Recent discovery: Band of Thieves

This droll 1962 British item is a 69-minute music video disguised as a film.

That’s overstating the case, but not by much. The Lyn Fairhurst/Harold Shampan script is a threadbare excuse for a dozen lengthy “live” (diegetic) performances by clarinetist/vocalist Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band, as the modest story proceeds.

 

Bernard Stanley “Acker” Bilk and his combos were known for “trad jazz,” a popular 1950s and ’60s British offshoot of American Dixieland. (The major difference between the two is Dixieland’s use of “collective improvisation.” Instead of granting each musician individual solos, Dixieland draws on the specificity of each instrument to create a single unique and harmonious sound.) Bilk’s instrumental hit, “Stranger on the Shore” became the UK’s best-selling single of 1962, spending 55 weeks on the UK charts; it also became the second No. 1 single in the States by a British artist. Given Bilk’s popularity — enhanced by his signature goatee, bowler hat and striped waistcoat — it’s no surprise that a feature film would be crafted around his talents. He certainly couldn’t have dreamed of a better showcase.

 

In terms of cinematic history, this film is noteworthy as the second feature boasting cinematography by Nicolas Roeg, who’d later trade his camera for the director’s chair after helming three consecutive hits in the early 1970s: Performance, Walkabout and Don’t Look Now.

Spotlight on Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky

Film music journalist/historian Jon Burlingame has been an invaluable resource over the years; he’s also a thoroughly entertaining writer. I’ve long followed his Los Angeles Times and Daily Variety articles, and I often refer to his books: 1996’s TV’s Biggest Hits, updated and expanded last year, as Music for Prime Time; and 2012’s The Music of James Bond.

His just-published newest book is the perfect topic for this post: Dreamsville: Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn and Music for TV Noir. Had it existed while I was working on my crime/spy jazz project, it would’ve been footnoted extensively in the first volume’s Chapter 2. 

 

Jon was gracious enough to spend nearly an hour discussing what led to this book, at this particular point in time. After all, we’re talking about two TV shows — Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky — that are more than six decades old. Aside from creator/producer/director/writer Blake Edwards, they also share a second, equally important individual: Mancini. The impact his music had on that show — and on TV and film scoring at that time, and later — cannot be overstated.

 

That became the obvious starting point for our chat.

 

“I’ve been a fan of Peter Gunn dating back to my childhood, via early 1960s reruns,” Jon explained. “When I got older, and moved to Los Angeles for work reasons in 1986, I discovered that the show was running five days a week on local television. I was thrilled, and started recording them. (This was long before they were commercially available on DVD.) I’ve also been a Mancini fan, dating back to the 1960s. I later had the opportunity to interview him and Blake Edwards, when I was writing regularly for the Los Angeles Times, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

 

“I wanted to contribute something to the Mancini Centennial, which is this year. I knew that two solid books on Mancini’s life and career already existed: his 1989 autobiography, Did They Mention the Music?; and John Caps’ excellent 2012 book, Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music. What was missing, though, was an in-depth look at that three-year period from 1958 to 1961, which became the launching pad for Mancini and his entire career. He and Edwards formed such a solid bond that Edwards essentially made Mancini his in-house composer for the rest of his career. 

 

“That period also led to Mancini’s big-screen success with “Moon River,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “The Pink Panther,” “The Baby Elephant Walk” and all manner of other hits during the 1960s and ’70s. So I thought that a book focused on that three-year period, with Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky, was worth doing.

 

“Besides,” Jon added, with a chuckle, “at my age, I didn’t want to write a book that I wouldn’t have fun with, and I knew this would be fun to write ... and it was.

“Actually, the research was more fun than the writing!”

 

Jon’s prose is engaging, as always, but I’m also impressed by the wealth of detailed information.

 

“The book is designed to satisfy two different constituencies,” Jon admitted. “First, it’s a ‘TV book’ about two shows, so I felt obliged to write about every episode of both shows, listing director, writer, guest cast and a little bit about the plot. 

