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Thoughts on music in movies, I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, by George Kaplan

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BEGUILING MELODIES #1: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love – Lyrics by
Dorothy Fielding, Music by Jimmy McHugh, as heard in Bringing Up Baby

Annex - Grant, Cary (Bringing Up Baby)_01

“It’s extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” Noel Coward’s Amanda
speaks those words in Private Lives and wouldn’t it be difficult or
even foolish to deny the truth of them? Although I, being modern
(don’t *scoff*, that is RUDE! Tsk, tsk.), feel that no music which
moves you in any way could be considered “cheap”. I think we’ve all
been watching a movie at some point and been whirled away by the use
of a song. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or evocative or just plain
exciting, we’ve all had it happen; some song just gets us and
we’re never quite the same afterward, the song becomes part of our
mental furniture, our imaginative landscape, our emotional memory.
(And sometimes a kooky tune will hook itself into our minds at the
most inopportune time and we won’t be able to get it out for days or
weeks, and worse we’ll start singing it! The Oompa Lumpa Song from
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or the Lullaby League/Lollipop
Guild song from The Wizard of Oz are two DEADLY ones for me!)

Annex - Hepburn, Katharine (Bringing Up Baby)_02

This is the first in a very occasional series of post about great
songs in great movies. As you can see above it’s I Can’t Give You
Anything But Love in Bringing Up Baby that is first up. Baby uses Love
in a very clever, very funny way. It isn’t a song used explicitly in a
romantic fashion, no, it’s deployed in what is, for a screwball
comedy, an appropriately screwy manner: Dorothy Fielding and Jimmy
McHugh’s beautiful sentimental song is used to “woo” and soothe a
leopard named Baby (it isn’t so effective against an untamed one, mind
you) who has – one might say – fallen “in love” with it! However, the
really clever aspect is that even as the song is used as background
to various nutty goings-on in contrast to how love songs are
ordinarily used in film it is also slyly and hilariously and in an
oddly manner accompanying the unlikely falling (sometimes literally)
in love of strait-laced professor David Huxley (Cary Grant) and whacko free
spirit Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn). It’s one of the most brilliant
things about a glitteringly brilliant picture but it wouldn’t work
anywhere near as well if the song wasn’t so wonderful. I Can’t Give
You Anything But Love has been part of me since I first saw the movie
just as has the movie itself. They are both, to quote another sublime
song: unforgettable. And as if to prove how fantastic Love is, just
take a listen to versions by artists such as Doris Day, Louis
Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald. Ms Fielding and Mr McHugh were made immortal
through their song.

Please feel free guys and dolls to mention some of your
unforgettable movie songs in the comments and perhaps tell us why they
caught you.

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