We hate Hollywood. We hate the Oscars. We hate being lectured by moral cretins. However, reading previews of last night’s event, I learned of the film Blue Moon. The film is a portrait of Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers’s first lyricist. I found the movie on cable and watched it while we were snowbound at home yesterday afternoon.
Directd by Richard Linklater, written by Robert Koplow, starring Ethan Hawke, I liked everything about the movie. That is my review.
It gave me the idea of devoting an installment of Sunday Morning Coming Down to the Rodgers and Hart songbook — drawing on the work of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and others who have recorded “songbook” albums to it.
One of the others is Tony Bennett. Bennett’s Rodgers and Hart songbook album was released in 1973. As the movie concludes, Bennett’s 1975 interpretation of “This Funny World” plays on the soundtrack. Where did that come from?
Bennett recorded the song for his 1973 songbook album and again in 1975. He rescued the song from the 1926 musical Betsy. The song is some 100 years old. Bennett’s rendition of the song the second time around appeared on Life Is Beautiful, the first album released on his own Improv label. In its own way the album is a countercultural document if there ever was one. In Bennett’s interpretation, moreover, the song sounds like an eternal verity.
