Posted on 05/02/2005 3:41:32 PM PDT by quidnunc
It's the little things in the paper that drive you nuts. I don't mind The Telegraph being a broad church when it comes to opinions on peripheral matters like Iraq, the European Union or the appropriate degree of tepid enthusiasm for the thin gruel of the Tory manifesto.
But I made the mistake of reading Thursday's obituary of Robert Farnon on a plane and the following sentence caused my mouthful of coffee to explode over the guy in front of me and set his hair plugs alight: "He also did some suitably syrupy arrangements for the crooners Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne and Vera Lynn."
Good grief. There's nothing "syrupy" about Farnon's arrangements for Sinatra. If you listen to his work on Sinatra Sings Great Songs From Great Britain, the guitar coda on "Garden in the Rain" and the trumpet obligato on "If I Had You" are worth the price of admission alone.
I felt rather depressed at the thought that "syrupy" should be my paper's final judgment on the greatest Canadian orchestrator of popular music ever, especially when you consider that "Now is the Hour" (the "Maori farewell song") was co-written by Clement Scott, the Telegraph's drama critic from 1872 to 1899.
It remains the only song by a Telegraph journalist ever recorded by Sinatra, at least until the lost tapes of Frank Sinatra Sings the Boris Johnson Songbook are discovered.
So I dusted off the Great Songs From Great Britain CD and was reassured to find the Farnon arrangements as ravishing as I remembered them. The key line is from "Garden in the Rain": "a touch of colour 'neath skies of grey." That's what Farnon's orchestrations brought to even the dullest material, like "We'll Meet Again", whose stiff-upper-lip sexless stoicism Sinatra can't get his head around at all.
-snip-
Farnon's daughter was Charmaine Carr who played Lisel in the film of 'The Sound of Music'.
She's just one of the few of my favorite things.
And she was kinda cute.
(steely)
"We'll Meet Again" was ironic closing theme song to the movie "Dr. Strangelove".
Where's the Vera Lynn for our war?
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 03/05/2005)It's the little things in the paper that drive you nuts. I don't mind The Telegraph being a broad church when it comes to opinions on peripheral matters like Iraq, the European Union or the appropriate degree of tepid enthusiasm for the thin gruel of the Tory manifesto.
But I made the mistake of reading Thursday's obituary of Robert Farnon on a plane and the following sentence caused my mouthful of coffee to explode over the guy in front of me and set his hair plugs alight: "He also did some suitably syrupy arrangements for the crooners Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne and Vera Lynn."
Good grief. There's nothing "syrupy" about Farnon's arrangements for Sinatra. If you listen to his work on Sinatra Sings Great Songs From Great Britain, the guitar coda on "Garden in the Rain" and the trumpet obligato on "If I Had You" are worth the price of admission alone.
I felt rather depressed at the thought that "syrupy" should be my paper's final judgment on the greatest Canadian orchestrator of popular music ever, especially when you consider that "Now is the Hour" (the "Maori farewell song") was co-written by Clement Scott, the Telegraph's drama critic from 1872 to 1899.
It remains the only song by a Telegraph journalist ever recorded by Sinatra, at least until the lost tapes of Frank Sinatra Sings the Boris Johnson Songbook are discovered.
So I dusted off the Great Songs From Great Britain CD and was reassured to find the Farnon arrangements as ravishing as I remembered them. The key line is from "Garden in the Rain": "a touch of colour 'neath skies of grey." That's what Farnon's orchestrations brought to even the dullest material, like "We'll Meet Again", whose stiff-upper-lip sexless stoicism Sinatra can't get his head around at all.
We'll be hearing "We'll Meet Again" rather a lot this VE anniversary week. Looking back at that Sinatra/Farnon album, you're struck by how - in 1962 - so many of the numbers they chose are wartime songs, either from the Second War - "We'll Gather Lilacs" - or the First - "Roses of Picardy".
I see Graham Norton's Strictly Dance Fever on the BBC this weekend is doing an all-VE Day wartime palais de danse commemorative special - lots of Vera Lynn and Ann Shelton.
One of the reasons why it's effortlessly easy to "commemorate" the Second World War is that popular culture had signed up for the duration. It was the war that brought Robert Farnon to Britain, to lead the Allied Expeditionary Force's Canadian band, as Glenn Miller and George Melachrino led the American and British bands.
By contrast, nearly four years after September 11, I can't think of any big pop star in uniform except Madonna, who on her world tour last year cavorted in a blue burqa and, when she disrobed, as she inevitably does, was revealed to be wearing a US army uniform underneath.
This was in order to make the highly original point that the Taliban and the Bush Administration are both equally oppressive. Well, I never. The herd mentality of celebrity "dissent". Would it kill 'em once in a while to dissent from their dissent and try something other than the stultifying orthodoxy of Hollywood cardboard courage?