 

“The second constituency is music fans, and/or people interested in Mancini, and his career. As a result, it was important — to me — to single out the musicians who played on all those shows. Luckily, it was mostly the same guys who played on every episode of both: Ronnie Lang, Gene Cipriano, Bob Bain, Ted Nash, Pete Candoli, Dick Nash, John(ny) Williams and others ... a real Who’s Who of late 1950s West Coast jazz.”

Recent discovery: Four Boys and a Gun

Despite a varied and extremely busy film scoring career that stretched from 1941’s Under Fiesta Stars to 1972’s The Cremators, Albert Glasser (1916-98) is best known these days for the bombastic scores he delivered for low-rent 1950s “creature features” such as Monster from Green Hell, Beginning of the End, The Amazing Colossal Man and The Spider, among many others. He was remarkably prolific during that period, scoring 15 films (!) in 1957, and 10 in ‘58.

Glasser doesn’t immediately come to mind, when contemplating jazz scores ... and to be candid, he didn’t occur to me at all, during the five years spent producing my two-volume survey of crime and spy jazz. But a friend recently alerted me to Kronos Records’ just-released soundtrack album of Glasser’s score for 1958’s Cop Hater, described as containing “...both big orchestral moments [and] more jazzy and big band swing style tunes.” I deem the latter claim an overstatement; having just watched that film; the non-diegetic score is pure orchestral melodrama. The very few jazz touches are brief source cues in bars and nightclubs. 

 

(Cop Hater was the first of a trio of films based on the first three 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain, aka Evan Hunter, née Salvatore Albert Lombino. It was followed by The Mugger, that same year, and 1960’s The Pusher. Glasser also scored the second one, which has a touch more jazz, but again solely as brief source cues.)

 

Even so, my curiosity was piqued ... and a bit of research revealed that Glasser delivered terrific big band jazz scores for a couple of atmospheric B-films, the first of which is this 1957 noir drama of young men gone terribly astray. As was typical of publicity art at the time, the posters and lobby cards were hilariously lurid: “These kids are going straight to the electric chair!”

 

Director William Berke and his scripters — Leo Townsend and Philip Yordan — based their moody, 74-minute character study on Willard Wiener’s 1944 novel of the same title. The film opens as four young men — Ollie (Frank Sutton), Eddie (Tarry Green), Johnny (James Franciscus) and Stanley (Bill Hinnant) — rob a boxing arena ticket office: an impulsive crime that goes awry when a policeman is shot and killed. The lads are quickly arrested, and then confronted by a district attorney (Otto Hulett) who gravely insists that the killer will “go to the chair,” while the other three will serve 10 years in prison. The story’s gimmick is that three of the boys — and we viewers — have no idea who pulled the trigger. The bulk of the film subsequently delivers flashbacks that depict what drove each of them to commit the crime, followed by the final “big reveal” and a mildly clever twist conclusion.

 

Despite its humble production values, Berke’s film is laden with stars on the rise. Franciscus debuted here, and went on to an extremely busy film and television career, most notably in TV’s Mr. Novak and Longstreet, and popular features such as Beneath the Planet of the Apes and One of My Wives Is Missing. This also marked Hinnant’s acting debut, and he’s best remembered as the original Snoopy in the 1967 off-Broadway production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown: a role he reprised in 1973’s Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of that play. Sutton already had a string of credits dating back to 1949, but he remains best remembered for his iconic role as the harried Sgt. Carter in television’s Gomer Pyle: USMC. Bit parts are filled by soon-to-be-familiar faces such as Ned Glass, J. Pat O’Malley, Diana Sands and Joseph Campanella.

Glasser assembled an impressive roster of 20 musicians known to include four trumpets, four trombones, five saxes and a rhythm section of piano, bass and drums. The full personnel list is lost to the mists of time, but Glasser recalled working with Maynard Ferguson, Rafael Méndez and Jerry Rosen (trumpets), Clyde “Stumpy” Brown and Murray McEachern (trombones), and Calvin Jackson (piano). Shorty Rogers handled the jazz arrangements, all of which are solid ... but Glasser’s frequent repetition of the film’s title theme eventually becomes monotonous.

