Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

utgard14 Pleasant but fictional biopic of songwriter Cole Porter, starring Cary Grant and Alexis Smith. The two stars offer very bland performances. This is especially surprising for charismatic Grant. Monty Woolley, Eve Arden, Ginny Simms, and Jane Wyman liven things up in supporting parts. It's a beautiful looking movie, filmed in luscious Technicolor. Great Cole Porter songs are a plus. Cary Grant even sings a couple. Obviously as a biography of Cole Porter, it's hogwash. It does touch upon some of the major events of his life but the details are almost entirely fabricated. As a work of mostly fiction, it's entertaining enough. It goes on a little long, though. Watch it for the musical numbers, if nothing else.

grandpagbm What a great movie! I'm sure I enjoyed it as much as I did, at least partially, because I appreciate Cole Porter music. This is a movie about the life of Cole Porter, and Cary Grant (one of my favorite actors) is excellent in the lead role. There is a strong support cast, with terrific singing and dancing. Mary Martin plays herself with a great performance in a small role. The colors are brilliant in the sets and costumes. I see this production as an excellent example of the modern musical film. Porter's music is the outstanding highlight. Although the script is mostly fiction, not the true story of Porter's life, the film is outstanding. I expect to watch this movie fairly often.

Terrell-4 Night and Day is probably the worst of the reverential "biographies" of America's great theater composers which Hollywood cranked out in the Forties. Rodgers & Hart, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, the list goes on, were all smoothed out, glossed over, given awful dialogue and had to see their songs so over-produced at times it must have seemed that they were hearing the heavenly choir. Night and Day gives us a number of Cole Porter songs polished and massaged with the lush sound stage treatment. The movie also gives the songs pretentious orchestrations so foreign to Porter's style, plus bowdlerized and rewritten lyrics to insure little of Porter's naughtiness would survive to possibly offend middle America. Most surrealistically, we have Cary Grant as Cole Porter...and that is the kind of casting that makes the Hollywood studio system so wonderful to read about. In addition to being one of the great theater composers, Porter was short, enthusiastically gay, a bit pop-eyed and a terrible social snob. On the other hand, he was supposed to have had a great sense of humor, and reportedly was highly amused when Cary Grant was chosen to portray him. (Another odd bit of Hollywood casting was choosing Mickey Rooney to play Lorenz Hart in Words and Music.) One or two good biographies have been written about Porter. As a film biography, though, Night and Day is largely a work of hack Hollywood fiction. But don't we at least get a bunch of his songs? Sadly, the songs have been so over-produced, treated so respectfully and have been so sanitized, that watching the numbers often is just downright irritating. Porter, such a social snob and living the kind of high-maintenance life some might consider simply frivolous, is worth knowing because of his songs...and his songs are best enjoyed when they are performed with impudence and style. It's smart to remember that when he wrote... I love you / Hums the April breeze. I love you / Echo the hills. I love you / The golden dawn agreesAs once more she sees / Daffodils. It's spring again / And birds on the wing again / Start to sing again / The old melody. I love you, / That's the song of songs And it all belongs / To you and me. ...he wrote it to win a bet that he couldn't write a hit love song using mundane images. Porter won the bet and thoroughly enjoyed seeing what he consider a mediocre string of clichés become widely popular. If you enjoy detective work as well as Cole Porter songs, track down the CD's produced by Ben Bagley, the Cole Porter Revisited series of albums. I think Porter might have enjoyed them.

irajoelirajoel I remember seeing this silly bio. of the great Cole Porter on our small black and white TV when I was a kid and not liking it much. Now years later a pristine DVD of the film is now available and I still do not like it. Actually I hated it. Of course the no.1 reason for my disliking it is the total fantasy that Warner Bros. came up with as "the life of Cole Porter." The cast tries hard but everything is so wrong about this film that I sat there shaking my head. Maybe in 1946 movie audiences were more accepting of this kind of crap, but come on Cary Grant as Cole Porter?? Of course all the gay stuff hangs over this movie big time. Porter was gay, Grant was gay Monty Wooley was gay, and from what I've heard Alexis Smith was a closet Lesbian. They must have had a hoot making this one. Needless to say the period costumes, decor etc are all wrong and Porter's great music deserved better singers than Ginny Simms or Jane Wyman. The only nice moment for me was Mary Martin (another closet Lesbian) doing My Heart Belongs To Daddy. This movie really needed Ethel Merman (another bi lady) to give this 500pd Easter Egg some life. Unfortunately the more recent movie bio De-Lovely or De Lousy isn't much better. A shame because Porter was one of the great composers of the Broadway Stage.