Soundtrack Spotlight #6: Nunzio (Lalo Schifrin)

Nunzio is a rather special Soundtrack Spotlight case to me because I am very close friends with David Proval, the actor who played Nunzio in the 1978 Universal production (filmed, by all the accounts I have heard, during one of the hottest New York summers on record, with both the 1977 black-out and the Son of Sam playing a role, albeit minor, in the film's production). Every time I have seen even short clips of the film, it gives me a profoundly privileged feeling in knowing that the Nunzio character speaks to aspects of David Proval's persona that I have seen emerge endlessly from him in reality, and I am grateful to have known him and to have been one of the beneficiaries of his warmth and trust. David is one of the biggest mensches I have encountered; he truly went out of his way to help give me a start in film world and has encouraged me every step of the way since I have known him. It was through him that I also have met the film's writer, Jimmy Andronica, who also plays Nunzio's brother in the film and is a native to the part of Brooklyn in which the film is shot, and I have spoken with the film's director, Paul Williams, on the phone. It actually doesn't end there, either. I just finished shooting a fundraising trailer for the little boy (now grown man) who played Nunzio's 5-year-old nephew. So, I am not exactly going into this with an air of impartiality. I think highly of the film because, in it, someone I have grown to love and admire as a friend plays a character you grow to love and admire as the creation of a gifted actor whose greatest part this is...and that is including his performance in Scorsese's Mean Streets (third billed after De Niro and Keitel). He plays Nunzio with bold humor, fascinating nuance and gravitas--three ingredients that rarely function so well in confluence. Watching this performance made David one of my favorite actors and I sometimes have gotten a little emotional just watching choices he is making as an actor in this film. So, okay, this is not a review of the film or the actor in the film, or at least it shouldn't be. My prejudices are out in the open about the score, but I nonetheless think an average listener would get a great deal out of Schifrin's usual mastery.

Lalo Schifrin's music complements the film in spades. Funny story: I was simultaneously disturbed and delighted at one point to pass a stand on West 34th Street in New York City playing a badly dubbed kung-fu flick featuring Nunzio's theme on the soundtrack. I was flabbergasted, considering that Nunzio is not exactly a movie known by many. Schifrin scores the film with tracks and cues of great bravado and piano-based strains heavy on pathos (yes, versus bathos). One often cannot help but think that Bill Conti's score from Rocky had at least some influence in Schifrin's approach to scoring Nunzio, but I think it stands perfectly well on its own and is certainly one of my favorite scores of the composer's long, prolific and distinguished career (along with his unreleased score from The Christian Licorice Store, which could very well be the next Soundtrack Spotlight). The film tells the story of a "mentally slow" Brooklyn grocery delivery boy/man who thinks he is Superman, who enjoys a puppy-love attraction to a bakery cashier, played by Tovah Feldshuh. My favorite lines in the film: "Superman don't take tips" and "You break those eggs and I'm gonna break your head, Nunzio!" I am not going to break down technicalities of the score for this, like I usually do. This score is pure whimsy and emotion, nothing much else to really say. Just enjoy it, really. And for the retrophile, you've got the occasional disco elements which are especially present in "Theme from Nunzio" and "Candy Store Frenzy".

Download the score here. Thanks to the boys at Isbum's Place and Vintage Vinyl for the upload. My favorite track is perhaps "Nunzio in Love," with "Main Title" coming in a close second.

Soundtrack Spotlight #5: La Course du Lievre a Travers les Champs (Francis Lai)

Bar none, never again will you hear another composer's score sound so extraordinarily reminiscent of the most idiosyncratic work of Morricone...and wind up doing it so right, with originality to spare! The vastly underrated René Clément's La course du lievre a travers les champs (1972) is one of my favorite crime films, and Lai's dolefully dulcet strains throughout his scoring of the film demonstrate that, on occasion, he could eclectically reach well far beyond the soporific constraints of the scores he composed for Claude Lelouch and popular American box-office soapers and romancers like Love Story and Mayerling. The chords that end most of Lai's phrases almost literally scream "Morricone!" and most everything at the very least echoes the prolific Italian scoremaster, but there is something about this score that transcends and defies accusations of empty-headed mimicry.

