Hollywood To Tehran To Tokyo: The Journey Of "Like Someone In Love"

Tadashi Okuno and Rin Takanishi (in mir­ror), Like Someone In Love, 2014, dir­ec­ted by Abbas Kiarostami

Songs are a form of storytelling, so it stands to reas­on that most great or even good songs have at-least-good stor­ies attached to them. One of the most pop­u­lar songs by com­poser Jimmy Van Heusen and lyr­i­cist Johnny Burke, was, for instance, inspired by an argu­ment that the song­writ­ing team over­heard their friend and col­lab­or­at­or Bing Crosby hav­ing with his first son Gary.

According to Van Heusen bio­graph­er Christopher Coppula, Burke and Van Heusen were din­ing at Crosby’s home; Gary, who was about ten at the time, was express­ing dis­sat­is­fac­tion with hav­ing to go to school. The eld­er Crosby upbraided him, say­ing, “So you want to be a mule, be a mule.” Burke was thun­der­struck. He and Van Heusen had been stuck for quite a while on their latest assign­ment, writ­ing songs for an upcom­ing Crosby pic­ture, Going My Way, dir­ec­ted by Leo McCarey. McCarey had instruc­ted the duo to con­coct a pop song ver­sion of the Ten Commandments, wis­dom that Crosby’s priest char­ac­ter could infec­tiously impart to his young charges at the church’s school. “So you want to be a mule, be a mule” was not exactly “thou shalt not,” but it flipped a switch for Burke, and “Swinging On A Star” was born.

There’s no such lore sur­round­ing “Like Someone In Love,” the beau­ti­ful bal­lad by Van Heusen and Burke that deb­uted in 1944, the same year as “Swinging On A Star.” In the midst of one of their busiest years, the team com­posed it, and a couple of oth­er songs, for an RKO peri­od com­edy called Belle of the Yukon. An ami­able trifle dir­ec­ted by vet­er­an William Seiler, Belle stars Randolph Scott and Gypsy Rose Lee as a couple of quasi-grifters in the late-19^th-cen­tury Great White North. The juven­ile romantic leads are William Marshall as Steve, a new-in-town piano play­er, and radio dis­cov­ery Dinah Shore as Lettie, daugh­ter of a saloon own­er. About 22 minutes into the pic­ture, Steve is tinker­ing with a tune at the piano and Lettie comes down the stairs; Steve says he’s been work­ing on a song, and he plays the head of “Like Someone In Love.” Lettie says “It’s lovely,” and Steve says “Why don’t you try it?” She picks up the sheet music and starts singing. Two verses and two refrains later, you have a new addi­tion to The Great American Songbook.

A con­fec­tion in appeal­ing Technicolor, Belle is one of those movies whose nar­rat­ive evan­esces even as you’re watch­ing it; it must have been some­thing of a ton­ic to U.S. audi­ences in the wan­ing but still uncer­tain days of late World War II. It says noth­ing dis­hon­or­able about the great Randolph Scott to note that he more or less sleep­walks through his role; the part of “Honest John Calhoun” demands noth­ing more. If you’ve ever wondered why bur­lesque great Gypsy Rose Lee nev­er had the film career of her sis­ter June Havoc, Belle will answer all your ques­tions in that depart­ment. Shore is the most enga­ging pres­ence in the film. Her fea­tures are not those of what was con­sidered a clas­sic beauty at the time, but she’s ter­rific­ally attract­ive and pro­jects a per­son­al­ity both earn­est and sly. And she sings like a bird; as the per­former who gave birth to “Like Someone In Love,” she deliv­ers some­thing abso­lutely beau­ti­ful. Oddly enough, though, the Van Heusen/Burke song from Belle that made a big­ger splash, ini­tially, was the now largely for­got­ten (but still delight­ful) “Sleigh Ride In July,” which earned the duo an Oscar nom­in­a­tion for 1945. (Belle was released on December 27, 1944, which appar­ently pushed it ahead for Academy con­sid­er­a­tion at the time.) “Like Someone In Love” became a hit in spring of 1945 via its record­ing by Bing Crosby.

