Search - Night and Day on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1946 DVD Release: 06/01/2004 Format: DVD - Closed Captioned Edition: Dual Layered Audio Tracks: English Subtitles: English, French, Spanish SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 2 hrs 8 mins Studio: Warner Home Video Members Wishing: 0 Genres: Musical, Musical Drama, Biopic [feature]

Faced with the challenge of writing a screenplay based on the life of fabulously wealthy, fabulously successful composer Cole Porter, one Hollywood wag came up with a potential story angle: "How does the S.O.B. make his second million dollars?" By the time the Porter biopic Night and Day was released, the three-person scriptwriting team still hadn't come up with a compelling storyline, though the film had the decided advantages of star Cary Grant and all that great Porter music. Roughly covering the years 1912 to 1946, the story begins during Porter's undergraduate days at Yale University, where he participated in amateur theatricals under the tutelage of waspish professor Monty Woolley (who plays himself). Though Porter's inherited wealth could have kept him out of WWI, he insists upon signing up as an ambulance driver. While serving in France, he meets nurse Linda Lee (Alexis Smith), who will later become his wife. Focusing his attentions on Broadway and the London stage in the postwar years, Porter pens an unbroken string of hit songs, including "Just One of Those Things," "You're the Top," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Begin the Beguine," and the title number. The composition of this last-named song is one of the film's giddy highlights, as Porter, inspired by the "drip drip drip" of an outsized rainstorm, runs to the piano and cries "I think I've got it!" The film's dramatic conflict arises when Porter is crippled for life in a polo accident. Refusing to have his legs amputated, he makes an inspiring comeback, even prompting a WWI amputee to remark upon his courage! Corny and unreliable as biography, Night and Day is redeemed by the guest appearances of musical luminaries Mary Martin (doing a spirited if disappointingly demure version of her striptease number "My Heart Belongs to Daddy") and Ginny Simms, the latter cast as an ersatz Ethel Merman named Carole Hill. Jane Wyman, seen as Porter's pre-nuptial sweetheart Gracie Harris, also gets to sing and dance, and quite well indeed. Beset with production problems, not least of which was the ongoing animosity between star Grant and director Michael Curtiz, Night and Day managed to finish filming on schedule, and proved to be an audience favorite -- except for those "in the know" Broadwayites who were bemused over the fact that Cole Porter's well-known homosexuality was necessarily weaned from the screenplay. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

John Alvin - Petey
Cary Grant - Cole Porter
Eve Arden - Gabrielle
Alexis Smith - Linda Lee Porter
Herman Bing - "Peaches"
Monty Woolley - Himself
Paul Cavanagh - Bart McClelland
Jane Wyman - Gracie Harris
Tom D'Andrea - Bernie
Dorothy Malone - Nancy

He may have been dapper and handsome in black-and-white, but in his first Technicolor feature, Cary Grant positively lights up the screen and music legend Cole Porter in the Warner Bros. release of the 1946 musical biography Night and Day. Presented in 1.33:1 full-frame, this release offers audio rendered in closed-captioned English Dolby Digital Mono with optional English, Spanish, and French subtitles. Extra features include the vintage Warner Bros. shorts Dezi Arnaz and His Orchestra and Musical Movieland, the classic Looney Tunes cartoon The Big Snooze, and a Cole Porter trailer gallery. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide