“The
Curtain Falls” was the song that Bobby Darin used to close his shows in the
1960s. Not being that much of an expert on Darin (and never having seen him live),
I wasn’t aware of this until I saw Kevin Spacey’s 2004 Darin biopic Beyond The Sea. It doesn’t show up until
near the end of the film, at which point the audience knows that Darin is ill
and doesn’t have much longer to live. (He died at the age of 37, after his second
open-heart surgery.) The song is the closing track on the soundtrack album, but
to avoid sending the audience bawling into the lobby it is actually followed in
the film with the far-more-upbeat “As Long As I’m Singing”.
The song
itself is an amazingly poignant ballad, even without the foreshadowing. I had
initially assumed it must have been written by one of the classic songwriting
teams of the 1930s or 40s, and was surprised that none of the crooners of that
era had a hit with it. It turns out that it was written in 1961, not by a
well-known musical legend but by a guy named Sol Weinstein, who couldn’t read
or write music or play any instruments. While this song seems to have been
Weinstein’s only musical legacy, he did have a notable career as a comedy
writer (and at one point had a call-in radio show on WCAU in Philadelphia).
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