The blu-ray of Blue Moon is available. That’s the good news.

Alas, there are no extra features on it. That’s the sad news. Like a ship without a sail, as a lyricist might have put it.

If you have any interest in the film, then I don’t have to tell you that it takes place on the night of the premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in the famed Sardi’s as Rodgers’s former song writing partner Lorenz Hart conducts a nearly non-stop monologue (even when he’s talking to other folks he’s essentially doing a monologue) by turns witty and angry and self-pitying, while trying not to drink without succeeding.

It’s rather like watching a man slowing disintegrating before one’s eyes and you can’t stop watching because he’s just so fucking entertaining.

Needless to say Ethan Hawke deserves all the plaudits he’s received for playing the diminutive Larry Hart.

In her autobiography Shy, Mary Rodgers Guettel had this to say about Larry Hart:

Larry was fun. Because of his height I thought of him not only as younger than Daddy (though he was, in fact, seven years older) but almost as a child. He certainly had a child’s sense of delight and irresponsibility. However much he loved my father the young genius, and I suspect he loved him more than professionally, he was scared of my father the taskmaster.

That Larry Hart is brilliantly brought to life in the film.

There are several insider jokes as Hart supposedly inspires E.B. White and George Roy Hill to do some of their most famous work.

And then there’s this, where I’ve tacked on the supposedly inspired bit at the end:

I see that some folks on the internet have called this movie a downer. Although its protagonist does come to a sad end [not a spoiler, the film opens with that], I did not find it so.

If you have any interest in the Broadway musical, you might want to give it a look.

 

 

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