Torch Song in reverse

I noticed that Torch Song is on the TCM schedule, tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM. Not too long ago, I watched a different movie that reminded me of Torch Song. That one is called Night Song and, not having blogged about it before, now would be a good time to do so.

Merle Oberon plays Cathy Mallory, an unmarried socialite living in San Francisco with her aunt, Miss Willey (Ethel Barrymore) and who is a patron of the arts. She and some of her friends go to the symphony, and after that they go to a little hole-in-the-wall bar off a side street that has a jazz combo playing. The combo has a pianist, Dan Evans (Dana Andrews), and Cathy thinks he's pretty good.

Cathy goes over to the piano to chat up Dan, but he reveals that he's blind, and rather snottily bitter about it too, spurning any advances because after all, who's really going to love a blind guy? They're just going to pity him. Dan's best friend Chick (Hoagy Carmichael) would like to see Dan get better, and go back to working on that concerto that he was composing before he went blind, but who knows if that's going to happen?

So Cathy comes up with a daft idea. Perhaps Chick could arrange for Dan to be somewhere that Cathy could bump into him, like at the beach. Only this time, Cathy is going to pretend to be blind and not well-to-do, so that Dan won't think this new woman he's just met is taking pity on him. Now, of course, the obvious question is what's going to happen when Dan finds out that Cathy is in fact fully sighted. I'd think he'd hate her for lying to him and treating him as the butt of some sort of sick joke.

At any rate, Dan doesn't figure out that this is rich and sighted Cathy Mallory, and becomes friends with the woman he thinks is blind, her aunt in tow because she supposedly needs a sighted companion, too. Cathy hears the concerto and thinks it's good and that Dan should keep working on it. She also learns that this is one of those forms of blindness that might be curable, but it's going to need $5,000 (a fairly substantial sum back in the late 1940s) and a trip east for the operation to do so.

Ah, but Cathy has a solution for that. She has the money to set up a contest to commission a new concerto, with a grand prize of... $5,000! Oh, and Cathy most definitely isn't in any way going to influence the judging to make certain that Dan's concerto wins, no sirree.

So of course we know that Dan is going to win the contest, and the prize also includes the great pianist Artur Rubinstein (a real concert pianist back in the day, playing himself) is going to perform the concerto... in New York in a few months' time, those few months being more than enough time for Dan to go to New York too and get that operation. Of course, once Dan regains his sight, he's not so sure he wants to see the "blind" Cathy any more since he doesn't want her to think he's pitying her. "Sighted" Cathy comes to New York....

Oh boy is the plot to Night Song ridiculous. The acting is good enough, but dammit if all those plot holes about the characters' motivation don't stay in the front of my mind throughout the movie. Fans of classical music will probably enjoy the music, although of course it really pops up at the end so you have to sit through a good 80 minutes or so before you get to it.

Night Song was originally released by RKO, so unsurprisingly it has received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.