10 Songs That Became More Famous Than Their Movies

2. That's Amore - The Caddy

Before Dean Martin became one of America's biggest singing stars as part of the Rat Pack and before Jerry Lewis became Paramount Pictures' biggest star with comedies like The Nutty Professor, the two made 17 films as a comedy duo between 1949 and 1956. Martin was the straight man, while Lewis the comedic entertainer took all the plaudits. Fortunately, Martin had his singing to fall back on, increasingly making sure that their comedy vehicles gave him a chance to show off his vocal talents. A fairly typical example of the Martin-Lewis formula is The Caddy, in which Lewis is the crowd-shy son of a golf pro who trains Martin to take part in the golf tournaments that he is scared to feature in. Their spectacular quarrels on the golf course eventually mean that where they fail at golf they find a new career in show business. The film was the same moderate of its time success as the other Martin-Lewis collaborations, but is not much remembered now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llqPiYzE1mo The song Martin recorded for the film, however, is a different matter. Veteran composer Harry Warren (whose Chattanooga Choo Choo achieved the first ever gold record) wrote the jaunty tune, while lyricist Jack Brooks provided a string of Italian (or Neapolitan) American culinary stereotypes of "pizza pie" and "pasta fazool" and That's Amore became Martin's signature hit, as popular to cover as it is to pastiche.