Other than that, popular culture has pretty much skipped the Vera Lynn phase and cut straight to Basil Fawlty: don't mention the war. They'd rather talk about anything other than Islamic terrorism. The Sean Penn thriller, The Interpreter, was originally about Muslim terrorists blowing up a bus in New York. So, naturally, Hollywood called rewrite. Now the bus gets blown up by African terrorists from the little-known republic of Matobo. "We didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way," said Kevin Misher, the producer.
But being so perversely "non-political" is itself a political act. If there were a dozen movies in which Tom Cruise kicked al-Qa'eda butt across the Hindu Kush, it would be reasonable to say, "Hey, we'd rather deal with Matoban terrorism for a change."
But, when every movie goes out of its way to avoid being "encumbered", it starts to look like a pathology. Whenever some hapless studio exec finds he's accidentally optioned a property that happens to have Islamist terrorists in it, the first thing he does is change the enemy. Thus, the baddies in Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears were de-Islamicised and transformed into German neo-Nazis, a very pressing threat to America in 2005.
Imagine it's 1943, you're at a Warner Bros script meeting about Casablanca, and Jack Warner says: "I like it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans? How about if we re-set it in Massachusetts and make them sinister British neo-Redcoats?"
And, if you're stuck with a subject where it's hard to switch the Muslims to neo-Nazis - like, say, the Crusades - best to use it as an opportunity to explore our present blundering stupidity in the context of our long tradition of blundering stupidity - which is the short review of Sir Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven.
Ask them to make a post-9/11 thriller in which Americans are the good guys and the enemy is, well, the enemy, and Celine Dion sings the big theme song about how she'll miss feeling his throbbing heart beating against hers all night long but she knows he's going off to do the right thing and they'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when - and the studios'd tell you there's no audience for it.
Just like they told Mel Gibson he'd lose his shirt on The Passion of the Christ. The disconnect between the headlines and the culture these last four years is not about economics, it's about a loss of civilisational confidence.
Which is a big problem, because the smarter Islamists have figured out that, while they can never win on the battlefield, there's a sporting chance they can drag things out long enough until Western civilisation collapses through sheer self-loathing.
Enjoy Vera Lynn this weekend, but spare a thought for our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at ceremonies 60 years from now. Where's their soundtrack?
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Its all being sung by Country performers! Maybe not as glamourous, but just as effective to here Alan Jackson, or Charlie Daniels.
The original ending of Dr. Strangelove was a food fight in the War Room. Look closely at some scenes in the War Room - there's a huge buffet table loaded with food.
(Got this from an interview of George C. Scott on the David Susskind TV show, shortly after the film came out.)
I disagree with this completely. Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" isn't sexless at all. To me it has always implied the moment between that last encounter and the departure of her Tommy on the troop train. Lynn's voice is very emotional, while still having that stoic British determination.
I remember Farnon's own composition, "Gateway To The West", was used as one of the musical themes on the "Omnibus" TV show of the '50s. I liked his "syrupy" stuff even as a little kid.
-PJ
The most fundamentally romantic and bittersweet song of the European theater, though, isn't "We'll Meet Again."
It's "Lili Marlene." Talk about heart wrenching! Each combatant nation had its version, and I have an MP3 of a medley: first Marlene Dietrich performs the German version, then Vera Lynn in English.
I think I'll give it a listen right now.
We'll meet again,
Don't know where,
Don't know when,
But I know
We'll meet again
Some sunny day.Keep smiling through
Just like you
Always do
Till the blue skies
Drive the dark clouds
Far away.Vera Lynn,
the 'Forces Sweetheart'Her most famous song must be "We'll meet again", which was written by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles in 1939 and sung in the movie of the same name, in which Vera starred in 1942. She first sang the song in 1939 while touring with the Ambrose Orchestra...
We'll meet again,
Don't know where,
Don't know when,
But I know
We'll meet again
Some sunny day.
Keep smilin' through
Just like you
Always do
Till the blue skies
Drive the dark clouds
Far away.
So will you please say hello
To the folks that I know;
Tell them I won't be long.
They'll be happy to know
That as you saw me go
I was singing this song.
We'll meet again,
Don't know where,
Don't know when,
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day.
Vera's rendition of Lili Marlene.
http://switchboard.real.com/player/email.html?PV=6.0.12&&title=veralynn&link=http%3A%2F%2Feri.ca%2Frefer%2Fveralynn.MP3
Is that the Strangelove version with the male chorus?
Not in my opinion, it's, "Yours 'til the Stars lose their glory". When I was a kid she was always referred to as, "The Sweetheart of the forces".
I don't know that one. It's WWII I'm presuming?
There'll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.There'll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow, when the world is free.
The shepherd will tend his sheep,
The valley will bloom again
And Jimmy will go to sleep,
In his own little room again.There'll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
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