DVD Review: Bobby Darin - Seeing Is Believing

I remember watching Bobby Darin from time to time on television when I was a kid. I think it was on The Ed Sullivan Show or maybe on Darin’s own television show, which he hosted for a couple years before his death in 1973.

Mostly I remember that he sung the songs “Splish, Splash” and “Mack the Knife.” When I was a kid, I thought he was cool. Not as cool as Elvis, maybe, but there was something about him that caught my eye.

As an adult, I have a deeper appreciation for him. But that’s only since I watched his performances on the new DVD, Bobby Darin: Seeing Is Believing. When the disc came open for review, I volunteered because of Darin’s name. I remembered the song from the 1950s and thought it would be a fun review to do. What I hadn’t counted on was being more intrigued by him now than I ever was.

The world hasn’t forgotten Bobby Darin. His music is still with us on oldies stations and in movies. Kevin Spacey was so taken with Darin that he did a bio-pic about him, Beyond the Sea, and there are five of Darin’s songs throughout American Beauty. McDonald’s underscored an ad campaign with the song “Mack the Knife.”

But when I watched the DVD of the performances, some of them from Darin’s early years and a few only months before his untimely death, I saw something in him that I hadn’t seen as a kid. Or maybe, something that I truly hadn’t recognized for what it was but had responded to on a kid level and just accepted without thinking.

When I watched Darin on the DVD, he came alive. His performances are good, entertaining, and very watchable. But the thing that caught my eye was how much Darin enjoyed what he was doing. When he was up there on that stage in front of an audience, he was having the time of his life. I saw it in his eyes, in his easy smile, and the way he just reached out to an audience and captured them with just a few lines of song.

That’s magic. Most people don’t realize it for what it is. Humphrey Bogart had the same thing in his acting. Bret Michaels of the metal band Poison had it. There are a lot of other people who have it too, and many of them are people I do business with who are plumbers, carpenters, writers, and musicians.

When someone loves his or her job, I know it. And it brings something out in me, gives me that little bit extra that lightens my step for a while and makes everything seem a little more doable.

That’s what Bobby Darin was about. I saw it all through the twenty performances on the DVD. While he was up there on stage, in front of a group of people, I really feel that he was more alive than at any other time.

The sound on the DVD is really good, but it’s not Dolby Digital 5.1. Still, Darin croons through the sets and the music is pure. The older, black-and-white sequences are little more rough, but it’s Darin that really captures the attention, not the sound.

His life was a mixture of tragedy and luck. Born Walden Robert Cassotto in The Bronx, New York, to a young mother out of wedlock, Darin never knew his father. His early years were made difficult by poverty. When he was eight years old, he contracted rheumatic fever that eventually left him with the heart disease that finally stole his life in 1973. He had an artificial heart valve. While he was still a boy, he heard a doctor tell his mother that he would be lucky to live to be 16.

Article Author: Mel Odom

Mel Odom is the author of over 100 novels. Winner of the American Library Association's Alex Award for 2002 and runner-up for the Christy in 2005, he's written in several genres, including tie-in novels for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and novelizations of Blade, XXX, and Tomb Raider. …

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