It is one of my favorite Valentine’s Day songs. I’m not certain if you kids will get all the references, but it’s still my gift to you.
Down With Love, with lyrics by “Yip” Harburg and music by Harold Arlen, was originally written for the Broadway anti-war musical Hooray For What! in 1937 especially to be performed by the great Kay Thompson. The song didn’t make it to opening night, but it was finally introduced by Thompson’s replacement, Vivian Vance (I Love Lucy’s Ethel) later in the run.
The song was a hit in 1940, recorded by Eddie Condon’s Orchestra. The song has been performed by many cool vocalists, including Judy Garland, Bobby Darin, Blossom Dearie, and Sutton Foster. It has taken its rightful place as a Pop and Jazz Standard. Barbra Streisand has a terrific version of Down With Love on The Second Barbra Streisand Album (1963), and she performed the song live on The Judy Garland Show. Garland’s version is featured in the breezy 2003 movie Down With Love, starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor.
It’s hard to improve on originals, but Peyton Reed’s wildly inventive Down With Love does the job with this homage of the Manhattan-set Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedies of the late 1950s-1960s. McGregor and Zellweger are up to the task with clever performances that reveal, with self-aware winks, the conventions that those earlier comedies and the realities that these conventions concealed. The sidekick in those Hudson/Day films was Tony Randall. InDown With Love, his neurotic style is brilliantly brought back by David Hyde Pierce, and Randall himself appears, in one of his final screen roles.
You sons of Adam, you daughters of Eve
The time has come to take, your love-torn hearts off your sleeve
Look about you, what do you see?
Love-sick, love-lorn, love-wrecked, love-worn, boo-malady
There’ll be no peace on Earth
Until this curse
Is wiped off from this love-mapped universe
Are we mice or are we men? Can’t you see the light?
Come you fellow victims lets unite!
Down with love, the flowers and rice and shoes
Down with love, the root of all midnight blues
Down with things that give you that well-known pain
Take that mood and wrap it in cellophane
Down with love, let’s liquidate all its friends
Moon and June and roses and rainbows ends
Down with songs that mourn about night and day
Down with love, just take it away, away
Take it away, take it away
Give it back to the birds and the bees and the Viennese
Down with eyes romantic and stupid
Down with signs, down with Cupid
Brother, let’s stuff that dove
Down with love
Down with love
Down with love
Down with love
Down, down, down with love
