Last week in this space, we discussed the highly effecting soundtrack to The Man with the Golden Arm -- a moody post-bop jazz score that came from a highly unlikely source in the person of Elmer Bernstein.  This week's original soundtrack focus, the 1959 courtroom classic Anatomy of a Murder, was penned by someone who hardly needed to prove his jazz credentials.  Duke Ellington was a jazz elder statesman by the time the movie started production, but jazz had long been considered off-limits in most movies thanks to its connotation as "race music" through most of the '30s and '40s.  It took the work of men like Bernstein and Henry Mancini to normalize it for film use to the degree that Otto Preminger could call upon a living legend like Ellington to score his crime drama a few years later.  The picture wrapped in record time, and Preminger rushed to get it into theaters, partly in fear that its highly controversial nature (it was built around a revenge killing for the rape of the accused's wife, and used language that was extremely explicit for its day) would cause it to receive flak from the censors, so Ellington was pressured to work fast.  Luckily, years of working with a talented group of improvisors -- some of whom, including Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, and Cat Anderson, can be seen and heard in the film -- had prepared him well.

Ellington had done film work before, but by and large, it was for shorts, concert films, and the like.  Anatomy of a Murder would be his first full-length feature film, and the pressure was on in more ways than one, since for all the controversy surrounding it, it was meant to be an A picture.  It featured a prestige director, a highly coveted source for its script, and some of Hollywood's brightest actors in the lead roles:  Jimmy Stewart, George C. Scott and Lee Remick among them.  (Ellington even has a minor role himself, playing the owner of a local roadhouse.)  He was also something of a grandee of jazz, one of the old men of the medium's golden age, and not exactly known for being able to hit the clanging, atonal, and often dark aspects of the post-bop era.  But he acquitted himself better than anyone could possibly have expected:  his score to Anatomy of a Murder reels convincingly from swinging to subtle to romantic to comic to clever to violent when the scene calls for it.  While it's not quite a great enough accomplishment from one of the finest jazzmen in history to stand unquestioned alongside his greatest sides, it's a remarkably effecting film score that strikes -- if a bit late -- a mightily convincing blow in favor of using jazz as a material for film scores just as suitable, if not more so, than the second-rate symphonic music that was the norm at the time.
<

Read More...

By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions.  Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies.  There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties.  Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental.  Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.

Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model:  Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day.  But Elmer Bernstein?  Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long.  Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard.  Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook:  the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments.  He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie.  Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?

Read More...

NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life.

Read More...

With a few notable exceptions, the elaborate main title sequence has gone the way of the drive-in double feature. In fact, many of today’s movies eschew opening credits altogether, opting to plunge the audience directly into the experience and saving the who-did-whats for last. There’s something to be said for that, but we feel a vital part of the moviegoing experience is being neglected, whether it’s the establishment of tone or mood, or just a playful visual riff on the film’s themes. Join us now for a journey of sight and sound we like to call The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History.

PSYCHO (1960)



If you only know the name of one title designer- and chances are you do- the designer would almost certainly be Saul Bass. Before Bass came on the scene, the opening titles of films were mostly utilitarian, occasionally interesting to look at but primarily a way to honor the studio's obligations to the principal cast and crew. But this began to change after Bass was hired by Otto Preminger to design the opening credits to The Man With the Golden Arm, with his cutout-style animation working in tandem with Elmer Bernstein's score to create a title sequence that's arguably as good as the film that follows. Bass went on to work with Preminger numerous times, as well as filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer, Robert Wise, and later, Martin Scorsese. But for our money, Bass was never better than when designing titles for Alfred Hitchcock, which he did on three occasions. Any of these (the other two being Vertigo and North by Northwest) would be a worthy entry for this list, but we're going with their final collaboration, 1960's Psycho. For one thing, it's the most deceptively simple of Bass' classic output, with little more than white titles on a black background occasionally shoved aside by grey bars. A perfect rhythmic match to Bernard Herrmann's legendary score, Bass' titles are a classic case of "less is more"- a more complex animation might have given the game away, but Bass preserves the mystery of what is to come while still managing to set the tone for the film before we even see a frame shot by Hitchcock. And this was Bass' greatest breakthrough, to take what was once considered an overture to the feature film and turn it into an organic element of the movie itself.

Read More...