FILM SCORE FRIDAY 1/3/03

GEORGE ROY HILL 1922 - 2002

Oscar winning director George Roy Hill died on December 20th of complications from Parkinson's disease. Hill studied at Yale and served two years as a Marine fighter pilot in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he toured as a stage actor before returning to the Marines as a pilot during the Korean War. He turned his experiences into a teleplay and sold it to NBC's "Kraft Television Theater" and was soon directing for television, including a live version of the Titanic docudrama A Night to Remember. He also directed for the Broadway stage, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Look Homeward Angel, before turning his attentions to the cinema.

His first feature was an adaptation of the play Period of Adjustment, which he had directed on Broadway, and within just a few years he had moved from stage adaptations to the epic scale of Hawaii. His smash hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid gave him the clout to take on more personal projects, such as the stylish, moving adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.

One year after Slaughterhouse, Hill had his biggest boxoffice smash with The Sting, which also won him the Oscar for Best Director. In his acceptance speech, the best advice he could give his fellow directors was to hire his co-workers on The Sting: "It helps, believe me."

The Great Waldo Pepper, a pet project of Hill's, was a rare boxoffice failure for star Robert Redford, while Slap Shot was a raunchy hockey comedy that pushed the envelope of profanity in movies. The World According to Garp was the most acclaimed of his later films, receiving two Oscar nominations including one for Glenn Close's impressive film debut. He retired after his unsuccessful final film, Funny Farm, and served on the national board of the Directors Guild of America. He is survived by two sons, two daughters, and twelve grandchildren.

Though he only directed fourteen features, four of them won Oscars for their scores. Thoroughly Modern Millie won Elmer Bernstein what is still, shockingly, his only Oscar, while Butch Cassidy won for both its anachronistic score and the popular song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." The score for The Sting, adapted by Marvin Hamlisch (who won all three music Oscars that year) from the music of Scott Joplin, received some criticism since ragtime was not the music of the era The Sting depicted, but since ragtime did already exist (and was a favorite of Hill's) the score is not truly anachronistic in the way that Bacharach's sixties-style vocals for Butch Cassidy are. Georges Delerue won his only Oscar for the charming score to Hill's A Little Romance, though its domination by a familiar Vivaldi tune made its "Best Original Score" status a little curious.

PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT - Lyn Murray
TOYS IN THE ATTIC - George Duning
THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT - Elmer Bernstein
HAWAII - Elmer Bernstein
THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE - Elmer Bernstein
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID - Burt Bacharach
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE - Glenn Gould
THE STING - Marvin Hamlisch (adaptation)
THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER - Henry Mancini
SLAP SHOT - Elmer Bernstein (music supervisor)
A LITTLE ROMANCE - Georges Delerue
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP - David Shire (adaptation)
THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL - Dave Grusin
FUNNY FARM - Elmer Bernstein

Rock musician and occasional film composer Joe Strummer died at his home in Somerset, England of a heart attack, on December 21st. Born John Graham Mellor, Strummer was the son of a diplomat, and was one of the founders of the seminal punk band The Clash, serving as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Their two-album set London Calling was named the best album of the 1980s by Rolling Stone magazine.

Strummer occasionally dabbled as a film composer, writing the scores for Walker (released on CD by Virgin), Permanent Record, and Grosse Pointe Blank. The Clash song "London Calling" has gained a new popularity on film soundtracks, popping up in such films as Intimacy, Billy Elliot, and, incongruously, Die Another Day.

The Guardian reported that at Strummer's funeral, his coffin was decorated with a Stetson hat and the slogans "Vinyl Rules" and "Question Authority." He is survived by his wife, two daughters and a stepdaughter.

Our friend and contributor Daniel Schweiger pointed out that in last Friday's column, I erroneously attributed the score of Nicolas Cage's directorial debut SONNY to Cliff Martinez. The score was, in fact, written by Clint Mansell.

The two composers are easy to tell apart. Mansell works regularly with respected indie director Darren Aronovsky and had his biggest success with the drug film Requiem For a Dream. Martinez, on the other hand, works with Steven Soderbergh and had his biggest hit with the score for Traffic. Got it?

