Before its license to thrill was revoked by Netflix again, Never Say Never Again was full of music so awful it would make Netflix viewers say "never again" to hearing it

(Photo source: New York Times)

Have you ever heard score music that's so terrible during a certain movie that its trailer music sounds like Beethoven by comparison? Michel Legrand, whose jazzy and very French score for the original Thomas Crown Affair is one of the highlights of that very '60s caper flick, clearly had an off day when he wrote the score to 1983's Never Say Never Again, the unofficial 007 movie that was the weird result of a legal dispute that allowed Thunderball to get remade with Sean Connery in the role of Bond again. (The messy circumstances that led to the production of the non-canonical Never Say Never Again--the last 007 movie to pit Bond against SPECTRE before next winter's canonical 007 movie Spectre--are like if the Indiana Jones franchise got embroiled in some sort of legal beef between Disney and George Lucas that would be too convoluted to imagine in detail here, and as part of the settlement, Harrison Ford got to star as Indy one last time in a rival Indy movie for another studio while Disney worked on its rumored reboot with Chris Pratt as Indy.)

The much-maligned GoldenEye score by French composer and frequent Luc Besson collaborator Eric Serra--the only cue I really dig during Serra's score is the very first one, the 17-second gunbarrel music--isn't the worst score written for a Bond movie. Nope, the "worst Bond score" honors would have to go to Legrand's tin-eared score. I realized his weirdly chintzy-sounding and sometimes yacht rock-ish score is the worst after I rewatched Never Say Never Again on Netflix only a few hours before the streaming service lost the streaming rights to the movie once again and had to yank it from its library over the weekend. It's the first time I've watched Never Say Never Again in its entirety since the very first time I saw it--on VHS as a kid. I barely paid attention to Never Say Never Again that day because I was too busy playing with the Christmas present my parents gave to me right before they rented a VHS of Never Say Never Again, and that toy happened to be this:

(Photo source: ActionFigurePics)

(Photo source: Vintage Action Figures)

When you're a kid whose attentions are divided between play-acting battle strategy conversations inside a huge castle playset between He-Man and Mekaneck about how they're going to metaphorically skullfuck the forces of Skeletor and Trap Jaw and watching a VHS of an overlong and clunkily paced but lavish spy flick, it's a little difficult to pay attention to the spy flick. But the one thing I do remember from that Christmastime viewing of the VHS rental of Never Say Never Again is Connery getting stabbed right after the easy-listening sounds of former Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 vocalist Lani Hall's Never Say Never Again theme song.

Thanks to cable network airings of Never Say Never Again that failed to lure me into rewatching it in its entirety and YouTube clips of the opening titles, I'm constantly reminded of how poorly Hall's ballad--which was composed by Legrand and produced by both Hall's husband Herb Alpert and Mendes himself--fits with the opening action sequence. It's not the worst tune, but "Never Say Never Again" is yacht rock-era Sergio Mendes and Herb Alpert, not "Mas Que Nada"-era Sergio Mendes and Herb Alpert.

Together with Hall and the rest of Brasil '66, "Mas Que Nada"-era Mendes and Alpert were responsible for one of the coolest covers of a Bond song, their remake of "The Look of Love," another tune from an unofficial Bond movie, the 1967 version of Casino Royale. The lackadaisical feel of this later Bond song from Hall, Mendes and Alpert robs Never Say Never Again's opening action sequence of any tension or suspense. Yacht rock and spy movies are a terrible combination. It's why I don't like the Rita Coolidge version of "All Time High" the late John Barry produced for Octopussy--a rare musical misstep by Barry--and I instead prefer the more dangerous-sounding (especially at 3:06) Pulp cover of "All Time High" David Arnold produced for 1997's Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, the cover album that landed Arnold the gig as Tomorrow Never Dies score composer.

The rest of Legrand's Never Say Never Again score is far worse than the opening theme and lacks the oomph, tunefulness, grandeur and sexuality of the best of Barry's work for the official Bond movies. Oomph, tunefulness, grandeur and sexuality are four reasons why, like recent "Uptown Funk" mastermind Mark Ronson once said in 2011, Barry's work has been sampled so much by hip-hop artists ("It's mean stuff. It's not pretty or sanitised. It sounds tough," wrote Ronson). Legrand's score is a good example of why French musicians shouldn't be scoring Bond movies. Unless they're Daft Punk. That's because I like those two helmeted motherfuckers and I like how the idea of Daft Punk scoring a Bond flick would make way-too-conservative Bond fanboys--the same fanboys who are way too intense about their hatred of French electronica artist Mirwais for producing Madonna's much-maligned Die Another Day theme--squirm.

