Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon Puts Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine” Back in Focus

The arrival of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a tight drama about the last days of the Rodgers and Hart partnership in 1943, has yanked one of their strangest hits back into the light. “My Funny Valentine” was written for the 1937 musical Babes in Arms, and even now the song’s architecture resists lazy romance.

There is nothing conventionally flattering in it. Billie Smith, the character who delivers the lyric, tells Valentine LaMar that his looks are laughable, then asks if his figure is less than Greek and whether his mouth is a little weak. The word “valentine” stays lowercase in Rodgers’s official lyrics, a plain noun punned against the character’s name, not a title erected in caps. Hart’s touch was dry, precise, and allergic to soft landings.

Rodgers’s melody works against the words in a way that amplifies the discomfort. On the line “When you open it to speak,” the singer reaches up on “open,” tracing the physical awkwardness of a mouth before speech. It creates a suspended moment, a genuine beat of uncertainty about what might come out.

Mitzi Green introduced the song onstage in 1937, but no recording survives. A 1999 recreation by Erin Tilly, using the original arrangement, shows how formal and clipped it sounded in period context, complete with an introductory verse that most later interpreters have discarded.

Blue Moon does not worship its subjects. It watches them at the end of the line, exhausted and crackling with old friction. The song simply sits there, as unphotographable as ever, waiting for someone new to open it up.