If my choir is performing a song from a film or play I always like to put the piece in context, which often means that I have to wade through summaries of plots that make very little sense. Many if not most musical comedies have plots that are simply frameworks, often flimsy, to hang the song-and-dance numbers on. (It’s okay for me to end that previous sentence with a proposition since one of these song titles does that, too.) Also, sometimes the musical numbers have outlived the production for which they were written and it’s very difficult to get access to the original story.
Such is the case with Something to Shout About, the 1943 film scored by Cole Porter, in which “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” occurs. I’m finding it very difficult to get an idea of how the song is actually used in the story. I know who sings it and to whom, though, and I’ve managed to get a rough idea of the plot. (Wikipedia was just plain wrong on this one, but luckily they weren’t the only source available.) Turns out it’s one of those “rich backer insists on appearing in a show even though she has no talent” thingies. So at first I thought that it was sung to the rich backer (a wealthy divorcee) by the producer of the show, with the idea that he’d marry her and get her to stay home. (This was 1943, after all.) According to the film’s performance credits, though, the couple involved is a theatrical agent and the talented girl who is ripe for the part that the divorcee has taken on. I could get the movie through Amazon and watch the whole thing, but I’m afraid that that’s just not on the agenda. So we’ll leave it at that for now. As I’ve hinted already, the view of love presented here is a very traditional one: the woman stays home; the man comes to her. She’s there no matter what. (Full lyrics, such as they are, can be found at the end of this post.)
“They Can’t Take that Away from Me” by George and Ira Gershwin is a different matter, in that its function in the plot, or rather plots, is clear. That’s not to say that the plots themselves are clear. The song actually appears in two films, Shall We Dance and The Barkleys of Broadway. In SWD, Rogers’ and Astaire’s characters are rumored to be married but really aren’t, and so the idea is that they’ll actually get married so that they can actually get divorced. (Got that?) The occasion of the song is a foggy night crossing on a ferry, as the new bride and groom return back from their quickie wedding and plan for an even-more-quickie parting. Astaire says to Rogers, “I hope you enjoy your divorce.” So the song has a tone of bittersweet farewell, unlike “You’d Be So Nice.”
Of course, we know that Ginger and Fred will eventually get back together, which they do at the end. Interestingly, the couple doesn’t dance in this scene; Astaire sings to a silent Rogers. Dancing wouldn’t have fit the mood at all, and the constrained setting of the ferry deck isn’t conducive to a dance number. In the film containing the reprise, Rogers and Astaire play a husband-and-wife Broadway dance team with “marital issues” and do a gorgeous performance of “They Can’t Take That.” Barkleys was their tenth and final film together. (SWD was their seventh.) One little nugget I mined was that originally Judy Garland was supposed to play the lead in Barkleys but that her growing dependence on prescription drugs caused her to have so many absences that she was fired and Rogers hired as her replacement. Given the fact that Ginger Rogers was a very touchy, proud person by all accounts, I find it rather astonishing that she agreed to take the part. There was talk that the “elfin” younger Rogers had now become a more “mature, athletic” woman. All I can say is that she looks great.
As is widely known, Rogers and Astaire by no means had the same chemistry offscreen that they had on; in fact, they didn’t like each other much. Rogers didn’t like Astaire’s autocratic control of their dances, and he found her difficult to work with. At one point, many years after their last film, he said, “Oh Ginger! She always wanted to be boss.” But he was the master of the dance, planning their steps out as if he were a military general, mapping out every step on paper and then on a blackboard. Their first film together, Flying Down to Rio in 1933, was such a success that the two were seen from then on as an ongoing duo by RKO Studios, which owned their contracts. Astaire wanted to work with other dancers and Rogers wanted to star in serious drama, but no dice. They were just too popular together. For their last RKO film and next-to-last film in general, a biopic about the dancers Fred and Irene Castle, Astaire tried to get the real Irene Castle (then long past her dancing days) to intervene with the studio and get them to hire someone else. RKO firmly declined her advice.
A note on the lyrics: Since I wrote about how George and Ira Gershwin labored over fitting the lyrics to the music (with Ira doing most of the laboring) for the song “Fascinating Rhythm,” you may be wondering if there was a similar fraught process over the ones for “You Can’t.” After all, how do you decide what tugs at the memory more: the tilt of a hat, the beam of a smile, or the lifting of a teacup? How was the decision made to include that the man is so besotted he even likes her off-key singing? I ran into a fascinating interview on NPR that said,
It was actually written very quickly. The – when the – when George and Ira came to Hollywood the second time in 1936 to write for RKO Pictures, to write for Astaire and Rogers, who were already a successful team, they came to Hollywood with a fair number of ideas already in mind. So the songs for that first of the three movies that they wound up doing in LA and in the ’36, ’37 period – they all came together very quickly. The songs are written to fit certain sequences in the film. This was one of them and one of the best.1
I’ve been unsuccessful in finding a clip from the movie for “You’d Be So Nice”–but here’s a choral arrangement done by some enthusiastic teens:
Here’s a clip from both films in which “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” appears:
And here’s a choral version of that:
Here are the full lyrics for both songs::
You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To
You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To You'd Be So Nice By The Fire While The Breeze On High Sang A Lullaby You'd Be All That I Could Desire Under Stars Chilled By The Winter Under An August Moon Burnin' Above You'd Be So Nice, You'd Be Paradise To Come Home To And Love
I’m not sure why there’s all this Germanic capitalization, but that’s the way the lyrics are written and so I’m leaving them as is. The words are pretty unmemorable, aren’t they? It’s the Porter melody that makes it. And it’s been covered by many artists over the years.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me
The way you wear your hat The way you sip your tea The memory of all that No, no, they can't take that away from me The way your smile just beams The way you sing off key The way you haunt my dreams No, no, they can't take that away from me We may never, never meet again On the bumpy road to love Still I'll always, always Always keep the memory of The way you hold your knife The way we danced 'till three The way you changed my life No, no, they can't take that away from me No, they can't take that away from me
“Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due“–an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air of author Michael Owen on his new biography of Ira Gershwin. The entire interview is well worth a read. ↩︎