The Never Say Never Again trailer music has more oomph than the actual music in the movie. Sure, the unknown composer who wrote the trailer music was clearly imitating Bill Conti's score from an official Bond movie, 1981's For Your Eyes Only, without using the Barry/Monty Norman Bond theme that Conti had the freedom to include and neither Never Say Never Again producer Jack Schwartzman (the late husband of Talia Shire, as well as the father of Jason Schwartzman) nor Warner Bros. had the rights to use for their rival Bond movie.

But the anonymous Conti wannabe's trailer music gives off sparks in ways that Legrand's score fails to do. Combined with both the way the trailer house pieced together footage of the movie and the baritone of Peter Cullen (a.k.a. Optimus Prime), the voice of so many trailers and TV spots for '80s Bond flicks, the trailer music makes Never Say Never Again appear to be a more exciting action movie than it actually is.

The best things about Never Say Never Again are the performances of Connery--who's more awake during Never Say Never Again than he was when he sleepwalked through You Only Live Twice because he was sick and tired of the Bond franchise at the time of You Only Live Twice's filming--and Barbara Carrera, who steals the movie as Fatima Blush (like Luciana Paluzzi did during Thunderball when she played the same villainous character, Fiona Volpe, in that version of the story, 18 years before). Carrera was even nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as Fatima. Throughout my rewatch of the movie on Netflix, all I could think, especially when Carrera wasn't on screen, was "All that money that's up there on screen, and they couldn't get Raiders of the Lost Ark cinematographer Douglas Slocombe to light the locations with more panache, and they couldn't get Connery a more convincing toupee."

The mid-'80s were not exactly the greatest period for Bond movies, whether official or unofficial, although Octopussy has its moments, dumb Tarzan yell gag and questionable attitudes towards Indians aside. I don't know if the most underwhelming aspects of Never Say Never Again were because of cocaine or because of the Taliafilm production company's cluelessness about how to craft a Bond movie a la the Broccoli family, which runs the Bond movie franchise like a tight ship. But when you hire folks like Legrand, Slocombe, Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner and stuntpeople from Raiders of the Lost Ark and they're not putting in their best work (one minute, Kim Basinger's escaping from a castle on horseback, clad in just a slip, and then the next minute, her stunt double's leaping off the castle fully dressed, or maybe those aren't long sleeves and that's the stunt double's actual skin, which is far lighter than Basinger's), the blame for those underwhelming aspects has to be put on the badly distracted leadership of Schwartzman, who was reportedly too busy dealing with constant legal battles with the Broccoli family and Eon Productions to be present for the day-to-day shooting. His absence "left the actual supervision of production in the hands of barely-qualified subordinates," wrote You Only Blog Twice blogger Bryant Burnette.

(Photo source: Lewis Wayne Gallery)

(Photo source: You Only Blog Twice)

Legrand's tepid-sounding Never Say Never Again score cues have been frequently excised from the movie by Bond fanboys in fan edits of Never Say Never Again they've posted on YouTube or outside YouTube. I think they should try inserting into their Never Say Never Again re-edits the theme songs from Bond video games like the Quantum of Solace video game and Blood Stone, which are more enjoyable tunes than most of the opening themes from the '80s and '90s Bond movies themselves.

The Legrand cues are, of course, not part of "AFOS Incognito," the new espionage genre music block at midnight on AFOS. Only the best original music from spy movies or shows is streamed during "AFOS Incognito," like Barry's On Her Majesty's Secret Service cues "This Never Happened to the Other Feller" and "Main Theme." Barry, show 'em how it's done.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Parodi/Fair, "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)"

Song: "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)" by Parodi/Fair
Released: 2002 (it was recorded in 1995)
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The "Rome, Italian Style" block focuses on how musicians outside the film and TV music world interpret '60s and '70s film and TV music. Former Arsenio Hall Show band keyboardist Starr Parodi and her husband Jeff Eden Fair, whose film and TV scoring work as a duo has included the mid-'90s United Artists logo music and the Lifetime cop show The Division, are hardly outsiders, but their arrangement of "The James Bond Theme" from 1962's Dr. No is my favorite cover of that theme that never appeared in a Bond film.

On this date in 1963, "The James Bond Theme" (composed by Monty Norman and arranged by John Barry) entered the American pop charts. It captured the danger and allure of Bond's universe so well that every Eon Productions Bond film since Dr. No has featured it, and every non-Eon Bond film that doesn't feature it is, musically, kind of dickless without it--like Never Say Never Again or The Rock, which I like to think of as a sequel to the Sean Connery 007 installments because Connery was clearly playing Bond again, despite being named "John Mason,"(*) a safe-enough name choice to keep the Ian Fleming estate's lawyers away.

