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Song of the Week #160
by Con Conrad and Herb Magidson

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, toward the climax of a complicated plot, standing nonchalantly on a balcony in the unlikely English seaside resort of "Brightbourne" overlooking a spectacular art deco terrace of impossibly glamorous dancers:

FRED: Not a bad tune. What is it?

GINGER: It's the newest thing over here. It's called 'The Continental'.

FRED: 'The Continental'? I like it. That's the second thing I've found I'd like to take back home with me. You know the words?

And amazingly she does. "Beautiful music!" promises Ginger. "Dangerous rhythm!" And not just beautiful but award-winning music, and statuette-earning rhythm. Miss Rogers was warbling "The Continental" into the history books: Seventy-five years ago, it became the first song ever to win an Oscar. The Academy Awards and talking pictures had showed up more or less simultaneously in the late Twenties, but it took a while for the Academy to acknowledge that songs were a bigger part of the new Hollywood than, say, title cards (an Oscar category that lapsed pretty quickly). Eventually, the industry figured out the obvious - that the movie business was also in the music business. When Con Conrad and Herb Magidson stepped up to receive the first Academy Award for Best Song at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on February 27th 1935, the new Oscar was a reflection not only of the success of the nascent genre of film musicals but also of the post-Wall Street Crash geographical shift of the music business: The big studios had not only signed up most of the top songwriters and brought them out west, but they'd also either acquired or started their own music publishing houses. For the next twenty years, the motion picture industry became a key supplier of America's hit songs, always as important as Broadway or Tin Pan Alley and often more so.

With one or two exceptions, the Academy's early judgments have been endorsed by posterity: Best Song 1935, "Lullaby Of Broadway" (our Song of the Week #79); Best Song 1936, "The Way You Look Tonight" (see Mark Steyn's American Songbook); 1938, "Thanks For The Memory"; 1939, "Over The Rainbow"; 1940, "When You Wish Upon A Star". The losers weren't bad, either: in 194l, when ''The Last Time I Saw Paris'' won, the other nominees included "Chattanooga Choo-Choo", ''Blues In The Night'' (our Song of the Week #147), and ''Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy'' (SotW #121). Then came "White Christmas" (SotW #38) , "Buttons And Bows" (SotW #45), "Baby, It's Cold Outside", songs still known, still sung, still recorded, still high-earning. In the Fifties, the film musical started to fade but the big theme song picked up the slack into the Sixties: "High Noon", "Three Coins In The Fountain", "Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing", "Que Sera, Sera" (Song of the Week #17), "Days Of Wine And Roses" (SotW #149), "Call Me Irresponsible", "Windmills Of Your Mind", "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" (SotW #154). By the Seventies, the bottom was dropping out of the title-song biz, and in the Eighties directors found it easier to slap a bit of boomer rock from the oldies station on to the soundtrack: What's Quentin Tarantino's best-known musical moment on screen? "Stuck In The Middle With You" - an old song for fresh ears.

If you heard "The Mark Steyn Christmas Show" a few weeks back, you may recall Don Black (co-author of "Born Free", the first British song to win an Oscar) generously pointing out that his fellow guest, Tim Rice, had won three Oscars. Tim modestly murmured that he happened to be in the right place at the right time for Disney. But there was a bit more to it than that. In the Nineties, the Mouse's rebirth produced a handful of new musical scores with real songs that audiences liked and remembered: Tim and Elton John's "Can You Feel The Love Tonight?" was not only a hit for Elt but was also taken up by, of all people, my New Hampshire neighbor Patti Page. The scores for The Lion King, Aladdin and Beauty And The Beast are genuinely liked. But the Disney renaissance sputtered, and by the Oughts we were down to pastiche numbers, incidental music nobody notices, and "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp". In today's Hollywood, it's even harder out here for a songwriter.

