The Way You Look Tonight Film Soundtrack

[Francesca Cruiz]

The Way You Look Tonight"

in the concert "An Evening with Nat King Cole" at the BBC TV Theatre, London, during the musician's visit to Britain in July 1963. Cole is accompanied by an augmented Ted Heath Orchestra. Featured personnel for the concert include Reunald Jones, trumpet; John Collins, guitar; Charles Harris, acoustic double bass; Leon Petties, drums with Ted Heath and The Cliff Adams Singers

Fields biographer Deborah Grace Winer quotes her subject on the qualities a good title should have: "'It has to be catchy and if possible contain some exiting new combination of familiar words used in a declarative sentence." Winer goes on to comment, "In fact, Fields titles generally do tend toward plain or slangy declarative statements (or fragments), rather than the poetically abstracted: 'I'm in the Mood for Love,' 'You Couldn't be Cuter,' 'If My Friends Could See Me Now,' 'Nobody Does It like Me.' The Hammerstein-Kern ballad was 'All the Things You Are'; the Fields-Kern ballad was specifically concerned with 'The Way You Look Tonight'" (Winer, p. 48).

Later in the biography, Winer adds to the contrast between the styles of Kern and Fields when she comments that despite the plain spoken title of "The Way You Look Tonight," the song's tune is a "lyrical, quintessentially Kern melody, with . . . fluid momentum and feel not unlike 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.'" Winer adds with regard to "The Way You Look Tonight" that it "is as romantic a ballad as they come, but unlike Otto Harback's lyric for 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' . . . which is filled with elevated language like 'So I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed,' the Fields lyric is . . . restrained and matter of fact"; and more generally, Winer concludes, "The Swing Time lyrics reject starry-eyed romanticism for smart, urbane, sarcasm tinged expressions." (Winer, p. 99, 102, 103).

Kern's biographer Gerald Bordman sees Kern's songs for Swing Time as parallel to his Princess Theater songs of two decades earlier in the sense that those songs announced his style for that period of his Broadway writing just as the Swing Time melodies "broadcast the nature of his compositions for Hollywood." This could be seen in the "immediacy of their appeal." Like the Princess songs, the subtleties were gone but remaining was Kern's "artistry" and his "grace" as well as his "unquenchable musical invention." (Bordman, p. 360)

Philip Furia, who plays down the song's "praise of eternal devotion to immutable beauty" suggested above, is much more interested in how Fields uses simplicity of language. This simplicity stands in contrast to while at the same time reinforcing "the elegant sensuousness of Kern's gracefully insistent melody." It is her "off-handed, snapshot compliment to just . . . 'the way you look tonight' along with its barely noticeable rhyme that do the trick:

Furthermore, Furia not only sees how Fields complements Kern's music but also how she writes to Astaire's ability to bring an "easy grace" to a song through her use of "the chattily resigned 'there is nothing for me but to . . . . ,' and the lightly sensuous 'so warm . . . so soft'" (Furia, Poets of Tin Pan Alley, p. 221 paper-bound Ed.).

In another place, Furia along with co-writer Michael Lasser extend this idea by calling "The Way You Look Tonight" Swing Time's "one oasis of romanticism . . . a limpid ballad," which although "infused with feeling" remains "restrained." This is managed through Fields' ability to combine different tones in one lyric. Her singer is not only straight out romantic but "wittily understated," "chatty" and "matter of fact" (Furia and Lasser, p. 136).

Click here to read the lyrics for "The Way You Look Tonight" as sung by Frank Sinatra

and arranged by Nelson Riddle (1964)

found on the albums: Academy Award Winners and Nothing But The Best

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