Night and Day (1946)

What befits a legend more than a completely false biography? Night and Day is a fictional account of the fictional marriage between America’s most aristocratic and prolific songwriter Cole Porter and society divorcee Linda Lee Thomas. They met while drifting through Parisian art and literary circles as fellow expatriates that Gertrude Stein dubbed the “Lost Generation” who defied Victorian morals and gender roles and defined modernism. Porter was 25, a lawschool dropout from Indiana who was selling songs to get by on his mother’s allowance. Thomas was 10 years older, from Kentucky, with a comfortable settlement from an abusive millionaire husband. Porter was also famously homosexual.

It’s easy to say what he found attractive in Linda. She was sophisticated and fashionable, with connections to the upper class on 2 continents. By marrying her, Cole’s family allowance went up and he gained legitimacy. It’s a little harder to define what attracted Linda to him, since we don’t have any positive words for a woman who loves and knowingly marries a gay man. Some suspected she’d renounced sex: the victim of her first husband’s abuses and infidelities. Others said she leaned a bit gay herself, as several of her closest friends were lesbian. Whatever the real relationship, Linda supported Cole until success moved them to Hollywood where California’s out lifestyle allowed Porter to be involved openly with other men. Linda felt this was no place for a wife. They separated, but she came back after a horse riding accident left Porter crippled and threatened with amputation of both legs. In an age when loveless marriages were rather common, theirs was a marriage of love without sex. How do you define that?

Don’t expect any answers from this treacle starring Cary Grant at his most insincere since Suspicion and the exquisite Alexis Smith as the suffering Linda who pines away for Cole’s affection. Despite plying him with engraved cigarette cases she can’t compete with his love for music, illustrated by the many romantic vacations that keep being postponed for his next big show. Support is provided by Monty Woolley, Ginny Simms, and Jane Wyman as friends and performers who wander in and out of scenes, and Porter’s great songbook is raided for inspiration. Grant often sits at a piano plinking out the famous tunes with unconvincingly impromptu lyrics. Rumor has it that during WW1 Porter had a closet full of uniforms and lied about being a soldier in the Foreign Legion. The film perpetuates that myth, even adding a dramatic injury so Cole and Linda can be reunited at an army hospital! Cole’s friends must have guffawed at such chutzpa but Porter loved it, saying any movie where Cary Grant played him had to be good!

There are a few performance highlights which are stunted by dull camerawork and snooze editing: Eve Arden makes a non-Eve Arden cameo as a French chanteuse, the real Mary Martin performs an eskimo rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, and an unknown dancer named Estelle Sloan sizzles in a tap solo to “Just One of Those Things” choreographed by LeRoy Prinz. Porter’s greatest song “Begin the Beguine” is a full tropical number with some strong choreography, but nothing really shines. The early Technicolor drains life from the colors turning everything icy and pastel. Distantly beautiful Alexis Smith looks like delicate porcelain, but the other actors resemble the undead. Dance numbers are flat and presentational, and while Ginny Simms has a lovely face and voice it’s frustrating to hear Porter’s songs given an overly reverent varnish of violins and slow swelling tempo as if every one of them were the last ballad. Cole Porter’s clever lyrics and complex compositions have stood the test of time whether backed with ’50s swing or ’90s dance pop, but here the orchestral arrangements reach for class but come off as artificial and sanitized as the film itself.