(*) If one likes to think of the name Bond as a mantle that's assumed by many different male MI6 agents instead of Bond being the same orphaned bachelor (and later, widower) from 1962 to 2002 despite five different faces, heights and accents(**), then that was a great way to explain why MI6 replaced the anonymous Scotsman who assumed the Bond identity from 1962 to 1967 and then briefly again in 1971: the U.S. government imprisoned his arse.

(**) Maybe Bond is really a Time Lord. All those STDs he picked up must have caused him to regenerate four times.

In 1995, United Artists recruited Parodi and Fair to do an updated version of "The James Bond Theme" for the GoldenEye teaser trailer, months before filming was completed on Pierce Brosnan's first movie as 007, which was also the first movie in which Eon enlisted Martin Campbell, the New Zealand-born director of the classic British miniseries Edge of Darkness, to rescue the hit-or-miss 007 film series from one of many periods of creative (and this time, also legally related) doldrums.

"We were in a unique and exciting situation because we had been given the assignment of bringing the Bond theme into the 90's," recalled Parodi and Fair on their official site. "Fortunately we were given lots of artistic freedom because the picture of the GoldenEye Teaser was to be edited to our music arrangement. We wanted to give the theme a sense of mystery and tension that would break out with tons of energy that suits the action that Bond films deliver."

The duo succeeded. Their nifty, trip-hop-influenced take on "The James Bond Theme," which constantly changes tempos, announced so effectively to the world during the GoldenEye teaser trailer that Bond was back in action again. It recaptures the danger and allure of Bond's universe in a way that Marvin Hamlisch's fun(***) but not-as-alluring "Bond '77" cover from The Spy Who Loved Me doesn't. Maybe it's due to the trip-hop sound, which is better suited for 007 than the disco sound of "Bond '77" because trip-hop is so influenced by Barry's spy movie scores, and artists from that genre are so fond of sampling those scores too, which is what Parodi and Fair did with the original 1962 recording of "The James Bond Theme" in their teaser trailer music.

(***) It's mostly because of the cowbells.

In 2002, it was nice to finally be able to have on disc the teaser trailer music, which became a staple of MGM/UA's trailers and ads for the Brosnan films. The trailer music made its CD debut on the Best of Bond... James Bond compilation, which Capitol released to mark the film series' 40th anniversary. At that time, the series was stuck in yet another creative rut (Brosnan's films did well at the box office but were becoming increasingly slipshod, script-wise). It wasn't able to come out of this rut until Eon enlisted Campbell again to helm what ended up being the best--and least juvenile--Bond film in decades. Mr. Bond, you have a nasty habit of surviving.

"Shutup, I Love This Title Screen," Part 20

GoldenEye
Title design by Daniel Kleinman

New AFOS episode: "The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum"

This week, the United Artists 90th Anniversary Film Festival hits both the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and the Nuart Theatre in L.A., so the next episode of A Fistful of Soundtracks will feature my favorite selections from scores to films that were distributed by UA. "The studio without a studio" thrived during an era when rival studios couldn't keep up with their audiences--and the social changes of the period--and kept releasing dull and staid product. UA's smart and daring films during the Arthur Krim/Robert Benjamin regime and Krim and Benjamin's championing of filmmakers--they let them do their thing--are always worth celebrating. Oh yeah, and most of these flicks had terrific original music too.

"The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum" (WEB96) will begin streaming tomorrow (Thursday, May 1 at midnight, 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm). I've included themes from some of UA's most popular releases (The Great Escape, 007), but I also wanted to fill most of the episode with music from cult classics (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) or soundtrack albums that are out of print (The Long Goodbye).

Pelham, a thrilling caper movie with Walter Matthau at his sardonic best as a cynical transit cop who's the perfect disheveled hero for an even more disheveled New York, and The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's clever reimagining of Philip Marlowe, are two '70s UA flicks I instantly fell in love with. I first caught Pelham on TCM a few years ago and discovered The Long Goodbye on DVD last year.

Pelham composer David Shire and Long Goodbye composer John Williams achieved so much with what little they had. Shire wrote each Pelham score cue under the 12-tone method of composition to evoke "organized chaos"--in other words, the funkiest film score not written by a black dude ever.

Williams' Long Goodbye score--one of the shortest he ever wrote--is equally off-kilter. It consists of nothing but different variations on the same melody. Wherever Elliott Gould's Marlowe goes, the Long Goodbye theme follows, whether it's as bar piano music or as a doorbell ring. I don't know exactly why Altman asked Williams to write the score like that. (Jaime J. Weinman says Williams' score is a spoof of the incessant pimping of movie title songs in the '60s and '70s--an issue that caused the previously stable working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and the less pop-minded Bernard Herrmann to fall apart during the making of Torn Curtain. The Something Old, Nothing New blogger theorizes that Williams' score could also be an homage to Roy Webb's similarly structured score during Out of the Past.) But whatever the intentions were, the Long Goodbye score nicely reflects Marlowe's sense of displacement--he's a '40s guy in a '70s world.

