Night And Day (1946)

The life of composer Cole Porter (Cary Grant) from his days at Yale University and his journey to becoming one of Broadway's and popular music's great composers with some tragedy along the way. Directed by Michael Curtiz, this is all too typical of 1940s movie musical biographies (WORDS AND MUSIC, TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY etc.) in that it's so highly fabricated that it's pure fiction with very little accuracy to the composer's real life. Situations and characters are created that never happened in real life for so called "dramatic license" but they're merely a bunch of the usual cliches strung together. In 2004, a somewhat more accurate account of Porter's life was made with Kevin Kline as Porter called DE-LOVELY. But if you can swallow the Technicolor fantasy, you're rewarded with those glorious Cole Porter songs like I've Got You Under My Skin, Night And Day, In The Still Of The Night, My Heart Belongs To Daddy, You're The Top, Begin The Beguine and so many others. The large cast includes Jane Wyman, Mary Martin, Dorothy Malone, Alexis Smith, Monty Woolley, Eve Arden, Ginny Simms, Donald Woods and Selena Royle.