Non v'innamorate

Don’t fall in love (Put the Blame on Mame)

(Doris Fisher-Devilli) – Aldo Donà – 1947

The Italian versions of foreign hits were not a prerogative in the 1960s alone, when it became almost a practice to exploit the commercial potential of the big American and English productions. In the previous decades too, it happened that some hit songs found new life in our language, especially if they were connected to really popular films. And this is the case with Put the Blame on Mame, taken from the film Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) with Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Rita Hayworth used lipsinging (since the real singing voice was actually that of Anita Hallis) in a famous scene from the film, a striptease performed in a strapless dress and elbow-length gloves, with shots that maximized the sex appeal of the Hollywood redhead.

The song, composed by Doris Fisher, who had already had some success as a performer, was adapted into Italian by Alberto Curci (who hid behind the pseudonym Devilli) with the title Non v’innamorate, and entrusted in 1947 to Aldo Donà, a singer whose career had begun right at the beginning of the 1940s. The orchestra that accompanied him was that of Pippo Barzizza, who elegantly took up the original arrangement and ended the song with a long instrumental coda filled with rhythm, giving a very clear idea of the extent to which the music from overseas had now been assimilated. Despite the limitations that the fascist regime had tried to impose, the best Italian musicians managed to hear and appreciate that music.