It's a bit like a thoroughbred pulling a milk wagon - a very fancy, clean, and beautiful milk wagon, to be sure, but hardly the challenge that she's capable of overcoming. It does, though, mostly lack the kind of sultry, daring edge that Day's late-'40s work displayed. All of what's here is beautifully sung, and stunningly arranged (and gorgeously remastered, one might add) by Paul Weston and Frank DeVol, her two best collaborators of the period in that department. And if the music didn't "suffer" from her shifting priorities, it didn't exactly benefit, either - in the face of the onslaught of rock & roll from 1956 on, Day and Columbia Records retreated to the safety of pop music for her repertoire and output. That picture, coupled with Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and the musical The Pajama Game (both represented here), all combined to establish her not only as a star but also as a serious actress and a box office heavyweight, and Day devoted a lot of her energy to the big screen during the final four years of the 1950s, mostly in light romantic comedies and the occasional musical, which combined to make her one of the most popular actresses in the world during that period.
By this time, there's little trace left of the smoldering jazz and big-band singer that Day had been in the 1940s - she was devoting herself to pop songs and, even more so, to movies, where her box office numbers began to soar in the wake of Love Me or Leave Me (the music from which - built on the repertory of Ruth Etting - is represented on the prior Bear Family volume, Secret Love). This third of four Bear Family Records boxes devoted to Doris Day's career is, in many ways, the least interesting, even though it contains her biggest hit and some of her most well-known material.
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