Narc - Cliff Martinez - TVT

January 14
25th Hour - Terence Blanchard
January 28
The Recruit - Klaus Badelt - Varese Sarabande
Two Weeks Notice - John Powell - Varese Sarabande
February 4
Gods and Generals - John Frizzell, Randy Edelman - Sony Classical
February 11
Diamonds Are Forever - John Barry - EMI/Capitol
Live and Let Die - George Martin - EMI/Capitol
On Her Majesty's Secret Service - John Barry - EMI/Capitol
February 18
The Guys - Mychael Danna - Sony Classical
February 25
Goldfinger - John Barry - EMI/Capitol
Thunderball - John Barry - EMI/Captol
You Only Live Twice - John Barry - EMI/Capitol
Date Unknown
Amerika - Basil Poledouris - Prometheus
The Big Sky - Dimitri Tiomkin - Screen Archives/BYU
The Busy Body/The Spirit is Willing - Vic Mizzy - Percepto
The Martian Chronicles - Stanley Myers - Airship One
Mighty Joe Young, etc. - Roy Webb, et al - Monstrous Movie Music
Nicholas Nickleby - Rachel Portman - Varese Sarabande
This Island Earth - Herman Stein, et al - Monstrous Movie Music

January 3 - Van Dyke Parks born (1941)
January 4 - Lionel Newman born (1916)
January 6 - Mario Nascimbene died (2002)

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN - John Williams

"The composer, John Williams, has concocted his most brilliant pastiche in decades: The score manages to combine finger-snapping, lounge-lizard jazz motifs (the Frank Sinatra/Henry Mancini "Come Fly With Me" fits right in) with suspenseful lines in the Jaws (1975) tradition, along with longer, more melancholy passages redolent of Leonard Bernstein and Charles Ives."

David Edelstein, Slate.com

"And John Williams's uncharacteristically jaunty, saxophone-flavored score captures that spirit of frisky devil-may-care merriment."

Stephen Holden, New York Times

"Spielberg has fun re-creating this and other aspects of mid-'60s America, from the vivid, geometric title sequence, to John Williams' Henry Mancini-like score to scenes of the Abagnale family watching "Sing Along With Mitch" -- and actually singing along."

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

"How often do you get to be hustled by pros? That includes subsidiary players, from stiletto-sharp walk-ons like Jennifer Garner of ''Alias'' as a call girl who scams the scam artist, to composer John Williams, forgoing the pomp that has made him a rich man and reverting to the hepcat small-combo stylings of his early film scores."

Ty Burr, Boston Globe

"Although John Williams' jazzy, quirky score, reminiscent of Henry Mancini's "Pink Panther" work, provides uplift, all the film really needs is an endless loop of one of its period songs - Frank Sinatra's 'Come Fly With Me.'"

Steven Rosen, Denver Post

"Composer John Williams temporarily abandons his routine bombast for a theme in which nervous noir scherzos evoke the music that Bernard Herrmann composed for Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."

Charles Taylor, Salon.com

"Setting a fizzy mood via some very mid-'60s animated opening credits and a jazzy John Williams theme that harks back to his "Johnny" Williams days as pianist for Henry Mancini's orchestra, pic gets off to a jaunty start."

Todd McCarthy, Variety

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND - Alex Wurman

"The superb soundtrack and inspired song selections (augmented by Alex Wurman's grim, basso piano scoring), identify each spook by music -- Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" for Patricia, the Who's "Won't Be Fooled Again" for Byrd -- adding texture."

Robert Koehler, Variety

THE HOURS - Philip Glass

"I am aware that for some people this homage to Virginia Woolf is a profoundly moving experience, but I found the film excruciatingly flat-footed, with one of the most exasperating scores (by Philip Glass) ever written. Someone must have thought that Glass' music, with its incessant sawing strings (da-da da-da da-da da-da da-da da-da da-da da-da da-da etc.), would be the equivalent of Cunningham's (or Woolf's) rushing prose and would weave together the various scenes and give the picture momentum. They forgot that that prose is always flowing off in new directions and carving new tributaries, whereas Glass either repeats himself or uses the sorts of progressions that would bore a reasonably intuitive Music 101 student after about six bars. The music just skips along the surface, homogenizing everything it touches. It's possible, however, that without Glass' score there would be nothing to distract you from the overemphatic dialogue."

David Edelstein, Slate.com

"With its own emphasis on repetition, Philip Glass' lush score enhances these connections, heightening the film's emotional quotient and giving the story added grandeur, melancholy and uneasiness. As Cunningham himself wrote in liner notes to the score, 'We are creatures who repeat ourselves, we humans, and if we refuse to embrace repetition -- if we balk at art that seeks to praise its textures and rhythms, its endlessly subtle variations -- we ignore much of what is meant by life itself.'"

