There’s a scene in the 1972 movie Sleuth, where­in eccen­tric mil­lion­aire crime writer Andrew Wyke (Lau­rence Olivi­er) has invit­ed his wife’s lover, Ital­ian hair­dress­er Milo Tin­dle (Michael Caine), to his man­sion, under false pre­tences, and pro­ceed­ed to shoot him dead in what he believes to be the per­fect mur­der. He struts self-assured­ly around his kitchen, busy­ing him­self in prepa­ra­tion of a cel­e­bra­to­ry cham­pagne-and-caviar sup­per to the strains of Cole Porter’s song You Do Some­thing To Me piped in from a dis­tant gramo­phone. Now, the movie itself deserves a blog all to itself, since it is a grip­ping and bril­liant­ly-writ­ten piece of dra­ma with bravu­ra per­for­mances from the two afore­men­tioned greats of the sil­ver screen, but this is not about the movie but the song.

The song is typ­i­cal of Cole Porter (1891–1964), Amer­i­can com­pos­er and song­writer not­ed for his wit­ty, urbane lyrics and writer of many a song that would find suc­cess on Broad­way in the 1920s and 30s, and become part of what we now call the Great Amer­i­can Song­book. His songs trip off the tongue: You’re The Top; Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love; Any­thing Goes; I Get A Kick Out Of You; Begin The Beguine; I’ve Got You Under My Skin; Let’s Mis­be­have; Ev’ry Time We Say Good­bye; Who Wants To Be A Mil­lion­aire? et al. His songs have of course been cov­ered by, well, everyone…and so I attempt­ed to find out which artist had record­ed the par­tic­u­lar ver­sion that we hear in Sleuth (below)…

Sure­ly a straight­for­ward google-able task? But not so: hav­ing failed to find the iden­ti­ty of the artist from the obvi­ous sources, I was led instead and cir­cuitous­ly to this forum of musi­cal sound­track enthu­si­asts (below). Start­ing in 2006, one “glo­ri­ot­s­ki” kicks off the thread with the same ques­tion that was on my lips, but “coma” sets the ensu­ing tone with “I’ve checked all avail­able sources but nobody real­ly seems to know”.

Oth­er ama­teur musi­cal sleuths, deter­mined to crack the mys­tery, steam in, with the sug­ges­tions rolling in: Fred Astaire, Al John­son, Mel Tor­mé, Al Bowl­ly, Pat O’Malley, Sam Browne (indeed, vir­tu­al­ly every­one except Mar­lene Diet­rich)? But the years tick by, and one by one each con­fi­dent sug­ges­tion has been debunked, right up to 2021 when we seem to have got no fur­ther:

Per­haps we’ll nev­er know…but I can live with that (in fact, I’m rather glad that the mys­tery has endured) because in the course of my research I came across this won­der­ful ver­sion record­ed by Har­ry Reser’s Clic­quot Club Eski­mo Orches­tra, with vocals by Har­ry “Scrap­py” Lam­bert. Enjoy!