A fine romance
The world is full of coincidences. As I stopped by Abby's blog today, I found the lyrics of one of my favorite songs, "The Way You Look Tonight", with lyrics by Dorothy Fields and music by Jerome Kern (the same guy who composed "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"). This song is almost as old as my parents. It was composed for a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical called "Swing Time", released in 1936. He sings this song to her as she is getting ready to go out with him. She has some kind of cream on her face, shampoo on her hair, and is dressed in a bathrobe. Now isn't that funny and a bit ironical? A guy singing "Someday, when I'm awfully low, When the world is cold, I feel a glow just thinking of you, And the way you look tonight" to a girl with cream on her face.
The lady lyricist, Dorothy Fields, had a wonderfully sarcastic sense of humour. For this movie, she also wrote the lyrics for a song called "A Fine Romance" which describes one of the most tedious relationships ever. It is so bad that the girl even says dryly: "You're calmer than the seals from the Artic Ocean/At least they flap their fins to express emotion". While the guy retorts later: "You never give the orchids I send a glance!/No, you like cactus plants/This is a fine romance". Now, if you ever run into a someone that is calmer than the seals from the Artic Ocean, I would recommend you to hurry as fast as you can in the other direction. The full lyrics are available at the following site:
http://www.reelclassics.com/Teams/Fred&Ginger/lyrics/fineromance-lyrics.htm
Now the coincidence I mentioned at the beginning was the fact that I woke up with "A Fine Romance" in my mind out of nothing, just to find the lyrics of a song from the same movie in the net.
1 Comments:
Dear Madam,
You know, I just love oldies romance movies. The song and dance, the pure romanticism of it all. They don't make movies like those anymore.
Fred and Ginger, Bacall and Bogie, etc etc
But then again, this is probably because I grew up watching those movies (because my mother was such a fan of old romance flicks) that I find it all wonderful.
But nonetheless, they sure don't make romance movies like they used to...
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