Gershwin's Somebody Loves Me

From a window in the tower - doubtless still a barracks - we hear a gramophone playing jazz music very faintly: Gershwin's Somebody Loves Me. Tender Is The Night - a film script by Malcolm Lowry

Lowry's film script of Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night opens in Antibes. As stated by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen, in their excellent The Cinema Of Malcolm Lowry, A Scholarly Edition of Lowry's Tender Is The Night(1990, Lowry's film script is less an adaption of the Fitzgerald book "than an extension of Lowry's own fiction."

As Rosemary Hoyt, one of the characters of the novel, wanders around Antibes, we are given by Lowry a cinematic journey around the town.

There have been many versions of Gershwin's song. Here is a delightful one:



Below are some postcards which compliment Lowry's descriptions of Antibes that you can browse as you listened to the above.


















I don't think Lowry ever visited the town. This is unusual in that most of Lowry's fiction is autobiographical though I suppose we have to realise he was adapting Fitzgerald's text.

Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue

Lowry wrote to his teenage friend Carol Brown:

A gramophone playing "Rhapsody In Blue" reminding me of you awfully. Letter To Carol Brown April/May 1926 Collected Letters Of Malcom Lowry Vol. 1

Malcolm is writing to Carol from the Leys School. We can only imagine that they may have shared moments together when the song was played on his trips back to the Wirral on school holidays. Lowry often uses music as others have done to capture moments in time. His novels and stories often contain musical references as if it was a soundtrack to the story on the screen of his mind.

We can see the above in Tender Is The Night film script which was written by Malc and his wife Margerie as they litter the script with music. One such piece of music occurs early on in the script:

From a window in the tower - doubtless still a barracks - we hear a gramophone playing jazz music faintly: Gershwin's Somebody Loves Me