Betty Comden (1915-2006)

With her co-lyricist and co-writer, Adolph Green who died in 2002, aged 87, Betty Comden, who died on November the 23^rd, wrote some of the most memorable shows and films of the mid twentieth century. In losing her, we have lost yet another of those very rare things – a lyricist who was effortlessly literate and could, by turns, be droll, subtle, brassy and high-spirited.  

When people think of Singing in the Rain they rarely think of Comden and Green, but it was they who that wrote the ingenious script that gave the film its impetus.

If people think of the stage version of On the Town(1944), they probably are think the powerfully energetic Leonard Bernstein score, in which he catches the ebullient spirit of New York, but fail to realise that that Comden and Green had provided Bernstein with lyrics that not only fitted the music but added an extra dimension.

Those who have seen the 1949 film starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra  film version of that show will probably remember the Comden and Green lyrics better because they were there hitched not to Bernstein’s music but, at producer Arthur Freed’s insistence, to music by Roger Edens. 

In 1953 they had big film hit with The Band Wagon, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Then in 1955 their screenplay for It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), the Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly directed musical satire which starred Kelly, Dan Dailey and Cyd Charrise, received an Oscar nomination – unusual for a musical – but lost out to William Ludwig and Sonya Levien who won for their screenplay for Interrupted Melody, the screen biography of the Austrailian singer Marjorie Lawrence.    

The Comden and Green partnership’s finest hour came with  Bells are Ringing (1956), a show which starred long time associate Judy Holliday and saw them write with Jule Stein and at least three songs that have now become standards, and examples of popular lyric-writing at its best. Just In Time, Long Before I Knew You and The Party’s Over are, as some would say the business.  “Now you must wake up/All dreams must end/Take off your makeup/The party’s over/It’s all over, my friend” don’t sound very poetic when read, but when sung the words express such longing and regret that it’s difficult not to be moved.  

In Comden’s obituary in The Guardian, Christopher Hawtree, speaking of Comden and Green, summed their relationship up this way

Their writing partnership made for something so strong that it was flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the most diverse composers; indeed, it was a helluva pen.

So it was; so it was.

Good question,

I rather like the question Jon Henley puts in his Guardian diary column today. 

No one, it occurs to us, has yet seen fit to ask the most obvious question to arise from the death of Alexander Litvinenko, namely is there not an urgent and compelling case for military intervention in (at the very least) Piccadilly and Mayfair, given that substantially more nuclear material has now been found in the hotels, sushi bars and office buildings of central London than the combined efforts of the UN weapons inspectors and coalition forces managed to uncover in the whole of Iraq? Just a thought. 

Of course there is no need to bring the benefits of democracy to those places either. Or is there?

Better educated soap characters. What next?

This item is to be found in the Further diary section of today’s Education Guardian.  

· The dear dotty Learning and Skills Council has finally flipped. The pressure of meeting those government targets has become too great. The quango is now trying to persuade imaginary people to enrol on courses. It has issued its daftest ever press release, calling on the writers of telly soap operas to get their characters better qualified. Many of the characters are “stuck in dead-end jobs with few prospects – such as street cleaners, market traders, or bar workers”, it observes. Among the culprits is Stacey Slater of Eastenders, who ought to quit her market stall and go to theFashion Retail Academy. Her continued presence in the market sets a bad example to young viewers, pronounces one quangocrat solemnly.

· Nothing better exposes the foolishness and hubris of the centralist planning mindset that dreamed up the LSC than this. The young people who tune into Eastenders do so because they want to be entertained. They do not want to be prodded by a quango bossyboots into doing some qualification or other. Of course, it would be possible to give all soap characters middle-management training, transferable skills, cheap suits and all the rest. How dull they would be and how quickly they would lose their audience.

Further comment would be superfluous.