship, and who can procure fresh flowers and furs in Manhattan at the tail end of the Great Depression, the song contains multitudes.

Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra recorded it first in 1941, in an interpretation that conjures divine dinner dances, and the giddy euphoria of falling in love. The moment on the Manhattan street feels like it happened just last week, but also that it’s yet to come. Meanwhile, Sinatra’s sleigh bell-sprinkled 1956 rendition – whose seasonal phrasing is taken by Barry Manilow’s recording – seems to look back to a happy event many Christmasses ago. Johnny Hartman’s extraordinary performance – a tribute to John Coltrane’s – is heavy with deep disappointment. Shirley Horn’s sublime version aches with remembered longing. Beverly Kenney serves up bright and naive entitlement, with a tiny hint of rage: maybe this character didn’t get what they wanted in the end. Stacey Kent delivers a poignant reverie.

Alec Wilder and James T. Maher delight in the way ‘Violets For Your Furs’ “moves and does lovely inventive things”, comparing singer and composer Matt Dennis’s writings to Johnny Mercer’s, which each “suggest the presence of the performer in their composition”. It’s so rich. Its embrace of then and now, whenever these times are in the universe of a given interpretation and whatever has taken place in-between, is magic. Even still, it’s comparatively neglected as a standard, with recordings only in the double digits. No films seem to have taken it up, although it is fleetingly mentioned in a scene in the ninth episode of cancelled ABC drama Six Degrees (2006-2007).

Is that neglect to do with anti-fur politics, as this piano studio proprietor suggests?

(On that issue, this highly specialised quiz about animals = in the running for my most favourite weird internet thing.)

Violets For Your Furs

Or is it to do with the somewhat antiquated ritual it describes?

This 2003 sinatrafamily.com thread is started by a forum member who can’t ‘get’ the song, and thinks it’s ‘asinine’. Her contribution prompts a flurry of rebuttals from fellow posters fantasising trips down all kinds of real and imagined memory lanes, some lamenting the decline of civilisation as manifest in casual dress. A lengthy discourse on hats unfolds. Its kind and friendly online banter is a world away from the cultivated vitriol of the contemporary social industry.

Violets Sinatra forum

These thoughts of animal rights, old school gallantry and polite conversation were front of mind as I wandered around the internet seeking out links to various versions of ‘Violets For Your Furs’. Seeing the cover art for Marty Paich’s I Get A Boot Out Of You (1959) took me aback.

Paich’s magnificently louche arrangement of ‘Violets For Your Furs’ on this album suggests lovers in smoky late night bars. The racy cover art is like a cutesified sexy and highly unsettling anticipation of the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

Similarly, Dave Brubeck’s Angel Eyes (1965) features a tremendous hard-swinging version of the song, and a glassy-eyed Terry Reno on its cover. Twenty or so years after ‘Violets For Your Furs’ was composed, second wave feminism was burgeoning, and at the same time beautiful girls stared out from a lot of cover art, in varying states of undress. (I’d call it Playboy-ification, but these album covers are ahead of the Playboy game.) Plus ça change, etc. Romantic love may be protean, and the gentle attentions of ‘Violets For Your Furs’ out of joint with the softcore objectifications of the 1960s. But the patriarchal structures that prop up ‘romance’ are doggedly persistent, for sure.

12: I Only Have Eyes For You (1934)

This song is a fantasy.

Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ for the movie Dames (1934), a satire on theatrical censorship featuring Busby Berkeley’s choreography. In context, the song is a sweet serenade given by budding Broadway composer and impresario Jimmy (Dick Powell) to his dancer girlfriend Barbara (Ruby Keeler). Their love story is a slight vehicle for Dubin’s intense lyrics. But thematically the song suits the film – a comedy of errors about gazing at beautiful actresses.

‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ asks how somebody smitten sees the world. Or rather, what they see. As the (very infrequently performed) verse has it, love is selectively ‘blind’, an ‘optical illusion’. The choruses describe how, to a person in love, all things – stars, gardens, crowded avenues – confusedly ‘disappear from view’. This feat is performed cinematically in Dames, which magically vanishes people from the street and the subway as Jimmy croons to Barbara.

