Goodbye to the real Doris Day
Producer and director Mark Cousins on the other side of the Hollywood golden girl
THAT PRIMROSE hair, the highlight in her eyes, that satin complexion, the honeyed vocals. Doris Day seemed to be the definition of Hollywood’s soft beauty and utopianism.
Such optimism had its downside, of course. It portrayed a mostly white, straight world (though Day doesn’t seem to have been wholly heterosexual) which looks dated now. Day’s films, such as On Moonlit Bay (1951), I’ll See You In My Dreams (1951), Calamity Jane (1953) and
Young At Heart (1954), seem like classic Eisenhower conformism; the Black Panthers and Jane Fonda killed all that, didn’t they, and with it Day’s world?
I wonder. When she died I tweeted that she meant as much to me growing up as Paul Weller or David Bowie. I wanted to compare her to men, angry, creative, androgynous men, because her films, like the music of Weller and Bowie, dealt in unconscious material. The emotions in her best movies threw that material up onto the silver screen like a volcano erupts lava.
Take Young Man With A Horn (1950), for example, which was directed by
Casablanca’s Michael Curtiz. It’s about obsession and self-destruction, superbly set in the world of jazz. Lauren Bacall plays a bisexual socialite. Day tries to hang on to the man she loves, a musician played by Kirk Douglas.
The pain of love is taken just as far in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Day is in Morocco. Her son is kidnapped. To help find him she must sing ‘Que Sera, Sera’. She doesn’t so much sing it as yell it. The scene is a masterpiece of camera placement, but at its centre is this conservatively dressed woman singing her heart out about unpredictability, about loss of control. It’s heartbreaking, an eruption.
Wilder still, and more tempestuous, is 1960’s Midnight Lace, which scared me a lot in my youth. Day plays an heiress who receives eerie death threats. Glossy and gothic, the film again seems to be about fear, its excess, its melodrama, the way it floods your brain. Day is in floods
of tears in it, but the fact that she doesn’t act in the Method style, she’s not got the realism of Brando or Anna Magnani, means that her terror isn’t really given a social context. It’s not realistic. It’s lusher than that, more velvet-like, more dreamlike.
This is the heart of Doris Day’s appeal, I think. Her worlds are dreamy like David Lynch’s worlds are dreamy. It’s really possible to imagine her in Lynch’s
Blue Velvet (and I’m tempted to cut scenes from Midnight Lace into that film).
In perhaps her most acclaimed performance, in Love Me Or Leave Me (1955), her character is assaulted by James Cagney’s (a strong pre-echo of Scorsese’s New York, New York). The pain in this remarkable film was more real than the romantic pain in other Day pictures, and so the critics liked it more. And again she flirted with social truths in
The Pajama Game (1957), in which she played a union organiser. This movie has some of her best numbers (the ‘There Once Was A Man’ duet is a delight).
But the point about Day was the trippy Americana, the suffering in abstract, stylised, sensual worlds. Her remarkable beauty bled out into her movies and almost defined their texture. She was a mood board, like Bowie was a mood board.