 

That theme is introduced ominously as the film begins, with unison horns delivering a forceful stinger, rising up the scale, as each “boy” is introduced on screen. After holding briefly on the final note, the band slides into the bluesy main theme, with a repeating 1-2-1-1-4-2/1-2-1-1-4-1 motif. The title credits splash onto the screen as, behind them, the boys are seen approaching the boxing arena. Silence descends while the robbery goes down; Johnny and Stanley stand watch, while Ollie and Eddie beat up the ticket office clerk and snatch the cash. Two cops show up on routine patrol; tension builds as the quartet wait for them to move along. Alas, the clerk sounds the alarm, and one of the cops is killed when shots are exchanged. Glasser swings into a double-time echo of the title tune as the boys flee in different directions; Johnny, shot in one leg, collapses in front of a church.

Ollie “casually” enters a bar and picks up a woman as Glasser delivers a slow, sultry cue; they return to her apartment, where a sassy, up-tempo arrangement of the title theme is heard on her radio. But Ollie’s behavior makes the woman suspicious; she sends him to a nearby store for liquor, and calls the police during his absence. An unsettling, melodramatic cue backs Ollie’s return, just in time to be snatched by the cops. The music shifts to mournful blues as each of the other boys is arrested in turn: Eddie; then Johnny, in a hospital bed; and Stanley, at home, to the mortification of his parents.

 

When gathered in an interrogation room, the boys are left alone to “work it out,” after the district attorney’s grim promise. The scene then flashes back a few days, to when Eddie is employed as a driver for a trucking firm; Glasser supplies some lively “traveling jazz” during a typical run, with Johnny along for company. Alas, Eddie is sweet on the firm’s secretary (Diane Herbert), but she has a gold-digger’s preference for the boss. The music turns sultry as Eddie does his best to woo her, only to be rebuffed — twice! — at which point he loses his temper and punches the boss.

 

And is immediately fired. 

 

Shortly thereafter, Eddie laments his fate with Stanley, as the two shoot pool and drink beer in a borrowed auditorium the quartet has dubbed The Dandelion Room. Lively jump jazz — tasty interplay between Jackson’s keyboard and unison horns — is heard from an unseen radio or turntable.

 

The next flashback focuses on Ollie, the most aggressive of the group, who works as a runner for bookie Joe Barton (Robert Dryden). Unfortunately — and stupidly — Ollie has “borrowed” $300, which he has spent on lavish gifts for his girlfriend, Sophie (Nancy Devlin), who happens to be Eddie’s younger sister. A quiet moment between these two lovers is backed by gentle strings and a mournful solo horn.

 

Ollie and the others later convene at The Dandelion, only to discover that their landlord (Ned Glass) has rented it out to another gang, which intends to use it for a fund-raising sock hop. Ollie and his friends aren’t about to tolerate these interlopers, and chase them away after a brawl set against a raucous big band reprise of the title theme. Our quartet realizes that hosting a door-charge dance would be a great way to raise enough money for Ollie to settle his debt with Barton. First, though, Ollie is summoned by the gangster, who knows full well that the young man has been shorting the weekly take. Ollie is “rewarded” for this indiscretion by being pummeled by Barton’s two henchmen, while another up-tempo arrangement of the title theme is heard on a nearby radio. (That’s apparently the only tune being played, at every moment, by every radio station in the city!)

 

The subsequent dance, with couples filling the auditorium, features a series of live Dixieland numbers by Stanley Rubin and his Tigertown Five (sidemen unidentified); Rubin delivers the vocal on a rendition of “I’ll Never Get Mad Again.” During the dance, Sophie tells the forlorn, nerdish Stanley — who desperately wants a girlfriend — that “A guy has to be good-lookin’ ... or have some money.” After a pause, during which she scrutinizes him, she concludes, “You’d better get some money.” (Ouch!)

 

Although the boys bring in a respectable amount of money, the fix is in; two of Barton’s men steal the gate. This setback unfolds against yet another lively rendition of the title theme, boasting sassy trombone and sax solos.

