Night and Day, the Musical

Abstract

The late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed an upsurge in historical biopics, sometimes based on European figures such as Marie Antoinette and Marie Curie, but more often than not based on the lives of Americans, including cowboys and frontiersmen, politicians and military figures, inventors, writers, athletes and criminals, including Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Alva Edison, Edgar Allan Poe, Lou Gehrig, and John Dillinger, among others. At the end of the war, some cultural figures, especially composers whose works were seen as particularly American and that could contribute to global American cultural hegemony in a postwar world, were featured as well. In 1945 and 1946, three such pictures were released: Rhapsody in Blue, a Gershwin film featuring Robert Alda as the composer; Night and Day, a life of Cole Porter starring Cary Grant; and Till the Clouds Roll By, a biopic of Jerome Kern starring Robert Walker. In the case of Night and Day, it may be worth asking whether generic categories adequately account for the specifics and seeming point of the film. An otherwise apparently unknown early treatment of the Night and Day script, together with imagery from the show’s lobby cards as well as the finished film itself, suggest that Night and Day is primarily a good old-fashioned romance and that, in its relationship to Porter’s music, most closely approximates a jukebox musical.