MovieChat Forums > Words and Music (1948) Discussion > Poor Larry Hart

Poor Larry Hart

posted 13 years ago by RashomonLaStrada
5 replies | jump to latest

So the 1940s Hollywood version of someone being gay is that he was rejected by a woman who broke his heart and then he wandered around looking for love (from women). But then again with the casting of Drake and Rooney nobody in the audience would have any notion that Rogers and Hart were Jewish.

Protecting the Box Office (or record sales or whatever) has always meant pandering to the smallest minds.

"The good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is why it is called Fiction."

[–] mitchflorida 13 years ago

Well, they can remake this movie, with all the gritty real details. And it won't be one-tenth as good as this was.

The people making movies nowadays don't have the talent or the class to do it.

I can picture it now, Kevin Spacey in the lead .

[–] RashomonLaStrada 13 years ago

No way Kevin Spacey...

Elijah Wood -- because they would stick with the fact that Larry Hart was unusually short.

Also, while I agree with you that the golden age of musicals has passed and that a lot of them were magical, Words and Music was never one of the great musicals.

"The good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is why it is called Fiction."

[–] FANatic-10 9 years ago

They did a great job with the musical numbers, they are outstanding. But the biography portion is so highly fictionalized, nothing more than standard Hollywood hokum, that it does hurt the film. I realize they could not be open about Hart's homosexuality, but did they have to make the ending so outrageously far-fetched and manipulative, with Rooney crawling out of his death bed, etc.? It was silly, but inoffensive until that point, which just defied belief. Still, worth seeing for the great talent and the wonderful Rogers & Hart songs. One more question: why have Perry Como play a fictional character, then introduce him at the ending benefit concert as Perry Como? Huh?

[–] Doghouse-6 9 years ago

...did they have to make the ending so outrageously far-fetched and manipulative, with Rooney crawling out of his death bed, etc.?

Although liberties were taken with both sequence and circumstances to lend more sympathy to Hart, the actual details are really not all that far off.

Multiple biographical sources report that Hart had shown up at the "Connecticut Yankee" opening ill and drunk, becoming so disruptive that he had to be removed from the theater. Hart's brother and sister-in-law managed to get him back to their home and to bed, but early the next morning discovered that Hart had already vanished into the night after they retired. He was later found by a friend, sitting outside an Eighth Avenue bar in the November cold, and rushed to a Manhattan hospital, where he died.

Pretty much the equal of the film's portrayal for pathos, but incompatible with the sentiment and reverence expected from a musical in squeaky-clean Mayerland.

Poe! You are...avenged!

[–] 9 years ago

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