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"I WANT TO BE A LEGEND"
- Kevin Spacey Is Bobby Darin
    in 'Beyond the Sea'

By Christopher M. Wright
  © 2006 Christopher M. Wright
  All Rights Reserved

He can sing! He can dance! He not only sang all the songs in this 2004 film, but Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey co-wrote, co-produced, and directed this biographical look at the life of 50s singing sensation Bobby Darin.

Beyond the Sea is titled after one of Darin's hit songs. The movie was a labor of live for Spacey who is a life-long Darin fan. "I sang all his songs into a hairbrush when I was just a kid. I was just 12 or 13 when he died," Spacey told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. Spacey spent three years preparing his voice and delivery for the role. Phil Ramone, Grammy-winning music producer, was hired as coach. The breakthrough came after two years of effort when Ramone heard something new coming through the studio monitors: "It wasn't Bobby Darin. It wasn't Kevin Spacey. It wasn't slick imitation. It was what I was waiting for," Ramone said in the Los Angeles Times interview.

Getting the voice right was not the only hurdle to overcome. First, Spacey had to get his hands on the project which had been languishing at Warner Bros. for over ten years. Then there was the small matter of raising $20 million to get the picture made at Lions Gate. To kindle interest in a movie about a long-dead near-great, Spacey went on a 10-city tour with a 17-piece orchestra.

The script employs a narrative technique Spacey might have learned while starring in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. There's a scene in that movie where he and his young companion, newly dead, are communicating while laid out side-by-side on the floor. Fantasy sequences move front-and-center in Beyond the Sea. The adult Darin and his boyhood self converse together in several scenes. Also, a choreographed crowd dances in the street to send the teenage Bobby off to his new career. Fantasy is very much a part of Latin American literature (who could forget the rain of yellow flowers in One Hundred Years of Solitude?), but not very common in the United States where it tends to get criticized.

Bobby Darin was born Walden Robert Cassotto to an Italian family in the Bronx (hardscrabble section of New York City) in 1936. His heart was damaged by rheumatic fever and doctors told him he would not live past age 15. His mother was a musical performer who helped him learn the craft. He hit the big time with his Top-40 hit Splish Splash (I was takin' a bath) and appeared on American Bandstand.

Not content with being a teen idol, Darin wanted to be a crooner in the Tony Bennett, Dean Martin mold. His goal was to out-Sinatra Sinatra. "I want to be a legend by 25," Darin told Life Magazine. Darin wanted to play the Copacabana nightclub and eventually succeeded. He also made a movie with Rock Hudson and Sandra Dee.

His courted Dee and their eventual union, like a lot of celebrity marriages, was fraught with problems, according to the movie. Relentlessly ambitious, he wanted her to be on the road with him constantly but she preferred to stay home to take care of their child. She drank. It all blows up in the movie and Darin is depicted as having a nasty temper. He liked to break things, apparently.

But when rock crowded out most other music in the 60s, Darin quickly became a has-been. Trying to reinvent himself, he left big production numbers behind and entered a hippy-dippy folksinger phase. It was a time of agonizin' reappraisal, social change, and upheaval from the Vietnam war. But Darin was laughed off the stage for singing protest songs, finding out as Ricky Nelson did that audiences don't want their favorite performers to change. They just want their old favorites. (Nelson was booed at Madison Square Garden for playing new material and wrote Garden Party in response.) After his attempt at reinvention failed, Darin had to go 'find himself', a common affliction in those days, but, in Darin's case, there was some basis for it. A family secret had dumped a load of bricks on his psyche at about this time. He was not who he thought he was and he had some identity issues to work through. Eventually, in the movie at least, he finds a way back.

The movie opens with Spacey singing Darin's only number one hit Mack the Knife (1959) which opens with the line, "Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear." The lyrics will never be mistaken for Don't Worry, Be Happy. The song is from a very dark musical by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, a big hit in Germany until it was banned by the Nazis in 1933. The musical is populated by beggars, thieves, and prostitutes who betray each other without hesitation.

Chief among thieves is Macheath ('Mack the Knife') who hides a career of murder and rape behind a facade of gentility. (Reportedly, Bobby Darin's father worked for a gangster. Could this in part explain why Darin was drawn to the song?)

In the musical, Macheath courts young, unsuspecting Polly whose parents lay plans to trap him. Act One closes with Polly's parents singing about the sad fact that moral compromises are sometimes necessary when survival is at stake.

The song Mack the Knife introduces Macheath at the beginning:

A mismatch has been noted between Darin's breezy version and the subject matter, but the fault, if any, may lie with the characteristically Brechtian juxtaposition of the horrible with the humorous. Granted, the lyrics and their delivery are more sinister in the musical, but that version sounds fairly jaunty to begin with, making Darin's rendition not such a leap. (Sample the 1954 New York cast in the Amazon link at the bottom of this page and see if you don't agree.)

Bobby Darin died of heart failure in 1973 at the age of 37. He left behind 163 songs and 486 recordings which, combined, sold tens of millions of copies.

© 2006 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved - This material may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten, redistributed, resold, or manipulated in any form.

                                       SAMPLE THE MUSIC ON AMAZON
 

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