The song’s massive recording history kind of reflects this disappearing act. There are plenty of straight ahead interpretations by jazz greats – Louis Armstrong’s story of gentle flirtation, Frank Sinatra’s confident seducer, Billie Holiday’s effervescent party-goer, coquettish Carmen McRae. Mary Wells gives a big Motown rendition, while Etta Jones swings languidly, weaving in Billie Holiday’s invented lyric ‘big, bulging eyes’ towards the end. But the haunting doo-wop recording made by The Flamingos in 1959, exquisitely arranged by band member Terry Johnson, has influenced so many others that it almost comes to substitute for the original.

‘My love must be a kind of blind love’, it begins. ‘I can’t see anyone but you.’ Having collaged these two lines from the verse to the top, this version then unfolds the choruses. Its mesmerising sound suggests being underwater, at the top of a mountain, inside a cathedral of ice. But its defining aesthetic characteristic is the cold – which sort of makes sense of the really odd apres-ski mise-en-scene of The Flamingos’ TV performance in the clip above. According to the YouTube poster, that edition of The Dick Clark Show was shot in the sticky New York heights of July.

There are also plenty of recordings that are simple covers of The Flamingos’ version – from Boyz II Men’s to Tashaki Miyaki’s – while others, like Catherine Russell’s, draw momentarily on its variation of the melody. Liane Carroll’s fierce shuffle funk interpretation is absolutely stunning. Differently captivating is Oneohtrix Point Never’s hypnotic composition, which seems to bring an android into conversation with a sinister gang of monks.

For ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, one of the finest episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), The Flamingos’ version is pretext for and backdrop to its story.

The spirit of James Stanley, class of Sunnydale 1955, is stalking the school’s halls. He is compulsively re-enacting the night when, crazed with controlling grief, he shot teacher and ex-lover Grace Newman. Both spirits are possessing current students, caretakers and teachers, almost always resulting in a death. Buffy correctly and angrily surmises that he wants forgiveness, a recognition based on her own recent catastrophe: sex with her boyfriend Angel, which transformed him back into murderous vampire Angelus, who then promptly killed her watcher Giles’ beloved partner, teacher and Clan Kalderash member Jenny Calendar.

James calls Buffy to the school by night, where she finds Angelus lurking. They become surrogates in James and Grace’s unhappy story, which uncannily echoes their own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM2eLr9nIsM

Following these events, Buffy, in shock, places the ethereal Flamingos’ record on a turntable, and gazes into a mirror, where she sees James’ reflection look back at her. But embodying Grace, Angelus’s vampiric undeadness allows both stories to be resolved. Instead of falling for the umpteenth time over the school’s balcony to her death, Grace/Angel returns, declaring love for James/Buffy and the shooting (sexual metaphor alert) an accident, releasing them both.

(Historical accuracy quibble: why not make James class of 1959? The answer is probably Back To The Future (1985). I mean, ok. But come on.)

In this phenomenal episode, ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ means obsession, grief, not-seeing, the same scene playing out across different bodies. Though different in kind, it shares spooky parallels with the song’s appearances in Dames.

First, Jimmy serenades Barbara on the Staten Island ferry, the Statue of Liberty in the background. Couples coo around them. Love is heteronormative sequence and sameness.

Later, extending the scene of Jimmy’s flight of fancy on the subway train, in which ads bearing women’s faces blend into Barbara’s, Busby Berkeley’s spectacular choreography presents a proliferation of Barbaras, suggesting women as interchangeable commodities, everywhere different but the same. As Lucy Fischer brilliantly puts it, the doppelganger girls’ ‘aimless, repetitive movement‘ embodies a kind of ‘zombiism‘.

The end of the Buffy episode sets all these stagings of surrogacy off. Buffy tentatively ventures to Giles: ‘part of me just doesn’t understand why she would forgive him’. Her sideways look of guilt reveals that really she is asking why Giles would forgive her. Anthony Stewart Head’s delivery of Giles’ patient response ‘does it matter?’ is magnificent. Anger, pain and loss commingle and dissolve in his performance. The scene evokes a unique unconditional love, but equally, how different stories of love can bear a resemblance.

11: For All We Know (1934)

This song is now, then, and forever.

The recording history of J. Fred Coots and Sam M. Lewis’s ‘For All We Know’, written in 1934, begins merrily with a version by Hal Kemp and His Orchestra, sung by Bob Allen. Its optimistic trills and honeyed vocals belie the song’s depths.

