9/29/23
Newsletter #473
The Crack of Dawn
As a kid I loved Doris Day. It began from being a Casablanca freak from the time I was in elementary school. As I kept watching movies, I came to understand that the director was the guy in charge. Given this, I began watching as many of director Michael Curtiz’s movies as I could. Luckily for me, Michael Curtiz (real name, Mihály Kertész) was the top director at Warner Brothers in the 1930s, and remained somewhere near the top throughout the 1940s and ‘50s. Curtiz cast Doris Day (real name, Doris Mary Kappelhoff) in her first movie, Romance on the High Seas (1948), even though she admitted to Curtiz that she had absolutely no acting experience (although she did have two number one hit songs with Les Brown’s band). Curtiz said that he liked her freckles, and I must admit, so did I.
However, the movie that really hooked me on Doris Day was Michael Curtiz’s film, Young Man with a Horn (1950), starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall and Doris Day. Kirk is a trumpet player in a jazz band and Doris Day is the band’s vocalist. Day is at her youngest, cutest, and most freckled, and she has a bad crush on Kirk who doesn’t know she’s alive. Instead, Kirk falls for the snottiest rich bitch ever, played perfectly by Lauren Bacall. Every time Bacall treats Kirk like a jerk – going so far as to break all of his prized jazz records – he comes back to the band and there is sweet Doris Day pining for him, but he still doesn’t pay any attention to her. I wanted to scream. I desperately wanted Kirk to work it out with Doris Day, but no, he had to go and become an alcoholic bum instead. I both love and hate that movie. As a note, Kirk’s spot-on trumpet playing was dubbed by the amazing Harry James.
A family favorite in my house as a kid was The Thrill of it All (1963) with Doris Day and James Garner. Personally, I think Doris Day and James Garner made a much better team than with her and Rock Hudson. Garner was a better actor and a lot funnier. Doris Day is hysterical as the average mom who ends up on TV as a spokesperson for Happy Soap. The film was written by the great Carl Reiner (from a story by the great Larry Gelbart) and I think it’s a really terrific script. The film is also extremely well-directed by the young Norman Jewison, who would go on to direct In the Heat of the Night (1967, Best Picture) and Fiddler on the Roof (1973). Anyway, Doris Day is your average mom, married to James Garner who is a doctor, and they have two kids. They are invited to a swanky dinner party. Doris is trying to give her two kids a bath and her 7-year-old daughter won’t let her wash her hair unless she uses that good-smelling Happy Soap. At the posh dinner party, given by the owner of Happy Soap who happens to hate their commercials, Doris offhandedly says, “Happy Soap saved my life,” and then tells about the recent bath incident. She is immediately hired for a lot of money to say exactly the same thing on live television.
The TV show leading into her commercial is a live dramatic western. Doris Day watches the scene as it unfolds in a saloon where the bad cowboy (played by Carl Reiner) grabs the saloon girl’s arm and says, “You’ll do what I say!” The saloon girl throws her drink in the cowboy’s face and says, “You pig!”
Right then they point at Doris Day and begin shooting her commercial. Doris Day says, “My name is Betsy Boyer, and I’m a pig.” It then cuts to people watching TV all over the country, including her children, asking, “Did she just say she was a pig?”
Doris miraculously pulls off the commercial, which is a big success and she she’s asked to come back the next week. This time the dramatic show is a WWII drama taking place in a bar. The mean Nazi officer (played by Carl Reiner) grabs the beautiful woman’s arm and says, “You’ll do as I say!” The woman throws her drink in his face and says, “You cad!” Doris asks an assistant director, “Isn’t this a lot like last week’s dialogue?” The AD says, “Nobody notices.” It cuts to her 7- and 8-year-old children saying, “This is the exact same dialogue as last week.
There’s a wonderful scene where the ad agency decides that they have to have pictures of Betsy Boyer next to her swimming pool, except that she doesn’t have a pool. So they build a swimming pool that day and shoot a commercial with her against a wall of Happy Soap boxes, next to the pool. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell her husband about any of this. James Garner drives up his driveway in some wonderful 1959 Bulge Mobile, goes through the wall of soap boxes, and right into the pool, where he sinks.
The Thrill of it All was a big hit, as were most of Doris Day’s films. Although I think the film is firing on every cylinder, I agree with James Garner who wrote that the film was “better than it should have been because of Doris.”
Anyway, Doris Day died on May 13, 2019, at the age of 97 years old. As per her wishes, there was no funeral, no assembly of any kind, and she was buried without a headstone, or any kind of marker at all.
And yet another day dawns.