movie score | The Most Beautiful Fraud

This is a regular list of random things that have fueled my love affair with cinema over the years.

I LOVE seeing my hometown in the movies. Although it’s been three-and-a-half decades since I left Philadelphia, I love the city from afar, and seeing it on the screen always triggers mixed emotions in me — nostalgia, a bit of pride, a love of family, fleeting homesickness, relief that I’m now over 2,000 miles away.

Whether it’s the gloomy blue-collar mid-1970s neighborhood that was Sylvester Stallone’s urban gym in ROCKY,

or the socially diverse human interest map of TRADING PLACES,

or the fantastically imagined near-future dystopia of Terry Gilliam’s 12 MONKEYS,

or the quiet but very menacing haunted row homes of M. Night Shyamalan’s THE SIXTH SENSE,

or the streets and sites, both mundane and grand, photographed so mysteriously and mythically in Shyamalan’s UNBREAKABLE,

… seeing this city again on the screen reminds me that Philadelphia is an exciting, spirited and remarkably historic city, and it was an inspirational and fun place to call home the first 15 years of my life.

The movie with the most vibrant and beautiful shots of Philadelphia is definitely Brian De Palma’s BLOW OUT. From the patriotically decked-out tourist destination of Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River to City Hall, the nation’s largest municipal building; and through the display window of Wanamaker’s, the city’s first department store, to the marble, gold, red and cream interior of the 30th Street train station (see UNBREAKBLE photo) and the pedestrian walkway beneath the Wissahickon Bridge in Fairmount Park, BLOW OUT is an authentic tour of the City of Brotherly Love in the early ’80s.

Damn!, what is that feeling? Homesickness? I think it’ll be time for a trip back to Philly soon!

I LOVE Barbra Streisand’s film debut as Fanny Brice in the 1968 production of the musical FUNNY GIRL. Streisand played the role on Broadway from 1964-66, but producers wanted a more established Hollywood actress for the movie. Shirley MacLaine turned it down, and director William Wyler insisted on Barbra. The movie might be sketchy on biographical truth, but there’s no denying Streisand’s extraordinary, powerful intorduction to film audiences. A star was indeed born.
(Streisand split the Oscar for Best Actress in a rare tie with Katharine Hepburn in THE LION IN WINTER.)

http://vimeo.com/75714386

I LOVE the attack of the skeletons and sword fight in the 1963 fantasy adventure JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS. The movie was helmed by a television director, but stop motion animation genius Ray Harryhausen directed the special effects scenes, including the giant living statue Talos, the murderous winged Harpies, and the seven-headed snake creature Hydra. But the most memorable of Harryhausen’s Argonaut antagonists is the army of sword-fighting skeletons. This scene has been copied many, many times in the 50 years since, but never with the imagination, patience, sense of wonder, excitement, talent and love of craft that Harryhausen brought to all of his creations, from MIGHTY JOE YOUNG in 1949 to CLASH OF THE TITANS in 1981.

I LOVE this movie poster. EYES OF LAURA MARS will be on another of my lists soon enough, thanks to a challenge from a friend, but this striking image has been a favorite since the night in 1978 that a 14-year-old me sneaked into a theater to see the movie.

I LOVE the scene in HIGH ANXIETY in which Mel Brooks is attacked by birds. He’s poking Alfred Hitchcock in the ribs, of course … these birds don’t want to peck eyeballs, they’re just doing what birds do. HIGH ANXIETY isn’t Mel’s best movie — hello YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, hello BLAZING SADDLES, hello THE PRODUCERS — but it is a delightfully chaotic mix of two particular favorites: 1970s Mel Brooks and Alfred Hitchcock’s entire film canon. (I also love the joke about movie music cliches: During a suspenseful car chase, Mel Brooks is jolted and confused by the sudden rush of bombastic, overwrought action movie music. An orchestra is performing in a bus that passes him in the next lane. Classic Brooks. And I just adore Cloris Leachman as sinister sex fiend Nurse Diesel.)