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

"David Hare's script prunes digressions, interjects monologues, and resists voice-over -- only for the stampeding arpeggios of Philip Glass's score to rush into the breach."

Dennis Lim, Village Voice

"And in the opening scene of "The Hours," the eloquent, somber screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's meditation on that suicide (it won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Woolf scrawls an anguished farewell letter to her husband, then hurries into the muddy water like Joan of Arc embracing the fire, accompanied by the churning, ethereal strains of Philip Glass's score. Mr. Glass's surging minimalist score, with its air of cosmic abstraction, serves as ideal connective tissue for a film that breaks down temporal barriers."

Stephen Holden, New York Times

"The movie has to overcome an over-all morbidity and Philip Glass's music, as well as its fractured time sequence, and, amazingly, it doesóit sails through."

David Denby, The New Yorker

"In one location flowers are bought, in another displayed, in another discarded, while Philip Glass' piano score underlines the images with a sense of strangeness and sympathy."

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

"The rhythms of "The Hours" are deliberate, circular, like Philip Glass' classical score, which is characteristically repetitive but does an effective job of bridging the various stories."

Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune

"Philip Glass' score, which makes generous use of some of his pre-existing compositions, is clearly designed to connect the three story strands emotionally by rolling across them so sweepingly. At times, this creates unusual frissons that would not have been achieved by a traditional score, but it is just as often intrusive and too prominent in the overall scheme."

Todd McCarthy, Variety

"This ultimately proves insufficient to lend meaning to their lives or profundity to a grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score ó tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important."

Richard Shickel, Time Magazine

THE PIANIST - Wojciech Kilar

"Wojciech Kilar's effective score is overshadowed on the soundtrack by the classical music pieces, especially those of Chopin, that speak to Wladyslaw's profession as well as to the culture that is being suppressed, if not obliterated."

Todd McCarthy, Variety

PINOCCHIO - Nicola Piovani

"At times furthering the echo of Fellini, Nicola Piovani's rich score ranges from carnivalesque tunes that recall Nino Rota's work for the late director to more soulful full-bodied symphonic themes."

David Rooney, Variety

"That's because the English dialogue track has that dreaded hollow and colorless sound of most dubbed movies, and its flatness is further underlined by the contrasting richness of Nicola Piovani's lovely score."

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

SONNY - Clint Mansell

"Scoring is mostly thoughtful, as is source music from Bach to disco."

Lisa Nesselson, Variety

In this week's installment, the meanest of all critics manages to find some almost complimentary things to say about various film scores of the 1970s, from his book Reverse Image published by Crown.

THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN

Richard H. Kline's color cinematography is decent, the special effects are efficient, the music [by Gil Melle] is appropriate.

Jerry Goldsmith's score avoids repetition of an obvious theme (it is, in the ordinary sense, almost tuneless) and can eerily subsume the sound of a leaky faucet in a murdered woman's apartment.

Furthermore, Malick obtained the services of Ennio Morricone for a score that, though perhaps not among the celebrated Italian's very best, still soars above the Hollywood norm. One looks and listens with rapt wonderment; every prospect, every permutation of the simple, basic melody, pleases, and only man is vile.

John Williams' music is good when it does not heave too much.

The visuals are cogently matched with Jerry Fielding's score, which imitates (perhaps actually quotes) the Stravinsky of the Concerto in D and the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto -- spare, sinewy, nervous music.

Buttressed by Gerry Fisher's nicely noncommittal cinematography and Alex North's jantily rustic score, Wise Blood hops and lurches to its trivial, tremendous climax in a manner Miss O'Connor would have approved -- which is praise enough.

Fittingly, the film music game that only I really enjoy returns with two eclectic composers who, though they both worked in features, made strong impressions with TV series about alien invasions -- Dominic Frontiere and Mark Snow himself.

Danielle Steel's Palomino - Danielle Steel's Mixed Blessings
Fer de Lance - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Flying Nun - I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later
Freebie and the Bean - Starsky and Hutch
The Invaders - The X-Files
Lost Flight - Crash: The Mystery of Flight 1501
Matt Houston - T.J. Hooker
The Outer Limits - The Twilight Zone (2002)
The Train Robbers - Down the Long Hills

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