Whereas UA was a '70s studio in a '50s Hollywood that struggled to keep up with the '60s.

Roman Coppola's CQ

WEB96 also covers UA's recent art-house phase, before Tom Cruise took over the company. One of my favorite films to emerge from UA's art-house years is Roman Coppola's CQ, a fun little film about filmmaking in the mold of Day for Night and Ed Wood. It contains a great loungey score by the French trio Mellow, which evoked the likes of Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone during the cues for the movie-within-the-movie Codename: Dragonfly, a mash-up of Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik (the source of Angela Lindvall's sexy rolling-around-in-cash scene).

The '70s logo

A Half-Assed History of UA's Logos

I remember the first appearance of the '90s UA logo when I saw GoldenEye in 1995. The logo actually received cheers from GoldenEye's opening weekend audience--they were just so happy to see Bond again after a six-year absence.

The '90s logo

The sadly discontinued jingle was composed by Jeff Eden Fair and Starr Parodi.

The husband-and-wife duo recalled to SoundtrackNet that "We did that with a 90-piece orchestra at the Sony Scoring Stage... Our instructions were, 'We want something that represents the past, present, and future of United Artists.' So we started with classic orchestral instrumentation, moving to futuristic sounds and concepts at the end."

The '00s logo

Defamer's funny idea of what the UA watertower now looks like

Next AFOS episode: I'm taking a break after five consecutive eps. I don't know when I'll stream the next new ep.

Never Say Never Again's rejected theme

(Photo source: Life Between Frames)

Last week, Tim Lucas of Video WatchBlog unearthed Phyllis Hyman's rejected theme from Never Say Never Again, thanks to his friend Stephen Forsyth, who also happens to be one of the composers of the dumped theme.

This was a particularly cool discovery for me because I'm always interested in hearing theme songs that didn't make the final cut. In fact, I once did a Fistful of Soundtracks episode about rejected movie themes, and I played "Thunderball" by Johnny Cash and "For Your Eyes Only" by Blondie. (However, I wasn't able to get my hands on Alice Cooper's "The Man with the Golden Gun" and Ace of Base's "The Juvenile," which was an early contender for the GoldenEye theme. After the GoldenEye producers gave Ace of Base the boot and went with Tina Turner--good call--the Swedish group released their version of "GoldenEye" as "The Juvenile.")

Never Say Never Again, the unofficial 1983 Bond flick that featured a saggy-looking Sean Connery in his first appearance as 007 since Diamonds Are Forever, divides Bond fans. But they all agree that its score, which was composed by a past-his-prime Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the original Thomas Crown Affair), pales in comparison to John Barry's energetic scores from the official Bond movies. Legrand's limp theme was performed by Lani Hall, the vocalist from Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66's "Mas Que Nada" (a tune I was introduced to by another spy movie franchise, Austin Powers). "Never Say Never Again" is one of the weakest themes to open a Bond film, official or unofficial.

According to Forsyth:

I co-wrote the title song for the movie with Jim Ryan. Warner Bros. informed our attorney that the song was to be used as the title song in the picture. However, shortly before its release, Warner Bros. informed us that the song could not be used because Michel Legrand, who wrote the score, threatened to sue them, claiming that contractually he had the right to the title song. So my song was never released...

Phyllis sadly took her own life in the early nineties. The year before she died, she called me late one night and told me she felt that "Never Say Never Again" was "her best and favorite recording."

Though her performance is terrific (she demonstrates restraint, something that's missing from the caterwaulers on American Idol) and the song is better than Hall's final version, it wouldn't have been suitable for NSNA's action-oriented opening credits sequence, which follows Bond on a mission that turns out to be a training exercise. Also, Hyman's ballad suffers from the then-popular "yacht rock" sound that instantly dated the other early '80s Bond themes (Hall's "NSNA," Rita Coolidge's "All Time High" from Octopussy). It took Duran Duran's "A View to a Kill" to break the spell, restore energy to the Bond theme and make it rock again.

In other Bond theme-related news, reports that the Quantum of Solace producers chose Amy Winehouse to sing the upcoming film's theme have been exaggerated. (Note to self: Never believe the non-BBC British press.) When Winehouse isn't busy headbutting and pimpslapping North Londoners or searching for her dealer, she and her frequent collaborator Mark Ronson have been working on the tune, but the Quantum of Solace producers haven't picked it as their theme yet. Will this be another one for the rejected Bond theme pile?