I remember the first time I heard it. Jo Stafford sang it in Dark Passage, a late 1940s black-and-white movie in which you don’t see the face of the hero, a prison escapee who had been framed for murder, until a risk-taking surgeon reconstructs his visage and Humphrey Bogart emerges from the bandages. Lauren Bacall believes in him, and Stafford sings “Too Marvelous for Words” on the Victrola. It becomes their song. “You must like swing,” Bogart says. Yes, Bacall answers, “legitimate swing.”
“Too Marvelous for Words” is a legitimately great ballad whether sung wistfully by Stafford or Helen Forrest or in a more jaunty manner by Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole. It’s a valentine to the hero or heroine of almost all songs, “you.” The old familiar words of praise (like “glorious, glamorous, / and that old standby, amorous”) can’t convey how great you are, so I’ll resort to a “love song from the birds.”
The tune is lovely, easy to remember, delightful to sing. There is a shrewd key change in the phrase just preceding the bridge: “I mean they just aren’t swell enough,” where “they” refers to “words” and “swell enough” rhymes with “tell enough.” The bridge is musically and lyrically not only the song’s pivot but its marvelous climax: “You’re much too much / and just too very very / to ever be / in Webster’s Dictionary.”
–David Lehman