"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: The John Gregory Orchestra, "It Takes a Thief"

Song: "It Takes a Thief" by The John Gregory Orchestra
Released: 1972
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: British bandleader/arranger John "Chaquito" Gregory's cover of Dave Grusin's slick It Takes a Thief theme lacks the funky bass playing and urgent percussion that I love so much about Grusin's third-season arrangement of the theme. But Gregory's rendition is the only cover of the theme that's available (it's also the only recording of the theme that's available), so it'll do.

The It Takes a Thief theme is my favorite Grusin tune. It's the perfect opener for a '60s espionage procedural I've often found to be more enjoyable than most '60s American spy shows because it has a criminal as its hero, which is more interesting to me than the company man types who were frequently the leads in '60s spy shows. Plus, as Alexander Mundy, Robert Wagner was the epitome of cool and quite skilled with the show's moments of light, not-too-campy-like-the-worst-seasons-of-U.N.C.L.E. comedy. This ease with comedy was a skill that the future Number Two later put to great use when he literally made a mess of his debonair image in the funniest thing he ever did, the 1989 SNL "Sloppy Eater" sketch (Parks and Recreation has got to find a way for Rob Lowe to work in his amusing and dead-on Wagner impression, which he's done in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and on talk shows).

In 2006, Universal announced that Will Smith was attached to a big-screen version of It Takes a Thief, which hasn't been made yet. Nah, I can't see him playing a smooth thief like Mundy. Smith is more entertaining when he's playing a fish-out-of-water hero like in the original Men in Black and Hancock and is less entertaining when he tries to be suave. Mundy is more of a Taye Diggs or Idris Elba role or a role for Michael Weatherly, whose onscreen dad on NCIS happens to be Wagner himself.

Pushing for more Asian Americans as leads on screen or in fiction is an uphill battle that I continue to be passionate about, so why not think outside the box and get Sung Kang from Justin Lin's Fast Five, who looked like he was channeling Mundy in that surprisingly good heist flick, to play him? Just rename him Alexander Moon.

Then again, why make an It Takes a Thief movie when the USA show White Collar is currently doing a better job at channeling Wagner's old show than whatever the movie version would have attempted to do?

Memorable quotes from commentary tracks #1

"When I first think about composers and choose one either from the experience of the work he's done or by a particular score that he's written, I always like to sit down with him obviously and run the film and let him take the film back with him and play it at home a couple of times and then come back and discuss what is needed, where music is needed or where music is not needed. I mean, there's a time during Bullitt when Quincy Jones was going to write the score, when I ran the picture with him early on, and he said, 'Nope. That's a mother. I couldn't put music onto that. It would only spoil it.' So he felt that to... I agree. A lot of cases, music does take away from the drama. Once you hear music, you're inclined to think that it's Hollywood, so I was very careful with the music in Eddie Coyle because the one thing we avoided all the way through was making a Hollywood movie."

--Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle director Peter Yates, from the Coyle commentrak (where he also praises Dave Grusin's jazzy Coyle score, which some have derided as "the sort of thing that gives the electric piano a bad name")