I LOVE Oddjob, my favorite James Bond villain, portrayed by Harold Sakata in GOLDFINGER. That hat, those heads …
(Strangely, hours after I added Oddjob to my list, I read Richard Kiel, the actor who played “Jaws” in the James Bond movies THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and MOONRAKER, had just died. Jaws was an effective bad guy also … at least until he switched sides in MOONRAKER to help Bond.)

I LOVE James Coburn’s bid for freedom on a bicycle in THE GREAT ESCAPE. Australian Flight Officer Sedgwick is a secondary character in the movie, but he is “the manufacturer,” the go-to guy who can build or repurpose just about anything to help his fellow POWs escape a Nazi camp. During the mass prison break, Sedgwick snatches a bicycle to start his solo journey through the German countryside into Nazi-occupied France. THE GREAT ESCAPE is filled with the toughest, coolest, smartest men’s men of the era: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, Richard Attenborough and Coburn; but though he had the least amount of screen time and lines among his co-stars, Coburn’s Sedgwick calmly and in good humor performs his tasks and waits for his opportunity, not even breaking a sweat during a close call with Nazi officers at a French cafe.

I LOVE the soundtrack for Brian De Palma’s 1978 suspense thriller THE FURY. John Williams composed the music during his 1970s peak, but the work is much different, darker, more other-worldly, than JAWS, STAR WARS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, SUPERMAN or his other soundtracks of the period. It most resembles his score for the sadly forgotten DRACULA of the same year, the version with Frank Langella, Laurence Olivier and Donald Pleasance. Both THE FURY and DRACULA soundtracks are hard to come by: They’re out of print and will cost you a few pints of blood … though if you ask nicely I might burn copies for your late-night listening pleasure.)

I LOVE the scene in David Lynch’s THE ELEPHANT MAN in which John Merrick shows his benefactors a photograph of his mother. This is a moment of wonderful acting from three veterans … watch how characters react to the photograph and how they react to each other’s reactions. Splendid, heartbreaking. “I must have been a great disappointment to her.”

I LOVE the 1941 romantic screwball comedy THE LADY EVE. Barbara Stanwyck plays a card shark who boards an elite cruise ship with her con artist father to cheat lots of money from wealthy passengers. She sets her eyes on Henry Fonda as an easy mark … and of course falls in love with him. Stanwyck is absolutely enchanting, and Charles Coburn is a hoot as her father, a criminal with the perfect touch of brains, heart and class. “Don’t be vulgar, Jean,” he reminds her. “Let us be crooked, but never common.” Henry Fonda is the consummate foil, head over heels for Eve and smart enough to know he’ll be better off for it. I’m so ferociously critical of romantic comedies that my friends think I just don’t like “that kind of movie,” that I’m missing some sort of gene that would allow me to moon over the happiness of characters in movies. No. Rather it’s that today’s romantic comedies are creatively stillborn, unimaginative, cheap wish fulfillment fantasies for lazy sods. I actually really love romantic comedies, thanks very much, and THE LADY EVE is one of my favorites.

This is the third of a weekly column of random things I love from movies I’ve seen over the years. And tell me in the comments something you’ve never forgotten from a movie.

I LOVE Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams in the 1991 and 1993 feature film versions of the Charles Addams New Yorker comics and the mid-1960s television sitcom. Ricci is so perfectly cast, so marvellously deadpan, as the darkly serious daughter in a family full of eccentric misfits, it’s really no wonder Hollywood has had no idea how to cast her in films since — to many, she’ll ALWAYS be Wednesday Addams (it’s the Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates Syndrome). The actress was only 11 when she first portrayed Wednesday, but she demonstrated natural talent and the camera loves her dinstinct feature … I truly hope she has a future in the movies.