On the surface, ‘For All We Know’ is about a tentative encounter between two people, about to part on an enchanted night. One person speaks to the other of the fleeting quality of the evening and what the future may or may not hold, pledging their heart and soliciting the other person’s love. When Coots first heard Lewis’s lyrics, he thought they were ‘worthy of great poetry’, and promptly promised him $200 of IOUs.

The verse, as performed by Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Bette Midler, locks down the song’s story as one of romantic love (‘A kiss that is never tasted / Forever and ever is wasted’). (Susannah McCorkle and Gladys Knight’s alternative verse intros are variations on that theme.) But Lewis’s words in the choruses are nothing short of a meditation on human existence itself: the experience of love, loss, consciousness, and temporality.

For all we know
We may never meet again
Before you go
Make this moment sweet again

We won’t say ‘goodnight’
Until the last minute
I’ll hold out my hand
And my heart will be in it

For all we know
This may only be a dream
We come and go
Like a ripple on a stream

So love me tonight
Tomorrow was made for some
Tomorrow may never come
For all we know

My favourite versions as of now are by Brad Mehldau, Bill Evans and Jose James and Jef Neve, each one tender and devastating in its own way.

But given the sheer quantity of interpretations, many of them straight ahead – one even by Ken Dodd – it’s weird that the first one I ever heard, again and again, should have been Nina Simone’s radical 1958 reworking. As she put it to Steve Allen in 1964, she interpreted the song in ‘a hymn-Bach-like way’. In her arrangement, whose melody departs substantially from the original, the eighteenth and twentieth centuries touch: a reflection in performance of the lyrics’ attention to endurance and transience.

With Joan Plowright as an elderly widow and Rupert Friend as her surrogate grandson Ludo, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) does much more with the song than simply include Rosemary Clooney’s version in the end credits. Endurance and transience pervade the film: Mrs Palfrey’s recent loss, her arrival in London to stay long-term at a mediocre hotel, her daughter and actual grandson’s neglect, and her accidental encounter with Ludo, which becomes a tender friendship.

The film is uneven and sometimes quite strange, but this scene is lovely. At Ludo’s flat, Mrs Palfrey has reminisced about falling in love with her husband, including a twinkling nod to their healthy sex life, and days out in Beaulieu. Ludo asks her another question, and an unexpected, touching serenade unfolds.

In Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), set in 1971, Abbey Lincoln’s gut-wrenching interpretation is used repeatedly to speak of the dangerous tenacity of addiction – from the opening sequence, which introduces junkie Bob (Matt Dillon), sweating from a seeming overdose on an ambulance stretcher, to his earlier bus ride back to Portland to enter a methadone programme, to the film’s final moments, which return us to the ambulance.

The first ambulance scene, accompanied by the song, has an ironic, hallucinatory quality, compounded with a cut to a cinefilm of Bob with his crew of fellow addicts and thieves.

Later, Bob gazes silently through the misted, rain-spattered window of the bus at the agricultural landscape around.

Matt Dillon--Drugstore Cowboy

Adrenalised pharmacy and hospital heists, obsessive superstitions, and violence have given way to a more prosaic reality, which the film complicates with the lyric ‘For all we know / This may only be a dream’. ‘We come and we go / Like the ripples in a stream’ plays over shots of street drinkers gathered outside decrepit storefronts. ‘So love me tonight / Tomorrow was made for some / Tomorrow may never come / For all we know’ suggests both hope and desperation as Bob enters his new abode, the St Francis Hotel.

The last moments in the ambulance, as he struggles not with an overdose but a revenge gunshot injury from a dealer, make clear that Bob intends to abandon clock-time and production line work, and return to his life as a junkie. As Abbey Lincoln sings the song’s final choruses, contemplating the ebbs and flows of time and love, Bob explains.

It’s this fucking life. You never know what’s going to happen next. […] See, most people, they don’t know how they’re going to feel from one minute to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.

On his way to ‘the fattest pharmacy in town’, he wants to live. It’s an incredible use of the subtleties of this wonderful song, which can accommodate the paradox of hedonistic control as well as gentle acceptance of the future’s sadnesses and joys, which so quickly become the past.

10: Everything Happens To Me (1941)

This song is a primer in magical thinking.

Matt Dennis and Tom Adair wrote ‘Everything Happens To Me’ in 1941. Frank Sinatra’s winsome recording with Tommy Dorsey that same year made it a hit.

