Search - You're the Top: The Cole Porter Story on DVD

Porter was one of the masters of American song writing, and

C. O. DeRiemer | San Antonio, Texas, USA | 08/02/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"What a strange combination of information and frustration is this 56 minute television documentary on the life and works of Cole Porter. On the one hand, we have an abbreviated but honest look at one of America's greatest Broadway songwriters. On the other hand, the examples given us of Porter's songs are more often than not drawn from terrible TV kinescopes and excerpts from some of the lead-foot Hollywood musicals made from his Broadway shows. The result is informative but irritating.

Bobby Short introduces us to Porter at the start of the program: "Song writing is a complicated craft and Cole Porter was one of its masters, and one of the few who wrote both the words and the music. What's more, Cole created a world we hadn't seen before in quite this way. It is the world he lived in, a world of penthouses, chiffon and champagne, the world where Ginger fell in love with Fred for the very first time."

Porter inherited millions. When he married his wife, Linda, she brought to the marriage even more money than he had. He was an enthusiastic homosexual, a social creature and a terrible snob. He just might have become, without her, an aging musical dilettante writing amusing and condescending songs for his social set. She was a woman uninterested in the physical aspects of married life, who took Porter as he was and who believed in his talent. The two of them had a marriage of understanding and commitment that lasted until her death. After years of living in Venetian palaces and the most socially acceptable Parisian apartments, a combination of his talent and desire for success, her pushing him to keep working at his writing, and the contacts of Irving Berlin, who believed in Porter, Cole Porter returned to America and began his trajectory of huge success on Broadway.

In that period of great American song writing, from the late Twenties to the late Forties, the time of Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Berlin, the Gershwins and Kern, Cole Porter came into his own. And in some odd way, he kept the pretensions and snobbery of his social life separate from the creativity and collaborations of his song writing life. Could anything be more socially pretentious than having an exclusive luncheon party...and requiring one's quests to speak French? It's a bit sad to listen to Kitty Carlisle Hart gush about the parties she and her husband, Moss Hart, went to at the Porters, and to realize that these were his show business parties, and that she and her husband were most likely never invited to his high social events. But on Broadway and in Hollywood, he was a generous collaborator who treated the people he worked with as the creative equals they were. And without a doubt the songs he wrote excuse a lot of snobbish behavior. The songs with his lush and often melodramatic melodies combined with lyrics so clever, so naughty at times and, often, so poignant, are what his life and work are really about. It's his songs we remember, not his social or personal life. If only this program had been able to give us those songs in better form. We may learn about Anything Goes, but we're given to look at a kinescope of an aging Ethel Merman and a grinning Frank Sinatra from a television production made in the Fifties. Even worse, we have to endure clips from some of those lumbering movie musicals from the Sixties...Shirley MacLaine and Sinatra so out of place with Porter's brand of naughty, sophisticated mischief...Hollywood's version of Kiss Me Kate where Porter's lyrics were dumbed down and sanitized.

For a quick and relatively honest look at Porter's life, this DVD is worth having. To appreciate his songs, however, buy some good CD's. I'd start with Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter, Short's You're the Top: The Love Songs of Cole Porter, and Lee Wiley Sings the Songs of George & Ira Gershwin & Cole Porter. To appreciate his mastery of lyric writing, dip into The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, edited by Robert Kimball"