Burke and Van Heusen were among Crosby’s favor­ite song­writers; they of course wrote the tunes for Crosby and Bob Hope’s Road pic­tures. In the final Road pic­ture, The Road To Hong Kong, made in 1962, after the Burke/Van Heusen team dis­solved, Hope’s char­ac­ter was named Chester Babcock—which had been Van Heusen’s birth name. (The one-time bor­dello piano play­er was known for, among many oth­er things, mak­ing elab­or­ately hil­ari­ous rib­ald sport of that birth name.) For his stage name, the com­poser “chose Van Heusen, the name of a fam­ous line of men’s shirts, because he felt it was a name asso­ci­ated with old money, eleg­ance and class,” David Lehman notes in his book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. “What he did­n’t real­ize was that the Van Heusen line was the cre­ation of a German-Jewish ped­dler named Israel Phillips.”

Crosby’s rendi­tion relo­cated the song at the cross­roads of pop and jazz, as the crooner’s singing ten­ded to do. About a dozen years later—on August 16, 1957, to be exact—the young ten­or sax­o­phon­ist John Coltrane, with bassist Earl May and drum­mer Art Taylor, recor­ded a ver­sion of the tune at Rudy Van Gelder’s stu­dio in Hackensack, New Jersey. There’s a pecu­li­ar notion among some young­er folks about jazz musi­cians like Coltrane and Miles Davis—that they made their record­ings of pop and music­al theat­er songs out of some mis­sion to apply a ven­eer of “hip­ness” to white bread or just plain white music. At its most extreme, this pre­sump­tion pos­its that Coltrane cut his revolu­tion­ary ver­sion of “My Favorite Things” mainly to troll Sound of Music fans. This is mis­taken think­ing. What attrac­ted Davis, Coltrane, Charles Mingus (his play­ful retitling of “All the Things You Are” not­with­stand­ing) and so many oth­er great musi­cians to these songs was a music­al deft­ness that inter­twined beguil­ing melody with a har­mon­ic com­plex­ity that opened up all man­ner of impro­visa­tion­al doors. Van Heusen bio­graph­er Coppula writes of “Like Someone In Love:” “This tune, like ‘Darn That Dream,’ has enjoyed broad pop/jazz cros­sov­er pop­ular­ity, with record­ing by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Stan Kenton, Coleman Hawkins, and Stan Getz (among many oth­ers). The appeal to jazz artists is explained in part by the lin­ear struc­ture of Van Heusen’s melody, per­mit­ting the artist to util­ize all vari­ety of har­mon­ies in a chro­mat­ic bass line. It offers a suit­able vehicle for the artist to express his cre­ativ­ity in fash­ion­ing har­mon­ies while provid­ing an inter­est­ing enough melody in its own right.” Indeed, Coltrane’s rendi­tion of the song begins with the sax­o­phon­ist play­ing alone, as if in mid-solo, extra­pol­at­ing on a phrase from the verse in a near-keening cry, and flut­ter­ing in that register for a couple of bars before the bass and drums come in and Coltrane states the theme itself.

Ella Fitzgerald recor­ded her ver­sion two months later, October 15, 1957, in Los Angeles. She and/or pro­du­cer Norman Granz also titled the attend­ant album Like Someone In Love. The LP was made after one of her grand­est mas­ter­pieces, the still-amazing four-LP Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Duke Ellington Songbook. This album is less them­at­ic­ally ambi­tions, but Fitzgerald’s singing is no less exact­ing or eleg­ant than it ever was in this peri­od. Burke and Van Heusen appear through­out, albeit in dif­fer­ing per­muta­tions; “I Thought About You,” by Van Heusen with lyr­ics by Johnny Mercer is here, as is “What’s New,” lyr­ics by Burke, music by Bob Haggart. “Like Someone In Love” is the sole Burke/Van Heusen tune. The orches­tral arrange­ment by Frank De Vol is more Hollywood sound stage than Cotton Club or any oth­er swinging loc­ale; the impec­cably taste­ful De Vol nev­er had the swinging brash­ness of a Nelson Riddle or the Debussy lean­ings of early Gordon Jenkins but he gets the song…as Ella, of course, also does. She begins the song with a bit of a fake-out after the string intro, singing the open­ing word “Lately” as if to expli­citly rhyme it with “stately.” But the very slight hic­cup she makes at “myself” lets her com­pletely melt into “out gaz­ing at stars” and from that point on the whole thing’s like a beau­ti­ful dream. Her ver­sion is still, argu­ably, the defin­it­ive vocalization.