Surprisingly, despite the vividness of its story of chronic misfortune, there are far more instrumental than vocal versions. And no movie seems to have incorporated the song into its action.** Three films share its title – a 1938 comedy caper about a by-election in a seaside town starring vaudevillean Max Miller, a 2001 Spanish romantic comedy entitled Todo me pasa a mí adapted from a play, and a 2018 single-shot short about an actor’s terrible audition. Then there is Chissà perché… capitano tutte a me (1980), a supremely How Did This Get Made–able buddy cop drama which teams a preternaturally strong sheriff (Bud Spencer) with a gizmo-toting alien boy (Cary Guffey, of Close Encounters of the Third Kind fame). Its Anglicised title, Why Did You Pick On Me?, is the repeated refrain of the sheriff as the two of them get into scrapes. For exposure to its full range of battiness, including Mary Poppins-esque magical home improvements, Kraftwerk alien villains, and at least one hundred slapstick brawls, it can be seen in full here.

Lucky for my purposes then that the album cover of Chet Baker Sings: It Could Happen To You (1958), on which ‘Everything Happens To Me’ appears, is acutely cinematic. In his review piece about this album and Chet Baker as a cultural icon, John Bergstrom doesn’t love it:

Baker was cool, all right. But he exhibited none of the aggressive, chest-puffing, downright intimidating cool that went with most of the other big names of the day. His coolness was passive rather than active, accidental rather than inevitable, devoid of sexuality. Just look at the flat-out hokey cover art for It Could Happen To You. This guy isn’t dangerous. At least not yet.

Rollneck notwithstanding, Baker’s lupine gaze in that image feels pretty intense to me. It Could Happen To You as 1950s werewolf romcom: seemingly anodyne heartthrob lures unsuspecting dates and turns them; under the light of the waxing crescent moon, he meets his match in this laughing girl, who also happens to be a werewolf. I’d watch it.

Johnny Burke’s lyrics for ‘It Could Happen To You’ (1944) and Tom Adair’s for ‘Everything Happens To Me’ are two sides of the same narrative coin: the one, a story of the exhilarating terror of Cupid’s arrow, and the other, a melancholic account of perpetual adversity in life and love.

Everything Happens To Me

The verse – which Chet Baker’s performance excludes, and which is absent from the chart above – begins with superstitious high drama: “Black cats creep across my path until I’m almost mad / I must have roused the devil’s wrath, ’cause all my luck is bad”. (Ella Fitzgerald retains it; following a misleadingly jaunty introduction, so does Billie Holiday.) Dennis’s composition then modulates from minor to major, and Adair’s resigned tale of woe unfolds. Magic is replaced by a thoroughly modern kind of predestination: golf dates made will guarantee rain, card games played will engender inevitable defeat. The wordplay of the phrases “I guess I’ll go through life just catching colds and missing trains” and “I never miss a thing, I’ve had the measles and the mumps” suggest interminable negativity. And it’s always the protagonist’s own fault: “I guess I’m just a fool who never looks before he jumps / Everything happens to me”.

A love affair with the person to whom the song is addressed seemed briefly to present a solution to the “jinx”, but alas: “I’ve mortgaged all my castles in the air”. (I find this artful line really hard to get my head around. Dreams have crashed down to earth as crippling debts? To whom?) For the lost object of desire has cut ties with the hapless character altogether. Dealing with this unhappy turn, the penultimate couplet is legitimately funny: “I’ve telegraphed and phoned, sent an Air Mail Special, too / Your answer was ‘Goodbye’, and there was even postage due”.

The song concludes on a note of fatalism. “I fell in love just once and then it had to be with you / Everything happens to me”.

To be described as someone’s one and only true love, never to be replaced, is classic ‘romance’. But as the narrative plays itself out in Chet Baker’s delicate performance, the protagonist’s misery and self-reproach are all-encompassing and of long duration. The brilliance of the song is in its presentation of the failed love affair as the icing on the cake of this person’s beleaguered life: the mantra ‘everything happens to me’ hints at another, untold story of loss and disappointment.

**Update: actually there are four, a similar miscellany: romantic comedy Playing By Heart (1998) (“if romance is a mystery, there’s only one way to figure it out”), The Guard (2011) (“the FBI are about to discover that things work a little differently around here”), Dolphin Tale (2011) (“inspired by the amazing true story of Winter”), and Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York (2019) (no tagline, but much controversy).