March Madness March of the Day: "Main Title" from Spartacus by Alex North

Spartacus--the film version with Kirk Douglas in the arena, not the Starz show with a frequently topless Xena--isn't a perfect epic, but I prefer it over the 2000 Best Picture Oscar winner Gladiator. Plus, the more dully scripted and much less politically intriguing of the two Roman epics didn't put an end to the Hollywood blacklist, and it doesn't open with killer Saul Bass opening titles accompanied by a riveting and slightly discordant march by Alex North. The main title theme and much of the rest of North's Spartacus score seemed to be, as Jonathan Z. Kaplan theorized in the 2000 "101 Great Film Scores on CD" issue of Film Score Monthly magazine, an attempt to go against the grain of Miklós Rózsa-style epic scores (not that there's anything wrong with the stately Rózsa school of scoring from the '50s, but it wouldn't have belonged in a downbeat and cerebral epic like Spartacus).

An irresistible impulse to play it again and again: Anatomy of a Murder, which just got Criterion-ized, featured the first Hollywood film score by a black composer

Anatomy of a Murder star Lee Remick, Duke Ellington and bassist Jimmy Woode

Otto Preminger's 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder, which finally received the Criterion Collection treatment last week, is a classic of the courtroom genre. Every time Anatomy of a Murder turns up on TCM, I get an irresistible impulse a la the late Ben Gazzara's hotheaded soldier client character to stop whatever I'm doing and revisit the entire (and rather lengthy) film or at least a chunk of it.

Criterion posted three reasons why AOAM continues to shine, especially in a bothersome age of right-leaning, constantly-parodied-during-NTSF:SD:SUV:: procedurals, or as I like to call them, "Dad shows."



I second those reasons, but I'd combine reasons #1 and #3 so that it's "It gets the law right and it's not all black and white" and give the reason #3 slot to Duke Ellington's sensational, Grammy-winning score. It captures well both the tranquil Sunday-morning-stroll-through-the-town-square side (like in "Sunswept Sunday" and "Low Key Lightly") and the seamy white-trash side of the film's small-town Michigan backdrop (some, like Wynton Marsalis, think that the score is poorly edited into the film, a gripe that Marsalis expressed while discussing Ellington's score in the liner notes of Sony Legacy's 1999 AOAM CD reissue, which can be heard during the "AFOS Prime" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks).

Besides introducing then-controversial words like "intercourse," "contraceptive," "spermatogenesis" and "panties" into movie houses where conservatives reacted to hearing those words by crapping said panties, AOAM is notable for containing the first original score for a Hollywood film written by an African American composer. (A year before Ellington's effort, Miles Davis contributed a score to a French film, Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, a.k.a. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.) It's fitting that Criterion drops the AOAM Blu-ray during Black History Month because of that milestone.

The first Hollywood score by an African American is distinguished by a catchy theme Ellington described as "gutbucket." Written for the bass and first known as "Pie Eye's Blues," the composition wasn't originally intended to be the film's main theme. It was supposed to represent Pie Eye, the roadhouse bandleader character played by Ellington during his cameo in AOAM (in South Africa, Ellington's scene with Jimmy Stewart was banned from the film because interracial two-man piano playing was apparently too disturbing for them). But then someone in the AOAM crew changed the order of the cues ("Was this Duke's idea?," wondered CD reissue producer Phil Schaap in the reissue liner notes) and must have found "Pie Eye's Blues" to be the perfect fit with those jazzy and striking Saul Bass opening titles, and the rest is history.



Then Sir Duke handed AOAM's main theme over to Peggy Lee, who added lyrics to the melody in her cover version, which was titled "I'm Gonna Go Fishin'," a nice reference to the film it originated from and its main character's love of fishing.

After Ellington's AOAM score, in walked Quincy Jones (who had an impressive hot streak of crime or comedy film and TV series scores from the '60s to the '70s) and then the slightly less prolific blaxploitation-era likes of Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Johnny Pate and J.J. Johnson (while over on the Asian American side, Japanese American composer Paul Chihara contributed scores to Death Race 2000 and Prince of the City). Then in the '90s, Stanley Clarke, the still-active Terence Blanchard (who did a cover of the AOAM main title theme for his 1999 Jazz in Film album) and even RZA followed in Ellington and Jones' footsteps. They all penned great original scores, but there needs to be more film and TV composers of color besides those maestros.

Court's adjourned.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Jimmy Smith, "Walk on the Wild Side"

Song: "Walk on the Wild Side" by master Hammond B-3 organ player and Beastie Boys "Root Down" sample source Jimmy Smith
Released: 1962
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: I first took notice of "Walk on the Wild Side"--not to be confused with the Lou Reed classic of the same name--when I heard it during Martin Scorsese's Casino. I later discovered that Smith's exhilarating instrumental was a cover of a movie theme, Elmer Bernstein's theme from the 1962 New Orleans bordello drama Walk on the Wild Side, which starred Laurence Harvey, Capucine and Jane Fonda (that was an interesting way for Scorsese to insert a shout-out to Bernstein, whom he previously worked with on Cape Fear and The Age of Innocence: he needle-dropped a cover of one of Bernstein's earlier compositions).

The instrumental version of Bernstein's Walk on the Wild Side theme accompanies one of legendary movie title designer Saul Bass' best opening title sequences, which, unlike most of Bass' other sequences, doesn't use any animation and is simply footage of an alley cat, cleverly edited to the tempo of Bernstein's slinky-sounding theme. The catfight at the end of Bass' titles pits a black cat against a white cat. It's like a Real Housewives of Atlanta fight scene with better acting.

(Photo source: The Movie Title Stills Collection)

Though its lyrics contain gospel-style references to the promised land of heaven, it's odd how this theme from a then-risque '60s movie about New Orleans hoes has become a gospel standard. It's like if Blondie's "Call Me" from American Gigolo got rewritten as "Call Me (Hello Lord)" or something.

Walk on the Wild Side star Jane Fonda models Timbuk2's new "Hitchhiking Ho" line.

All the other "Rome, Italian Style" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Goldfrapp, "Pilots"
Mike Patton, "Deep Down"
Barry Adamson, "The Big Bamboozle"
John Zorn, "Erotico (The Burglars)"

The Warriors by Tom Whalen: He'll shove his pencil up your ass and turn you into a Popsicle

Graphic designer Tom Whalen created a nifty alternate poster for The Warriors, one of my favorite flicks from the '70s (it's hard to believe its badass synthesizer score, which every hip-hop DJ or cratedigger will tell you has got breaks galore, was written by the same composer who was involved with the not-so-Warriors-like "Nadia's Theme"):

The Warriors' controversial, poorly received original poster was a menacing-looking portrait of all the gangs from the film. Moviegoers wouldn't be this frightened by a one-sheet again until 2007, when a shirtless, Jim Morrison-spoofing John C. Reilly scared away 90 percent of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story's target audience.

Here's another Whalen-designed alternate poster I like:

I think Whalen's poster is creepier than the official Shining poster designed by the legendary Saul Bass in 1980. Somewhere, a Bass fan who's following me on Twitter will read this and proceed to unfollow me.

Saul Wars

Here's another awesome mash-up of Saul Bass and The Star War, created by illustrator Russell Walks:

Woops, Guinness should be spelled with two n's, not one.

[Via Super Punch]

"Shutup, I Love This Title Screen," Part 7

Anatomy of a Murder
Title design by Saul Bass

"Shutup, I Love This Title Screen," Part 6

North by Northwest
Title design by Saul Bass

"Shutup, I Love This Title Screen," Part 5

Casino
Titles by Elaine and Saul Bass