DORIS DAY - “Que Sera, Sera”
(10th August 1956)
“Que Sera, Sera” is a slippery little song - its fresh optimism seems to conceal something a shade darker (the sentiment could as easily front a glum shrug as a carefree grin), but in the lyric only good things do seem to happen, so any fatalism you find is of the chirpy variety. It’ll all work out in the long run! In the real world such homilies might be dangerous, or at least an excuse to sit on one’s arse all day (as if I needed one). But pop music, thankfully, is not the real world.
Doris Day treats “Que Sera, Sera” as quite the happiest song ever written - a “Favourite Things” of predestiny and human impotence. She carries the arrangement along with her - the music-box tinkling behind the “Now I have children of my own’” verse just an extra tier in a wedding-cake production. And of course the chorus is indelible. The result is that rare thing, a pop song trying to sound less deep than it is. 7
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Lena on October 31st, 2006
And for a new generation (or two) it’s indelibly associated with the meteorite-heading-for-Springfield espisode of The Simpsons. I guess if you’re going to be fatalistic, you may as well be happy about it…
Marcello Carlin on October 31st, 2006
It originally appeared in Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and the way she sings it in the film, alone and in tears, to the daughter she knows is being held hostage in the next room, is beyond heartbreaking…
Marcello Carlin on October 31st, 2006
(She sings it as a sort of coded message)
FT's CarsmileSteve on October 31st, 2006
i’m sure on the haloscan comments we must have touched on:
a. the song’s ubiquity on the terraces
b. “we hope it’s chips, it’s chips” dalepack beefsteak advert of the early/mid 80s
which of these caused the other i’m unsure…
FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on October 31st, 2006
“fried onion rings”!
James Walker on March 19th, 2007
In response to marcello’s comment last Hallowe’en. It was her son she was singing to in the movie. She and Jimmy Stewart only had the boy, no daughter at all actually.
FT's rosie on May 26th, 2008
And can I get hold of a DVD of The Man Who Knew Too Much? Can I fuck! I was disappopinted but not altogether surprised not to get hold of Hall Bartlett’s Unchained - the film’s signature song has a completely independent existence and it’s not by all accounts (although I’ll be the judge when I get the chance) a particularly good film. But TMWKTM is Hitchcock, for fuck’s sake, and if it’s no Rear Window or North by North West it’s still pretty good stuff.