Producer and director Mark
Cousins on the other side
of the Hollywood golden girl
The pain of love is taken just as far in
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew
Too Much (1956). Day is in Morocco. Her
son is kidnapped. To help find him she
must sing ‘Que Sera, Sera’. She doesn’t
so much sing it as yell it. The scene is
a masterpiece of camera placement, but
at its centre is this conservatively dressed
woman singing her heart out about
unpredictability, about loss of control.
It’s heartbreaking, an eruption.
Wilder still, and more tempestuous, is
1960’s Midnight Lace, which scared me a
lot in my youth. Day plays an heiress who
receives eerie death threats. Glossy and
gothic, the film again seems to be about
fear, its excess, its melodrama, the way it
floods your brain. Day is in floods ofClockwise from main:
Doris Day as the
famed American
frontierswoman in
1953’s Calamity Jane;
1960’s Midnight
Lace — wild and
tempestuous; Love Me
Or Leave Me (1955),
real pain behind the
pizzazz; Day with
Clint Eastwood at
the Golden Globes
in 1989, with her Cecil
B. DeMille award.Goodbye
to the real
Doris Day
THAT PRIMROSE
hair, the highlight in
her eyes, that satin
complexion, the honeyed
vocals. Doris Day seemed
to be the definition of
Hollywood’s soft beauty and utopianism.
Such optimism had its downside,
of course. It portrayed a mostly white,
straight world (though Day doesn’t seem
to have been wholly heterosexual) which
looks dated now. Day’s films, such as On
Moonlit Bay (1951), I’ll See You In My
Dreams (1951), Calamity Jane (1953) and
Young At Heart (1954), seem like classic
Eisenhower conformism; the Black
Panthers and Jane Fonda killed all that,
didn’t they, and with it Day’s world?
I wonder. When she died I tweeted
that she meant as much to me growing
up as Paul Weller or David Bowie.
I wanted to compare her to men, angry,
creative, androgynous men, because
her films, like the music of Weller and
Bowie, dealt in unconscious material. The
emotions in her best movies threw that
material up onto the silver screen like a
volcano erupts lava.
Take Young Man With A Horn
(1950), for example, which was directed
by Casablanca’s Michael Curtiz. It’s
about obsession and self-destruction,
superbly set in the world of jazz. Lauren
Bacall plays a bisexual socialite. Day tries
to hang on to the man she loves, a
musician played by Kirk Douglas.