Johnny Mercer: The Dream's on Me, BBC Four | reviews, news & interviews
Johnny Mercer: The Dream's on Me, BBC Four
Johnny Mercer: The Dream's on Me, BBC Four
Arena and Clint Eastwood's superb evocation of the multi-talented songwriter
Sunday, 04 April 2010
Jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood, who co-produced this film with the BBC's Arena, clearly harbours a particular regard for songwriter, singer, impresario and record company mogul Johnny Mercer. When Eastwood made his film of John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was set in Mercer's home town of Savannah, Georgia and partly shot in Mercer House, built by Johnny's grandfather, the accompanying soundtrack was a newly recorded collection of some of Mercer's most celebrated songs.
Happily, where Midnight in the Garden... was, even in the most rose-tinted view, a grotesque miscalculation, The Dream's On Me was a rich and compelling documentary which swirled you through Mercer's eventful life while constructing alongside it a parallel history of what has become known as the Great American Songbook. Mercer was predominantly a lyricist, although he occasionally wrote music as well, and while he never became half of a household-name duo like George and Ira Gershwin or Rodgers and Hart, he collaborated with many luminaries of the era including Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Richard Whiting and Fred Astaire. Mercer himself reckoned his most successful partnership was with Harold Arlen. Since between them they created "One for my Baby", "Blues in the Night", "That Old Black Magic" and "Come Rain or Come Shine", posterity is inclined to agree with him.
It's in the nature of bio-docs like this to make everything look ridiculously easy, by dint of having to cram all the highlights into (in this case) 100 minutes. Even though we learned that Mercer had to scuffle around a bit to make ends meet after he stowed away on a steamer to get himself to New York as a teenager in 1928, it seemed that in no time at all he was getting a helpful leg up from Bing Crosby and being employed as a singer with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Before you knew it he'd scored a big hit by writing "Lazybones" with Hoagy Carmichael and was earning plaudits from Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. Within the blink of a clapper-board he was raising dust in Hollywood, writing "I'm Building Up to an Awful Let-Down" with Fred Astaire, recording duets with Bing, and banging out popular standards like "Hooray for Hollywood" and "Jeepers Creepers". While becoming a radio and TV star, he found time to launch Capitol Records, to which he signed mega-talents like Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and Stan Kenton while selling vast quantities of his own recordings. Of his four Oscar-winning songs, "Moon River" remains the most widely known.
All this polymathic activity was remarkable enough, and Mercer's multi-stranded career made even Simon Cowell look like a rather dim-witted boy lacking in ambition, but what gave the saga its particular piquancy was the intimate sense of Mercer's personality that emerged through the film's mix of tributes, reminiscences and interviews with the protagonist himself. In particular there were extended extracts from a splendid 1974 Omnibus interview with Humphrey Lyttelton in which Mercer proved to be the interviewee all talk-show hosts dream of. He discoursed with fluency and laconic wit about his music and the songwriter's art, acknowledging a lifelong debt to the lyric-writing guile of W.S. Gilbert (Sullivan's other half), while reflecting on the way he'd come to the songwriting industry as an outsider, being a Southerner rather than a New Yorker like the Gershwins or Irving Berlin. Hence his instinctive rapport with Hoagy Carmichael, who hailed from the unfashionable wilderness of Indiana and shared Mercer's nostalgic attachment to the simple pleasures of the rural life. Mercer's residual Southern gentility never left him, and once the royalties were rolling in he was able to fulfil the promise he'd made to his father to repay the debts incurred when the family fortune was wiped out in the Depression.
Laid-back as he was, Mercer spent decades in the showbiz fast lane, and paid the price in various ways. He turned ugly when he drank too much, which he apparently did quite often, but always sent apologetic flowers the following day. He was tormented by an irrational but long-lasting infatuation with Judy Garland, but had the willpower to stop it from ruining his marriage.
Eastwood permitted himself a few appearances in an auteur-ish capacity, during one of which he interviewed soundtrack composer John Williams. "Reading Mercer now tells us so much about who we were and where we were as a country and a people at the time," said Williams. "You can separate his writing out from the music and see something about our land." Perfectly expressed, I thought.
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