As I demonstrated recently, my knowledge of so-called higher culture is pretty shaky. I’m especially ignorant when it comes to music, at least of the pre-rock ‘n’ roll variety. To me, “The Great American Songbook” and “Tin Pan Alley” are vaguely understood terms at best, and up until a couple of weeks ago the only Cole Porter tune I could name was “Anything Goes,” and that’s only because I’ve seen the opening credits of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom so many times.
But then I saw De-Lovely, an unconventional biographical picture about Porter, and I realized that I do, in fact, know quite a few of the popular songs from the first half of the 20th Century. I’ve heard them for years in movies both new and old, and I think it’s fair to say that they are woven into the fabric of our cultural consciousness; in other words, everybody knows these songs, even if their origins are cloudy these days. (I’m personally quite fond of “Begin the Beguine,” which I knew from the film The Rocketeer, and from a CD collection of Big Band music I picked up a few years ago, but I never realized it had been written by Porter.) De-Lovely is filled with Porter’s music, performed by modern-day singers such as Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, Alanis Morisette, and others whose faces I recognize but whose names I escape me. The film actually is a sort of musical, although the songs are used more to punctuate a given scene’s emotional impact than to drive the action or reveal information, as they do in a more traditional musical. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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