The next flashback shifts first to Stanley’s morose home life, where he cannot live up to his parents’ expectations: a scene backed by mournful strings and a forlorn solo horn. Elsewhere, similarly despondent strings are heard behind an initially happy moment between Johnny and his pregnant wife ... but the mood darkens when she confesses how much she hates his boxing career. Meanwhile, Stanley has caught up with Ollie and Eddie; the three of them behave very badly at a fancy restaurant — which features an improbable bongo band and a barely dressed female dancer — and later beat up a cabby and stiff him on the fare. By this point, it has become clear: Ollie and Eddie are malevolent, opportunistic thugs.

 

Johnny gets the final flashback; he’s definitely the most moral of this quartet. But his better nature goes south when, after winning an important amateur title bout, his manager (O’Malley) lets him go with nothing but a tin trophy and shattered dreams of what he could have earned during a subsequent boxing career. A slow, doleful jazz cue is heard when the four friends gather across the street from the boxing arena, and gradually work up the nerve to steal the night’s take; this takes us back to where the film began.

 

Fast-cut to the interrogation room: After the DA departs, a sad solo horn is heard as the four young men squabble among themselves. The shooter’s identity is revealed, but — in a way — they’re all guilty. They attempt to choose who heads for execution by throwing dice, but that just causes more arguing and anguish. Their ultimate decision — something of a surprise, particularly to the DA — comes against a portentous orchestral cue; it builds to an intense climax as the end credits appear. Fade to black.

No soundtrack album appeared alongside the film’s release, and the score remained unavailable until the arrival of The Albert Glasser Collection: Volume 3, in May 2023; the disc also features the score for 1957’s Street of Sinners. The 15 tracks for Four Boys cover the full score, and several cues run longer than what is heard in the film. (The music by Stanley Rubin and his Tigertown Five is not included.) A 16th track finds an animated Glasser briefly reminiscing about what he can recall of this assignment. 

Soundtrack updates

Thanks to the ongoing efforts of labels that specialize in soundtracks — and the fans who purchase their products, thereby maintaining the pipeline — quite a few scores have received enhanced treatment since my two books came out in April 2020.

Taking them in the order of release...

 

Music Box Records released an expanded version of Philippe Sarde’s score for 1977’s Mort d’un Pourri (Death of a Corrupt Man) in June 2022. The music is noteworthy for the contributions by famed saxman Stan Getz, who was paid a singular honor by director Georges Lautner: The film opens on a silhouette of Getz, while he delivers an elegant solo version of the film’s haunting primary theme.

 

The original soundtrack album had a dozen tracks; this new Music Box release has 19, all fully remastered from hi-res transfers of the original stereo mixes. Another bonus: Gérard Dastugue’s new liner notes include commentary by Sarde. The original album was already excellent; this new disc is sensational.

 

A very unexpected entry was found in the September 2022 release of Goldsmith at 20th, Volume V, which at first blush doesn’t seem to belong here. But a treat is hidden among this fifth anthology of Jerry Goldsmith’s scores for 20th Century Fox: four tasty jazz tracks from Nick Quarry, a proposed private-eye TV series starring Tony Scotti. As Jon Burlingame explains in his detailed essay, the series was to be based loosely on 1967’s big-screen Tony Rome, the first of Frank Sinatra’s two cracks at that character.

But director Walter Grauman — who had helmed pilots for The Fugitive and Honey West, among others — wasn’t allowed to shoot a legitimate test episode. As Burlingame notes, the 15-minute “presentation film” was just a series of action sequences; Goldsmith supplied slightly more than 10 minutes of music as a favor to Fox music director Lionel Newman. The cues are strongly in the vein of Goldsmith’s Our Man Flint/In Like Flint scores, with plenty of jazz/rock swagger.

 

Riz Ortolani’s energetic jazz/pop score was by far the best part of 1967’s Tiffany Memorandum, which often was the case with the countless low-rent Eurospy entries unleashed by Italian filmmakers determined to cash in on the James Bond craze. It’s therefore ironic that Ortolani’s music was treated so shabbily; decades passed before four tracks were included on the 1996 anthology album Beat at Cinecittà. Fans got a bit more the following year, when nine tracks appeared on an Ortolani compilation album.

