Words and Music (1948)

Peggy Lorgan McNeil: I don't think I quite understand.
Lorenz Hart: You will after you've known me ten or fifteen years.

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Lorenz Hart: Miserable? Me? I'm always happy!
Dorothy Feiner Rodgers: No one's always happy.
Lorenz Hart: Alright, so I'm slightly miserable

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Rodgers and Hart had been working on Broadway successfully since 1919 (their first collaborative production, "A Lonely Romeo" ran for an impressive 222 performances). This film, historically speaking, is wildly inaccurate. The innumerable anachronisms include clothes, cars, musical numbers are attributed incorrectly to various productions, an unmentioned 7-year age difference between Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, Hart's homosexuality is obviously not addressed (conflict seemingly changed to anxiety over his height), strange leaps in time (The Garbo poster from Camille is shown soon after their 1925 hit revue Garrick Gaieties. One of the main productions depicted is 1927's hit musical comedy "A Connecticut Yankee" that shows up on screen long after the Garbo poster. More oddly, Perry Como's character Eddie Anders incongruently shifts to Perry Como (!) in the last minutes of the film. Although entertaining, the film is so riddled with inaccuracies (even more so than the oft criticized - - but strangely similar - - Night and Day) that it should be considered completely fictional.
The vocals by Perry Como and Mel Tormé were not permitted to be included on the MGM soundtrack album. Mr. Como's record label, RCA Victor, issued a single with his commercial recordings of "The Blue Room" and "With a Song in My Heart." Mel, under contract to Capitol Records, waxed another rendition of "Blue Moon." On the Rhino CD, "Mel Tormé in Hollywood," his soundtrack version now is found.
In the marketplace, Judy Garland had two discs of the comically cynical "I Wish I Were in Love Again" - the first recorded at her final Decca session on November 15, 1947, a solo accompanied by the husband-and-wife piano duo, Eadie and Rack; Judy's second on MGM Records, her soundtrack duet with Mickey Rooney, prerecorded on May 28, 1948. Judy's Decca side can be compared to an alternate take on her CD box set from MCA, "The Complete Decca Masters (Plus)." The Rooney-Garland match-up shines on two CD releases: the soundtrack from Sony, along with a Rhino collection, "Romantic Duets From M-G-M Classics."
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