But you should have been there three-quarters of a century back, when every studio had the best composers, lyricists, arrangers, conductors and musicians all on payroll, right there on the lot. The losing songs in those first five years included "Cheek To Cheek" (SotW #59), "I've Got You Under My Skin" (see also Mark Steyn's American Songbook), "They Can't Take That Away From Me", "Change Partners", "Jeepers Creepers": all movie songs - that's to say, songs written for movies. Yet that first year it was an oddly tentative toe in the waters. For the Best Song of 1934, the Academy nominated just three numbers. The first was introduced by Bing Crosby in She Loves Me Not, one of those silly little pictures he made before Paramount wised up and recognized he was a real star. In this case, it was something to do with a gal who witnesses a gangland murder and decides to hide out as a male student at Princeton. Of course. Who wouldn't? But, along the way, Bing crooned: 

Can it be the trees
That fill the breeze
With rare and magic perfume?
Oh no, it isn't the trees
It's Love In Bloom... 

Not so much in bloom as over-ripe. It was by the team of Robin & Rainger - Leo Robin (words), Ralph Rainger (music) - who would go on to win the award four years later with "Thanks For The Memory". This time round they lost, yet the song stuck around for 40 years due to a happy accident. One night, while Crosby's record was still a big hit, Jack Benny and his wife Mary Livingstone wandered into a nightclub, and the bandleader invited Benny, a competent violinist, to sit in on the next number. It happened to be "Love In Bloom", so Jack borowed a fiddle, played along and it turned up as a squib in a gossip column: "Jack Benny playing 'Love In Bloom' was a breath of fresh air," cracked the wiseacre. "If you like fresh air." A couple of nights later, he and Mary strolled into another supper club, and immediately the orchestra struck up "Love In Bloom". It took off from there, and, when Benny needed a theme for his radio show, it was the obvious choice. And so, every week, on radio and then TV, the intro to Robin & Rainger's lush Bing ballad was inseparable from Don Wilson's warm baritone announcing "It's The Jack Benny Program!", and a rhapsodic love song achieved immortality by being sawed into pieces by a fiddle-playing comic week in, week out, decade after decade. Off-air, Benny could actually play the tune rather well, if anyone had wanted to hear it that way.

The second nominee was "The Carioca", the song - or, at any rate, the dance - that made Fred and Ginger. It was written for the film Flying Down To Rio. Astaire and Rogers came way down the billing - after Dolores Del Rio, Gene Raymond and Paul Roulien - and most of the production number, including the vocal, was left to Alice Gentle, Movita Castenada, Etta Moten and various other luminaries. But, in their short dance duet, their first brief screen appearance together, Fred and Ginger stole the picture. Years ago, Stanley Donen, who went on to direct Singin' In The Rain and much else, told me that as a boy that's what turned him on to the idea of dance in the movies - not the zillions of chorines tap-dancing on the wings of the bi-plane as it flies down to Rio in the title song (he thought that was just silly) but two people performing a short dance and turning it into the most lyrical expression of romance. Years later Astaire made a lovely record of it with Oscar Peterson:

Say, have you seen The Carioca?
It's not a foxtrot or a polka
It has a little bit of new rhythm
A blue rhythm
That sighs...

Well, it wasn't that new a rhythm. It was a samba with a little bit of all-American swing underpinning it. The words were by Edward Eliscu and Gus Kahn (who wrote our first two Songs of the Week, "San Francisco" and "Dream A Little Dream Of Me"), and the music was by Vincent Youmans (composer of SotW #34, "Time On My Hands", and #21, "Tea For Two"). It was Youmans' first and last film score: one giddy flight to Rio, and then a long, slow, spiral into the depths, thanks to a combination of tuberculosis, alcoholism and astonishingly inept career choices. Like Gershwin, Youmans is the sound of New York in the Twenties: No, No, Nanette was not just a hit show but the embodiment of the era. Like Gershwin, Youmans died young. But it wasn't sudden; it was drawn out, and he was far from fame by the final moments. Composers love him: "He's the football players' football player," Jule Styne told me once. But everyone knows Gershwin, and hardly anyone knows Youmans. "The Carioca" was his last hurrah. After years of more or less good-natured rivalry with Gershwin, Youmans decided that he too would like to be a serious composer, and write operas and concerti and whatnot. So he went off to study composition at the Loyola School of Music in New Orleans. One of the professors, Guy Bernard, remembered him playing "The Carioca" on the piano and using his whole forearm for the bass accompaniment. Great stuff, but Youmans was determined on self-destruction.