I LOVE the stunning cinematography of the 1955 movie THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. That this incredible film was the only one ever directed by English actor Charles Laughton is a mystery … the director’s vision is inspired and wholely unique, and he is supported by a literate script, superb actors and, most critically, gorgeous photography by camera master Stanley Cortez. Laughton and Cortez looked back to the German expressionism of the 1920s and ’30s to tell this dark fairy tale, using the same shadows, nightmarish sets and distorted arrangements that were popular in horror and noir. This is such a great movie that almost any facet of it — Robert Mitchum’s evil preacher, Shelley Winters’ widowed mother, Lillian Gish’s take-no-guff redneck, the love-hate knuckle tattoos, the menacing hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” — could make my 10 Things I Love list. But the cinematography, that is what has haunted and affected me for decades.

I LOVE Sting’s fabulously tricked-out Vespa in the 1979 feature film adaptation of The Who’s rock opera QUADROPHENIA. The film producers wanted Sting’s character, Ace Face, the “ultimate Mod”, to ride a vintage Vespa 160, but the model had been discounted years earlier and the scooter company couldn’t find enough identical bikes to satisfy the filmmakers’ continuity needs. More modern scooters were rebuilt to replicate the rare GS, which makes the tragic end of Sting’s beautiful set of wheels much more easy to bear.

I LOVE the twisted relationship in THE GRIFTERS between Lilly, Roy and Myra, a trio of con artists who scam, cheat and deceive their way into the mother of all Greek tragedies. Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Bening are aces in this 1990 crime drama. It breaks my heart that this movie is all but forgotten today; it’s ripe for rediscovery … and just try to predict the outcome of this con game, based on a hard-boiled novel by tough guy Jim Thompson.

I LOVE that California new wave/ska/rock band Oingo Boingo starred in the movie FORBIDDEN ZONE one year before the release of their first album, ONLY A LAD. And if you’re familiar with Oingo Boingo, you’ll guess that this is one crazy frigging movie. What do you expect? — Hervé Villechaize, Tattoo from FANTASY ISLAND, is also in it, as is Susan Tyrell, the oddball actress from Andy Warhol’s circle. Boingo’s lead singer, Danny Elfman, is now one of the most sought-after film composers in Hollywood. This is his first score. Of course, mainstream audiences found the movie offensive, but it has since become a midnight cult favorite.

I LOVE the fantastic opening scene of Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL. For three-and-a-half minutes the camera tracks both a car with a ticking bomb and a couple walking through the streets of Tijuana. There is no trickery and no film edits. The camera glides over rooftops, around corners, alongside moving cars and pedestrians, all while staying in perfect step with Henry Mancini’s hip jazzy score. This is the kind of filmmaking that invigorates my love affair with the silver screen.

I LOVE that the best thing about JAWS 2 is a 13-word tagline … one still used by people who weren’t even born yet in 1978.

I LOVE Bernard Herrmann’s woozy score for Hitchcock’s VERTIGO.

I LOVE Edward Norton’s incredible film debut in the 1996 courtroom drama PRIMAL FEAR. Norton introduces himself with a powerful performance that will leave you guessing until the end, and he has certainly made good on this calling card. The last two movies I’ve seen him in have both been directed by Wes Anderson — MOONRISE KINGDOM and THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL — and Norton has thrived in that director’s rarefied world. In this PRIMAL FEAR clip, Norton manages to hold attention in the company of some terrific co-stars, including my favorite, Laura Linney, and Frances McDormand, Alfre Woodard and Richard Gere.

I LOVE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Not the Disney animated musical. I’ve never seen that version. I’m talking about the breathtaking 1946 French version, LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE. This was directed by Jean Cocteau, a hypnotic, romantic, visually enchanting masterpiece — yes, I’ll say it: One of the greatest motion pictures ever made. It’s one of the few I watch annually, a movie that always delights, always entertains, always restores a bit of childlike wonder.

The Most Beautiful Fraud

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