“Nowadays we don’t like watch­ing an old man, espe­cially an old man in love,” the Iranian film dir­ect­or Abba Kiarostami says in a making-of doc­u­ment­ary included on the Criterion Collection edi­tion of his 2012 fea­ture Like Someone In Love, the pic­ture that would be his last. It was the second that he shot out­side of his nat­ive coun­try, a French/Japanese co-production. It tells a neces­sar­ily incom­plete story of an eld­erly aca­dem­ic, a young pros­ti­tute he awk­wardly pro­cures for an even­ing, and the dis­turbed, pos­sess­ive boy­friend of the pros­ti­tute, who the pro­fess­or meets even more awk­wardly on the day fol­low­ing the night of his assig­na­tion. Kiarostami, as seen in pho­to­graphs, exuded the kind of cool one asso­ci­ates with cer­tain cine­mat­ic mas­ters, aided in no small part by his ever-present sunglasses. But in inter­views, it’s clear that the char­ac­ter with whom he most iden­ti­fied in this film is the decidedly not-chill Takeshi Watanabe (Tadashi Okuno, play­ing his first lead in his early eighties after, accord­ing to Kiarostami, a career of bit roles and extra work), the wid­owed pro­fess­or who is, among many oth­er things, hugely clue­less about sex work­ers, even a sex work­er as ingenu­ous as Rin Takanashi’s Akiko. “When I star­ted search­ing for music for the moment the girl enters the old man’s apart­ment,” Kiarostami told Dennis Lim in an inter­view for the New York Times in 2012, “it came nat­ur­ally that as someone from my gen­er­a­tion, he would listen to jazz. The first album I took off my shelf was Ella Fitzgerald and I just bumped into this song, ‘Like Someone in Love,’” In pre-revolutionary Iran, Western music was widely known, and the artist­ic cognoscenti of Tehran was well-versed in jazz, as was the case in oth­er cos­mo­pol­it­an cen­ters through­out the world. Kiarostami scored his first short film, 1970’s Bread and Alley, with a Paul Desmond ver­sion of the Beatles tune “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.”

Kiarostami (who pre­sum­ably held on to his jazz record col­lec­tion after the revolu­tion, whose régime’s anim­us to all things Western very def­in­itely exten­ded to music) went on to explain to Lim that he also thought that song title would be a bet­ter title for the film itself; in script form the movie was called The End. “The phrase itself sounds good to me too,” the dir­ect­or con­tin­ued in his con­ver­sa­tion with Lim. “There is noth­ing determ­ined and defin­it­ive about love. It’s bet­ter to say that we are like someone in love rather than assert­ing that we are in love. Death or birth are defin­it­ive; love is noth­ing but an illu­sion. We have in this film four people who are like some people in love.”

Akiko arrives at Takeshi’s apart­ment in a con­fused rush, and doesn’t even take off her coat after he invites her to have a seat in the liv­ing room of his cozy, book-lined apart­ment. After Takeshi tries to make small talk with Akiko—their con­ver­sa­tion, while ami­able, is also nearly mor­ti­fy­ingly awkward—she hops into his bed­room. A Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra rendi­tion of “Solitude” plays softly on Takeshi’s ste­reo. Takeshi fol­lows Akiko into the bed­room, seats him­self on a chair facing the bed, and we see a soft-focus reflec­tion of Akiko in the dress­er mir­ror next to the chair. Takeshi tries to lure her out of bed…with the prom­ise of a soup he’s cooked, a spe­cialty of her region (he knows where she’s from because her pimp, a former stu­dent of his, told him). While we can’t see Akiko’s face, we can prac­tic­ally see her wrink­ling her nose as she tells him, “I’ll hate that. My Gran made it all the time when we were little.”

He’s a little crest­fal­len; he gets up and goes back into his study/dining room. He’s been get­ting vex­ing business-related phone calls all even­ing, so he unplugs his desk phone. He looks out his front win­dow. Some inter­est­ing stuff hap­pens with the sound mix­ing; the noise form the street out­side, includ­ing a honk­ing horn, is fore­groun­ded, and the strains of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Like Someone In Love” almost seep in to the audio track, very nearly inaud­ible at first. As Takeshi putters around, the song gets louder, and more dis­tinct, but it nev­er reaches what one might call an aggress­ive or even def­in­ite volume. Nevertheless, Takeshi turns down the volume on his amp­li­fi­er. And the phone rings again—the land­line in the bed­room is still plugged in. Takeshi, con­cerned with let­ting Akiko sleep, goes into the bed­room and dis­ables the phone. A clock on a shelf above the bed indic­ates that it’s 11:30 at night. Who’s call­ing at this hour?