Still, the song did wonders for Fred and Ginger. When RKO decided to reunite them and this time as the stars, they were billed as "The King And Queen Of Carioca". The new film was an adaptation of Astaire's final Broadway hit, The Gay Divorce. For the screen, the title was changed to The Gay Divorcee: The Hays Office was not prepared to entertain the societally harmful notion that something as serious as divorce could ever be "gay", but they were prepared to concede the possibility that one of the parties might be (as in light and carefree, that is: now, of course, Massachusetts and other jurisdictions are chock full of gay divorces and gay divorcees). The plot involved Ginger as the eponymous divorcee, in London to detach herself from a husband she hasn't seen in years. Fred shows up and is mistaken, as is the way, for the professional co-respondent. If you don't know what a "professional co-respondent" is, look it up. I had to, when I started in radio as a teenager and a celebrated on-air personality was described to me as "wearing co-respondent's shoes". But let's not get too hung up on details. With the perverse genius of Hollywood, RKO kept the halfwitted plot convolutions of the original Broadway show but junked the entire score except one song. And the score was by Cole Porter. The sole number they retained was "Night And Day" (SotW #78). But otherwise every number was tossed overboard, and in-house songwriters were hired to compose replacements. The studio was especially keen to come up with another "Carioca", a brand new big dance number for Fred, Ginger, and wall-to-wall extras.

The task fell to a couple of guys called Con Conrad and Herb Magidson. Con Conrad was at the tail end of a career that peaked in the Twenties with "Margie", "Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me", and "Lena From Palesteena" (a neglected novelty song that I'm surprised no one's dusted off as part of the entertainment for Israeli Apartheid Week). Herb Magidson, by contrast, was at the beginning of a career that would peak a few years later with two very fine songs, "Gone With The Wind" and "The Masquerade Is Over". He also wrote "Enjoy Yourself" with Carl ("Marshmallow World") Sigman. For "Carioca: The Return", Conrad and Magidson more than delivered:

It's something daring
The Continental
A way of dancing that's really ultra-new
It's very subtle
The Continental
Because it does what you want it to do...

Exactly. "The Continental" wasn't a dance any more than "The Carioca" was. The waltz is a dance, so's the tango, and even the twist. But "The Carioca" and "The Continental" are just pretexts for production numbers - like the song says, they do what you want them to do. But RKO loved the number, and built the publicity campaign for The Gay Divorcee entirely around it. Who needs "Night And Day"? Newspaper ads showed cut-out footprints following arrows and dotted lines across the floor, Arthur Murray-style. Okay. So what exactly does this new dance involve?

Ah, right. So don't worry about where you put your left foot. Like the song's original subtitle says, "You kiss while you're dancing." When Ginger first sings the line, Fred interjects: "Not a bad idea" - although, as a star notoriously reluctant to kiss his leading ladies, he shows no inclination to act on it.

Then again, the number is brimming with all kinds of other good ideas, so who cares? The whole thing's almost 20 minutes long, and by the time it wraps up you can't complain you haven't had your money's worth. It starts in Ginger's hotel suite with boy, girl and the actual professional co-respondent, Erik Rhodes, as Signor Tonetti. Or as his catchphrase puts it: "Your wife is safe with Tonetti. He prefers spaghetti!" In order to fulfill the requirements, Tonetti has to ensure that the principals remain in the hotel room all night. Unfortunately, they're very taken by the dancing down below, and determined to join the throng. So Fred cuts out some silhouettes and sets them on a turntable, and Tonetti glancing up from the couch thinks the couple are just dancing round the room. Instead, they've skipped downstairs to gambol in the summer night, while the poor Signor unwittingly serenades them on his concertina:

Two bodies swaying
The Continental
And you are saying just what you're thinking of
So keep on dancing
The Continental
For it's the song of romance and of love! 

