Song: "The Mexican" by the British rock band Babe Ruth Released: 1972 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The back half of "The Mexican" is a cover of Ennio Morricone's For a Few Dollars More main title theme (the band was also fond of the Fistful of Dollars main title theme and covered that too on another album). It's a fantastic track that I was first exposed to via the 2002 Strut Records album The Official Adventures of Grandmaster Flash ("The Mexican" is one of Flash's favorite breaks).
This is the first in a series of weekday posts about the tracks that are streamed during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Rome, Italian Style" block. From today until July 29, each post will give some background on a different track from the block's playlist (and maybe even include a music video that the artist made for the track). "Rome, Italian Style" airs Mondays through Thursdays at 11am on AFOS.
Not to be confused with the HBO sword-and-mandals show Rome, producers Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's new Capitol Records release Rome is a concept album inspired by swanky '60s and '70s Italian film scores that were penned by the ingenious likes of Riz Ortolani and Ennio Morricone ("Back in the early '60s, more experimental composition was looked down on, so the movies were a great vehicle to get away with doing all that," said Danger Mouse in a 2010 Guardian article about the making of Rome). The "Rome, Italian Style" playlist was built around the tracks from Rome, but because nine tracks aren't enough to fill a four-day-a-week, one-hour-per-day block, the playlist includes other songs that were influenced by the sounds of '60s and '70s Italian composers or their British and American counterparts (like John Barry and Henry Mancini), as well as covers of themes that Ortolani, Morricone, Barry, Mancini and others wrote during that era.
Song: "Theme of Rome" by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi featuring Edda Dell'Orso Released: 2011 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: During the recording of Rome, Danger Mouse and Luppi enlisted several musicians and singers who took part in many of the vintage Italian scores that influenced the project. One of these artists is singer Edda Dell'Orso, whose voice can be heard during Morricone's scores from Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker, Danger: Diabolik, a giallo called The Fifth Cord and Maddalena. Her wordless vocals grace "Theme of Rome," the album's opening track.
Dell'Orso's voice was like a guide through the surreal aural world of Morricone, and it acts as a guide once again as we enter the dark and melancholy Italian movie that Danger Mouse and Luppi have created with just their imaginary soundtrack and without any visuals. I have no idea what language Dell'Orso was singing in during those old Morricone cues (it's a language only she understands--Dell'Orso-ese?), but her voice during "Come Maddalena" is so reassuring and calming that I bet she was singing "And we're walking, we're walking."
Because today marks the centennial of influential composer Bernard Herrmann, CBS News recently assembled a lengthy slideshow/audio clip gallery that's a pretty good overview of Herrmann's career. It's fitting that CBS would be the one to give Herrmann such a thorough and reverent centennial tribute because Herrmann had a long association with the network, from the days when radio was a more dominant medium (Herrmann served as conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra and composed score music for countless CBS radio dramas, including Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast) to the period when CBS conquered TV in addition to radio (Herrmann provided music for several Twilight Zone episodes and composed the anthology show's somber and lesser-known first-season opening title theme).
These days, Herrmann is best known for his brilliant work with Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Ray Harryhausen, which probably would have irked Herrmann because the famously testy maestro hated being labeled a film composer and wrote for more than just the screen (for instance, he composed an opera based on Wuthering Heights). His final film score, is, to me, his most stunning achievement. Herrmann initially had no interest in working on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the ultimate vision of '70s New York-as-hell, but then he changed his mind because he liked the part of Paul Schrader's script where Travis Bickle poured peach brandy on his Corn Flakes.
Perhaps because Herrmann knew he wasn't long for this world at the time he wrote it (he finished recording it only a few hours before he died in his sleep on December 24, 1975), the Taxi Driver score sounds like the last few gasps of a dying man, with its thunderous, apocalyptic-sounding percussion, a melancholy theme for alto sax that was performed by an uncredited Ronny Lang and a final cue where the last few notes quote at a funereal pace a previous Herrmann theme, the ominous three-note motif that concludes Psycho.
Be sure to check out the mp3 clips of the Taxi Driver title themes and other Herrmann compositions that CBS News has posted--or enjoy Herrmann's cues from Taxi Driver, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, Jason and the Argonauts and Marnie whenever they're streamed during the "Assorted Fistful" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks.
(This post first appeared in a completely fucked-up form on Blogcritics. The following version doesn't contain any of the inane edits that were made to it by a really sloppy editor. One of those inane edits actually reworded a fact about a production company so that what it now said about that company was factually incorrect. It's so goddamn frustrating, man.)
The HBO medieval drama's most shocking twist brings to mind a similar moment from a classic '70s animated series
It's been a long time since an HBO drama series has made me think to myself at the end of each episode, "God, I'm dying to see what happens next week." The last HBO drama to elicit a reaction like that from me was David Simon's Iraq war show Generation Kill. But that was actually a miniseries, not a drama with a not-so-limited run like The Sopranos, so the last non-Generation Kill HBO drama where I was really invested in every character was The Wire three years ago--until Game of Thrones came along.
(WARNING: Anyone who has never watched either of the two shows that are mentioned in this post's title can leave now. Spoilers right after the parenthesis.)
Everyone who was involved in Raiders did incredible work in this film, including Steven Spielberg, John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, stars Harrison Ford and KarenAllen, truck chase stunt double Vic Armstrong and even Alfred Molina, in a bit part that was his first role in a feature film (Molina was last seen revisiting the sci-fi/fantasy genre when he played an assistant D.A. who quit prosecuting and was somehow able to get back his never-before-mentioned old job as a cop on Law & Order: L.A.).
Because it's celebrating its 30th anniversary this week (Paramount premiered it on June 12, 1981), here's a clever tribute to Raiders that I first posted in 2009. Ivan Guerrero is a videographer who's a whiz at crafting alternate-reality trailers for contemporary movies out of footage from much older movies. He recently put together a "pre-make" of Joss Whedon's currently-being-filmed Avengers adaptation that showed what the movie would have looked like in a parallel universe where it was made in 1952. One of Guerrero's earlier videos was a similar pre-make of Raiders that used tons of clips from Charlton Heston's Secret of the Incas, a 1954 Paramount B-movie that's been cited as an influence on Raiders.
In the parallel universe that's established by Guerrero's pre-make, their Indy sounds more like Moses than a regular guy who turns into Don Knotts whenever he's around snakes.
Paramount has never released Secret of the Incas on DVD, so Guerrero's fake trailer is one of the few places where we can get glimpses of this proto-Raiders. I enjoyed the fake trailer so much back in 2009 that I even played around in Photoshop and created a snapshot of an old-timey-sounding blurb about the alternate-universe Raiders that would have fit right in with the pre-make.