The film was released in the U.S. in late 1972 under the new title ...And Hope to Die, dubbed into English and cut from 140 minutes to 99 minutes. The original French title translates as The Chase of the Hare Across the Fields. If you ever get the opportunity, go out of your way to see it, especially if you are a crime film enthusiast. The film is available on DVD in its full version in France (I own the Russian disc). It features Robert Ryan in one of his last great roles before his death the following year, along with Jean-Louis Trintignant (just fresh after the critical and commercial success of The Conformist), Tisa Farrow (yes, Mia's sister), the stalwart Aldo Ray and the gorgeous Lea Massari as Sugar. Based on a novel Black Friday by crime fiction luminary David Goodis (upon whose "Shoot the Piano Player" the Truffaut film is based and upon whose "Dark Passage" the Bogart film is based), La course du lievre a travers les champs is by far among the most unusual works of its kind. Filmed in Montreal and rural Quebec, the film tells the story of a hoodlum who seems a misfit fink even among his own kind. On the run from his former gang, who he has somehow double-crossed, he falls in with a motley group of hoods, shepherded by a gravel-voiced ringleader Charlie (Robert Ryan), who are all hiding out in a country-house and shoulder-deep in a grand (read: grandly fouled-up) plot to kidnap a dead girl and holding her for ransom under the pretense that she is alive. I openly recommend this film as well as Clément's Le passager de la pluie in the same breath as any of the Melville crime-genre masterworks like La cercle rouge.

The film consciously opens the way Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West opens, establishing early on that much of Clément's film and not just its score is, in part, a pastiche (or perhaps just simply a meditation) on a director he clearly admired. It would be more than a decade until Leone honed his aesthetic on something other than the Western genre, so an acknowledged use of Leonian influence on a crime film seemed at the time, undoubtedly apropos and intriguing. The film and the score, however, are more than just works that hinge tremulously on the viability of other works. Lai's interlarded use of the pan-flute and a man's melodic whistle to season moments and construct character within musical modalities is novel and admirable, even if one wrongly chooses to reduce it to a case of monkey-hear-monkey-do. Clément places Trintignant's Tony/Froggie character to consciously exist within filmic genre constructs, and within a world invaded by reminders of childhood and the act of play. The score reflects this curious stylistic and directorial pursuit -- and it becomes revolutionary because a score of this time, far before a score like Goldsmith's 1990 Gremlins II soundtrack, has the ability of commenting on a film's sense of self-awareness as well as the handling of the other themes therein that, at first glance, have nothing to do with such reflexivity.

Download the score here. This, again, is not my link. Thanks to the now sadly defunct Isbum's Place and its archives. I recommend the following tracks especially: "Generique Fin" (which innovatively stews the Morricone strains with elements of Jarre), "Main Theme," "Finale/End Title" and "La Course du Lievre".

Soundtrack Spotlight #3: Busting (Billy Goldenberg)

Okay, for this Soundtrack Spotlight, I'm givin' you even more Goldenberg. I feel, for at least these two posts, it is my duty to institute a Goldenberg revival because I really feel he is one of the finest film composers ever, and one of his finest scores is from the 1973 police buddy action/comedy/drama Busting, starring Elliott Gould and Robert Blake, and directed by Peter Hyams (in his directorial debut).

Last month, the Busting soundtrack was released for the first time on an official, legitimate disc. This soundtrack is extraordinary. I saw the film last year at Anthology Film Archives on an edited-for-TV print that had seen its better days (the film actually broke midway through). Hearing Goldenberg's score in a theater, no matter the quality of the print, was exhilarating in and of itself. There has never been a score for a film like this that is quite like this. It is, with every bit of honesty I can muster, totally and utterly original, but still manages to integrate the staples of 70's action-film musical composition. In my previous Night Gallery soundtrack post, I said that, with this particular score, Goldenberg achieves something that Elmer Bernstein tried to achieve throughout the entire decade of the 70's but never managed to really pull off (the closest he ever came was his Report to the Commissioner score). The liner notes make note of the fact that Goldenberg's orchestrations were extremely unorthodox, particularly for the time. Like how soundtrack-heads know there is the Mancini Sound and the Goldsmith Sound and the Williams Sound and the Barry Sound and on and on and on, there is most certainly a Goldenberg sound, and, for me, it's irresistible, and no better evidence could be given than his score for Busting.

Tracks I want to particularly call your attention to: "The Chase" and "Nailing Rizzo" open the same way, but go in different directions with a pulsating action-scene theme. I can't recall better chase music in a film from the time. Savor the jarring bongo sound and miscellaneous "noises" in tracks like "The Search" and "Home Alone". Alternate compositions of "The Chase" theme can be heard in "Busting the Club" and "The Electra". Enjoy!

Download here. Note: This is not my link, but another score-head's link. Thanks to Vagos.FM.