Downstairs, on the improbable terraces of "Brightbourne", an English seaside resort unlike any ever seen in reality, the film's choreographer Hermes Pan puts the company through ever more extravagant dance variations - waltz, tango, charleston, all such fun that you entirely forget that they make the point that "The Continental" is not a dance in its own right at all. This is Astaire and Rogers at the very beginning of their partnership, so Pan and his director Mark Sandrich are still using tricks from the dominant style of the day - Busby Berkeley at Warner Brothers. There's a few overhead regimental formations as the dancers switch from black tails to white to faux-toreador vests. But boy, they keep things moving. The vocal honors go to Lillian Miles who pops up with a bit of frenzied rhythmic patter:

On the dikes of the Zuider Zee,
The wooden shoes have found the key
The Continental!
It's like a fever!
It's like a plague!
It's swept all Europe
From Moscow to The Hague!

Which isn't really true. But for a faintly absurd production number the song certainly enjoyed a long life. Nat "King" Cole made it a great live speciality. Sinatra made two solid records of it, the first in 1950 with a jumpin' George Siravo arrangement, and then again in the mid-Sixties with a Nelson Riddle chart that doesn't hang around quite long enough to establish itself as a classic. It's fun for as long as it lasts, though, especially in the "you kiss while you're dancing" section. In the mid-Seventies, Maureen McGovern, who'd enjoyed success with two Oscar-winning disaster-movie theme songs (from The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno), revived the first and second Academy Award songs for a single. On the B-side "the McGovern Sisters" performed a multitracked swingin' "Lullaby Of Broadway", and on the A-side there was a "Continental" full of period charm. The single was a huge hit in Britain, though it seems to have been all but airbrushed out of the oldies vault. These days, Miss McGovern, a very technically accomplished singer, can be a bit overwrought for my tastes, and tends to make a meal of ballads that are already a wee bit too precious. That cute "Continental" shows a side of her I wish she hadn't chosen to mothball.

The song is a good song, as Cole and Sinatra well understood. But what it makes it a great movie song is the way it's used in the film - the way the entire energy of the picture seems to be working toward that explosive twenty minutes of plot, character, dialogue, singing, dancing, design, orchestration and photography that together celebrate all the possibilities of music in film. Fifty years later, it was all over. A "film song" was, if you got lucky, a hit record pasted on to the picture for promotional purposes. Exactly half a century after "The Continental", Phil Collins was nominated for an Academy Award for ''Against All Odds'', and, as the composer, lyricist and performer on the film's soundtrack, naturally assumed he'd be asked to sing it on Oscar night. The call never came. Larry Gelbart (of Tootsie and "M*A*S*H") was producing that year. As he wrote to Phil Collins' colleagues at Columbia Pictures, ''Thank you for your note regarding Phil Cooper, but I'm afraid the spots have already been filled.'' Phil Cooper? Some years ago, I congratulated Gelbart on that exquisite brush-off, but he seemed faintly embarrassed about it all. On the night, Phil Collins sat in the audience while the song was lip-synched by Ann Reinking, a great dancer but not as far as Collins was concerned much of a singer. Oh, well. By any measure, the song's connection with the movie was minimal: Collins is not in the film, but only heard on the soundtrack; and most of us recognize the number by its sub-heading ("Take A Look At Me Now"), so even his use of the film's title seems merely a marketing device.

Will the movie song ever come back? Unlikely, but who knows? In the meantime, we should note that "The Continental" owes its real immortality to its namecheck in a far better-known song - Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields' "I Won't Dance (Don't ask me)". Why?

When you dance you're charming and you're gentle
'Specially when you do 'The Continental'
But this feeling isn't purely mental
For heaven rest us
I'm not asbestos... 

A non-dance that shows up in two real songs. Not bad.