I Should Care

Music by Axel Stordahl & Paul Weston, lyrics by Sammy Cahn, 1944

Featured in Thrill of A Romance 

If yer old enough to remember Esther Williams, then yer older’n me.

Esther was a competitive swimming champion, born in 1921, who found a career in the 1940’s and 50’s making “AquaMusicals”, in which she’d actually perform her own “stunts”.

This had a downside. 

During the filming of Million Dollar Mermaid, in 1952, she broke her neck in a 115 foot dive! This put her in a body cast for seven months and led to some lifelong health problems.

Nevertheless, she lived…to marry four times and die in her sleep at ninety-one years of age!

Thrill of A Romance is a terrible movie (in which Esther, in the role of “Cynthia” is sweet enough to make Shirley Temple seem wanton by contrast) but fascinating in that it’s a vivid display of American upper-middle class “values” (and aspirations) in the closing days of World War II.

It “checks every box” of racism and male chauvinism. It does have a plot, but I’ll spare you.

The film premiered on May 23^rd, 1945. [Victory In Europe Day (V-E Day) was May 8^th, 1945.]

FDR’s HIGH blood pressure (systolic > 235 ) had finished him off on April 12^th;

Adolph Hitler had poisoned himself (and his “bride”) on April 30^th.

It was a scary time. The Pacific War was still raging…even as the Allies took the upper hand.

Few in the general public knew that these were to be the last days before “The Dawn of The Atomic Age”.

To escape from gory realities…and before television…people eagerly paid (movie tickets were well under $1 in 1945) for such treacle as was generously supplied by Esther and Van Johnson (who, like Esther, lived into his nineties) in this (at the time) popular movie [which also features Tommy Dorsey (a multi-talented yet ill-tempered man who drank himself to death at age fifty-one) as well as his young daughter, Susan, who displays prodigious virtuosity on the piano]. There’s also a pompous operatic tenor, Lauritz Melchior. 

I Should Care is not an integral part OF the film and in fact, was cut from the final release, despite its brilliant rendition by the Dorsey Orchestra with the legendary Clark Sisters.

With its wide-open vocal lines and careful melody, it’s catnip for singers and a favorite of improvisational keyboardists such as Thelonius Monk and Herbie Hancock. 

I believe that the tune’s (unique) appeal springs from its two six-minor “interludes” (“strangely enough…” and “maybe I won’t…”), along with its mysterious lyrics…which are SO out of step with its childish eight-bar intro (“I know I should…”).

This recording was created using FarPlay:

 Charlie Hickox, Piano

 Audio of the faithfully-transcribed original published sheet music:

Bb: