I occasionally get obsessed with a recording and go on a listening jag that defies explanation. This happened yesterday with the above recording of a song by Doris Day accompanied by Harry James and his Orchestra. It’s called ‘Would I Love You?’ and is hardly so well-known or even terribly distinguished that it merited the time I spent obsessively playing it last night. All I can say is that I find the song, the faux-Latin vibe, James’s trumpet and the sensuous vocal by Day wildly evocative of an era captured specifically in RKO movies of the late forties. It’s a song that’s really about the nightclub that it’s being performed in–palm trees on the wallpaper, rubber plants, little tables with shaded lights on the them, a semi-circular bandstand, men with natty suits and cigarette cases, women in sleeveless dresses with pearls, waiters with undefined European accents. It’s in black and white, shot on the RKO lot in Hollywood at some point shortly before Howard Hughes bought the studio. Is it a noir? Not necessarily. Sometimes the films in the genre that this song evokes are odd mixes of soap operas and shady dealings–‘A Woman’s Secret’, ‘Strange Love of Martha Ivers’, ‘Born To Be Bad’ come to mind. My version is named for the club this song appears in : ‘Zanzibar’. The film doesn’t take place in that exotic land though. It takes place RKO-Land. In elegant drawing rooms, seedy apartments, cars with rear screen projection behind them, a fancy department store, a hockshop and of course the Club Zanzibar. No location shooting–every set built on the lot. The cameraman is Nick Musaraca–or maybe Stanley Cortez. Gloria Grahame is in it–but she’s not the lead. Maybe we go with Joan Fontaine as the rich woman who murders someone and that Grahame is wise too, blackmailing her with the info. Sam Levene figures into it as a detective. The male lead is John Lund. Caesar Romero turns up as the nightclub owner who has a safe filled with ill-gotten jewels and cash. And this song–with its simple, eloquent lyric and Day’s alluring delivery–plays in one scene, It begins at the opening of the scene–the first thing we see is the band and and the vocalist. It continues in the background as a conversation at a table leads to a meeting  in Romero’s upstairs office. When the gun is pulled and goes off, the song is barely there, heard in the distant nightclub below. But it fills the moment with a mysterious and darkly romantic fatalism…