Takeshi leaves the room after tuck­ing Akiko in, so we can assume they did not sleep togeth­er, but he still looks pretty pleased with him­self as he drives her around the next morn­ing (tak­ing her to her col­lege, where she has an exam), smil­ing as he watches her put her grey leg­gings on. Soon enough Akiko’s sweaty, strung-out look­ing boy­friend Noriaki (Ryô Kase) enters the pic­ture, and every­body acts with spec­tac­u­larly bad judg­ment. “When you know you may be lied to, it’s best not to ask ques­tions,” Takeshi says to Noriaki even as he sort-of mas­quer­ades as Akiko’s grand­fath­er. The flimsy webs of deceit escal­ate a situ­ation that ought nev­er have come into being in the first place, and when Akiko expresses worry, Takeshi sings “Que Sera Sera” to her, in Japanese trans­la­tion, and eli­cits one of her final (slight, tent­at­ive, and, hell yes, awk­ward) smiles in the movie.

The movie ends in Takeshi’s apart­ment, with a wounded, trau­mat­ized Akiko sit­ting in his liv­ing room and Takeshi scram­bling around, with Noriaki raging out­side, let­ting them know that he knows that they are (still) lying: “Don’t pre­tend you can’t hear me.” Things are going from bad to worse both on screen and on the soundtrack. As Noriaki yells, the microwave in which Takeshi was warm­ing milk for Akiko beeps to sig­nal the end of its heat­ing cycle, and then con­tin­ues its peri­od­ic remind­er beep. A rock comes through the front win­dow, and the shat­ter­ing of glass is ter­ribly dis­turb­ing, as is Takeshi’s dis­ap­pear­ance from the frame. And at this time the Fitzgerald record­ing of “Like Someone In Love” comes on again, louder than it was the first time it was heard. “Lately I find myself,” Fitzgerald sings, as all three char­ac­ters in the scene seem as lost as they’ve ever been. Is the music die­get­ic or extra-diegetic? While it’s not likely that the ste­reo has some­how turned itself back on, there’s so much mad­ness going on that this is not entirely out­side the realm of nar­rat­ive prob­ab­il­ity. The cred­its begin to go up, and the screen goes black, and soon Fitzgerald sings “some­times the things I do astound me.”

Kiarostami told Dennis Lim, “I’ve said before that for­tu­nately or unfor­tu­nately, I’m unable to be a real storyteller. I’m sure that we can nev­er be the wit­ness of a story from its begin­ning to its end. I would say that this film doesn’t have an adequate open­ing and it doesn’t have a real end­ing either, but it also proves my idea that all films start before we get into them and they end after we leave them.” The film­maker presses this point more insist­ently in Like Someone In Love than in any oth­er film, includ­ing his pre­vi­ous fea­ture, the spec­tac­u­larly knotty and mov­ing Certified Copy.

“Like Someone In Love” was con­ceived and writ­ten in Los Angeles, recor­ded there years later by Ella Fitzgerald, and then many years later than that, Abbas Kiarostami pulled that Ella Fitzgerald album off of his shelf at home in Tehran. And sub­sequently played its title song on the ste­reo of an ima­gin­ary eld­erly man in the vicin­ity of Tokyo/Yokohama, where American jazz is well-loved by sub­stan­tial (albeit pos­sibly quickly dis­ap­pear­ing, these days) pock­ets of its population.

It is an incid­ent­al irony that the song’s com­poser Jimmy Van Heusen, an avi­ation enthu­si­ast from the thirties on (des­pite the fact that he did quite well both pro­fes­sion­ally and per­son­ally in Hollywood, he nev­er much liked the place, and would fly him­self back to New York between movie assign­ments), safety-tested American fight­er planes for Lockheed pri­or to and in the early days of World War II.

Thanks to James Kaplan (whose excel­lent Vanity Fair pro­file of Jimmy Van Heusen you might want to read next) and to Brook Babcock, keep­er of the flame.

In memori­am Abbas Kiarostami, 1940–2016.