Film Comment – July 01, 2019

July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 59

Michael Curtiz was impressed enough to proclaim Doris Day “the most everything dame I have ever seen.”

Beaming

Bright

The British master pays

tribute to a beloved star

BY TERENCE DAVIES

W

hen he was 9, filmmaker

Terence Davies went to the

movies to see Doris Day in

Young at Heart; “That’s

when I first fell in love with her,” he says.

It’s a love that would last a lifetime. When

offered a chance to meet her later in life,

however, he declined. He told The Criterion

Collection in an interview, “Gena Rowlands

once said to me, ‘I can get you an introduc-

tion,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want one. I want

to remember her as I saw her in those

wonderful musicals when I was growing

up,’ because I do love her, I really do love

her.” Upon her passing, we asked Davies

if he would like to write something. His

response was the following poem, a Film

Comment exclusive.—Michael Koresky

Terence Daviesis the director of eight

features, including Distant Voices, Still

Lives; The Long Day Closes; and A Quiet

Passion; as well as his Trilogy.

I cannot weep for all her charm

I cannot weep for all her wit

I will not cry for what she gave

I will not cry for all her joy.

But gone the laugh, gone the sun

Gone the passion few can match

Gone the face as round as joy

Gone the fire, gone the heart.

It’s just as if our sun went out

The solar warmth returned to ice

And polar is the grief we feel,

The sense of loss, Antarctic woe.

I bade you not to weep or cry

I chid you not to give up hope

But now I can no longer try

To stifle tears and try to cope.

What wastes we see, how desolate the world

Whither her soul, without her kind

How empty now the life unfurled

The shuttered room, the drawn down blind.

So if your hearts can take the weight

Of grief, of loss, of silent tears,

If we can count her one of stars

Then perhaps we’ll not forget

To think of her at quiet times

And let our memories unreel

Down all the years yet to come

And hold—if only for the briefest time—

Our love of her who now is gone.

H

er first #1, recorded with

Les Brown and His Band of

Renown, was 1945’s smooth-

riding “Sentimental Journey,”

and many more followed. The leap into

pictures came when she impressed

Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, who’d

written the score for a project at Warner

Brothers titled Romance on the High

Seas(1948), and who convinced her to

audition for the role of gum-smacking

honky-tonk singer Georgia Garrett for

the picture’s director, Michael Curtiz.

He was impressed enough to proclaim

Day “the most everything dame I

have ever seen,” and once she’d signed

a Warner contract went on to direct her

in My Dream Is Yours(1949), Young

Man with a Horn(1950), and I’ll See

You in My Dreams (1951). The highlight

of Day’s Warner years, which ended

with 1954’s Young at Heartopposite

Frank Sinatra, is the riotous Calamity

Jane(1953), a gender-bending Wild

West musical that gives Day free rein

to practice her knack for knockabout

laffs as the tall-tale-telling frontier scout

Martha Jane Canary.

Her best roles came through Hitchcock

and in George Abbott and Stanley Donen’s

film of the Broadway hit The Pajama Game

(1957), in which Day joined most of the

original cast, taking over from Janis Paige

the spitfire role of union leader “Babe”

Williams, her revved-up energy matched to

the dynamo pace of the film’s factory-floor

setting. The peak of Day’s celebrity came

in a series of romantic comedies variously

produced by Stanley Shapiro, Ross Hunter,

and her husband Martin Melcher, among

them the Rock Hudson trilogy of Pillow

Talk(1959), Lover Come Back(1961), and

Send Me No Flowers(1964). Her box-office

dominance was as complete as that of any

actress in the history of American pictures,

but didn’t live out the ’60s. Day fit not

at all into the emerging counterculture

youthquake with her sculpted pop-art bob

and official air of guarded propriety—offi-

cial I say, for she was once a touring musi-

cian, of whom Oscar Levant quipped, “I

knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”

She might’ve pivoted to serve the new,

“adult” Hollywood by taking the proffered

Mrs. Robinson part in The Graduate(1967),

but didn’t budge to the times, and so

would be pegged a cultural reactionary.

As so often was the case, it was left to

Molly Haskell to redeem this favorite of

female viewers, as she did in the pages

of 1974’s From Reverence to Rape, noting

that the “comic obstacle course of Doris

Day’s life, her lack of instinctive knowl-

edge about ‘being a woman,’ and the con-

comitant drive, ambition, and energy”

spoke more to a lived American reality

than did the postures projected by many

a critical darling.

Day was beloved for her shine, but she

was not naïve in her happiness; it was her

gift to make the optimism that marked

her characters understood as a choice, one

of the many choices with which they

negotiated the rocky shoals of a woman’s

existence. That this can ring deeper and

truer than blasé postures of sophistication

is something that Day’s fans have always

known, and that new ones will continue

to discover. 

KO

BA

L/

SH

UT

TE

RS

TO

CK