Beat Records’ November 2022 release finally features Ortolani’s full score: 22 tracks running just over 55 minutes. The earlier titled tracks are blended with studio session takes simply titled “Tiffany Sequence M8,” “Tiffany Sequence M22” and so forth. All I can say is, It’s damn well about time.

 

This next entry isn’t a soundtrack, but nonetheless warrants mention. In July 2023, not quite a decade after a three-day Man from U.N.C.L.E. convention — cheekily dubbed The Golden Anniversary Affair — took place in late September 2014, Arena Records released a recording of the live jazz concert that highlighted the final evening. Burlingame was present, of course — after all, he worked hard on Film Score Monthly’s four original soundtrack sets of U.N.C.L.E.music — and his brief liner notes for The Jazz from U.N.C.L.E. detail how he and convention organizer Robert Short chose the cues that would be performed by (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) The Summit Six Sextet: Steve Rosenblum, sax; David Lamont, flute; Dave Iwataki, keyboards; Yu Ooka, guitar; Nedra Wheeler, bass; and Dean Koba, drums. 

 The resulting concert clearly delighted the convention attendees, who enjoyed lively covers of iconic cues by Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schifrin, Gerald Fried and Robert Drasnin: “Meet Mr. Solo,” “Roulette Rhumba,” “Dog Fight on Wheels,” “There They Go” and many others (including, yes, the memorable title theme). For those of us who couldn’t be there, this album is the next best thing.

 

John Barry’s bluesy, brooding score for 1982’s Hammett perfectly suited the noir conceit of placing a mystery writer — in this case, Samuel Dashiell Hammett — into his own hard-boiled investigation. Barry’s music is very much in the vein of what he did for 1981’s Body Heat, and he was quite fond of what he did on Hammett. “I loved doing [it],” he told Ford Thaxton in 2001. “That was a terrific movie.” (I agree with that appraisal, but the public didn’t; the film withered on the vine.)

The original Prometheus Records release was spare, with 10 score tracks and an eight-track “Suite” of source cues. Silva Screen’s July 2023 update features more of both, for a total of 25 tracks: many of which — such as “Hammett Meets Salt”/“Suicide Is Fascinating”/“I’m Calling It In” — are built from multiple cues. The result is a much richer listening experience.

 

1966’s handsomely mounted Agent 505: Todesfalle Beirut (Agent 505: Death Trap in Beirut, From Beirut with Loveand several other alternate titles) follows the 007 template better than most Italian Eurospy entries, although the plot is ridiculous. Even so, the action is well paced, and Ennio Morricone’s jazz-inflected score — one of his very few spy-fy assignments — gives the film additional bounce. Morricone eliminated strings entirely, relying instead on brass stingers, moody organ touches and a pulsating rhythm section: just right for a story that blends spyjinks with a touch of science-fiction (a means of magically transforming desert sand dunes into arable farmland?).

Despite Morricone’s popularity, a soundtrack album didn’t appear until 2007, with 14 tracks paired with his score for 1963’s Il Successo. Beat Records’ October 2023 update, under yet another title — La Trappola Scatta a Beirut, also combined with Il Successo — doesn’t add any previously unreleased tracks; even so, the audio quality — taken from the mono master tapes of the original sessions — is a notable improvement.

 

Finally, 1992’s Sneakers is a seriously under-appreciated heist thriller with an all-star cast — Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn and River Phoenix — backed by a whimsical James Horner jazz score that perfectly complements the film’s breezy tone and character banter. The icing on the cake: Branford Marsalis’ effervescent tenor sax. Jazz fans also got to enjoy bits of classic tracks as diegetic cues: Miles Davis’ “Flamenco Sketches” and Charlie Byrd’s covers of “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Corcovado” (none of which landed on the soundtrack album).

The original Columbia album was okay, but its 10 tracks — at 48:27 — didn’t come close to supplying all of Horner’s lovely, wall-to-wall score; a widely circulating 24-track bootleg was far more satisfying. La-La Land’s December 2023 two-disc expansion is better still: 21 tracks totaling 73:24 on the first disc, with three alternate takes accompanying the original album tracks on the second disc.

As the saying goes, Good things come to those who wait (patiently or otherwise...!).