Fallen Angels and a wayward Fugitive

I covered Showtime’s marvelous film noir series, Fallen Angels, in my second volume. This anthology show delivered six episodes in the summer of 1993, followed by another nine in the autumn of 1995. Each playlet was adapted from a story by a famed noir author, and was blessed with a phenomenal attention to detail appropriate to post-World War II Los Angeles: a heavily stylized depiction of the city populated by all manner of dangerous dames, no-account gunsels, bent cops and hapless innocents.

The lush, shadow- and blood-drenched cinematography honors the genre’s roots without succumbing to parody, and top-flight stars persuasively chew into hard-bitten dialogue tough enough to break teeth. Very few of the stories conclude happily, and evil occasionally emerges triumphant: par for the course, when surfing hard-boiled waters originally penned by Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Evan Hunter, Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane and James Ellroy.

 

Alas, the show’s home media options have been minimal: a U.S. VHS version of the first season, and — much later — European and Australian DVD versions of the second season. Both seasons were combined in a single set released in France in 2020, although it’s notoriously difficult to find. 

 

Each episode begins with an introduction backed by a sensuous title theme credited to Elmer and Peter Bernstein. It opens with haunting strings and inquisitive piano notes, followed by Teddy Edwards’ salacious tenor sax; he introduces a melody dominated by a 3-7-3-5 motif, which plays against a leisurely montage of noir leitmotifs: swirling cigarette smoke, a sparkling cocktail, a gun slipped into a woman’s purse.

 

Peter Bernstein also handled the underscores for all 15 episodes: cues that rely heavily on macabre piano filigrees, sinister strings and occasional sax melodies that wander from lonesome to tragic. Unfortunately, none of that extensive music was included in the initial soundtrack album, which featured only the Bernsteins’ title and end themes, alongside a collection of jazz classics by Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Benny Carter, Nat King Cole and J.J. Johnson.

 

Happily, almost three decades later, Dragon’s Domain has just gifted us with Fallen Angels Vol. 1, which includes the aforementioned title and end themes, along with numerous cues from each of the first season’s six episodes. The result is 77 minutes of marvelously moody, smoky music ... but not always in the genre — jazz — that most people would expect.

 

“I loved doing that show,” Peter Bernstein recalled, in a 2019 interview, “writing noir stuff, kind of dark ... a lot of fun.

 

“But it was a very interesting experience. I worked with a lot of directors, big-time directors [including Steven Soderbergh, Peter Bogdanovich, John Dahl and Alfonso Cuarón], and more than one of them said to me, ‘Yeah, I want that smoky, noir saxophone sound.’ Well, if  you go back and look at the actual noir films they’re drawing from, there’s no smoky saxophone!”

 

This is true. Despite what most people assume, the classic 1940s and ’50s noirs had moody, haunting orchestral scores ... without the slightest trace of jazz. This mistaken assumption probably results, in part, from later films such as Chinatown and Taxi Driver, where Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann — respectively — punctuated those noirsagas with, yes, smoky sax cues. And since Chinatown is set in the late 1930s, well ... Goldsmith’s score likely enhanced a myth that endures to this day.

 

“[The directors] just projected it backwards to other films,” Bernstein explains, in this new album’s liner notes. “So I found myself not doing that, except in a couple of specific instances.”

 

Indeed, only two of this album’s six scores include jazz elements ... but they’re choice.

 

The Frightening Frammis, from a novelette by Jim Thompson, concerns a pair of con artists — played by Peter Gallagher and Nancy Travis — who keep betraying each other. The episode opens with a cool, mournful blend of bass, horns and synth (“How Did I End Up Here”), before easing into some impudent swing. Unsettling unison horns and sly bass touches return in “A Note for Bette,” “Babe’s Story” and “Babe’s Scam”; the latter also features an ominous piano vamp. “Goodbye Mitchie” is highlighted by an appropriately doleful horn, and “The Biggest Heist in the World” reprises the swinging title theme, backed by unison horn fanfares.

James Ellroy cheekily blends fact with fiction in his novelette Since I Don’t Have You; this adaptation finds heavily indebted Buzz Meeks (Gary Busey) simultaneously working as a troubleshooter for reclusive entrepreneur Howard Hughes (Tim Matheson), and as a bagman for notorious criminal Mickey Cohen (James Woods). To make matters worse, both men — unbeknownst to each other — have fallen for the same sultry dame (Aimee Graham).

 

“Perhaps my favorite of the whole bunch,” Bernstein admits, in the liner notes, “since it was so sprawling and fun. It has noir elements, some jazzy elements, and a little bit of modern. It’s big, and it’s got a big orchestral love theme.”

Indeed, this episode’s nine cues run a full 19 minutes. The first (“Howard Hughes”) opens with sly wandering bass, mildly discordant unison horns, and a disquieting keyboard melody. “Mickey Cohen,” in contrast, is introduced with sassy sax that quickly segues into a hypnotic 2-2-4-2 piano motif against cool walking bass; unison horns augment the cue when it slides into swing. That wandering bass becomes a recurring presence in subsequent cues, notably during the climax of “Break In at South Mariposa,” when foreboding horns back an accelerating bass riff. Events climax at a party thrown by schlocky film producer Sid Weinberg (Ken Lerner), who is introduced with an eponymous cue that blends slowly swinging walking bass with smarmy piano filigrees. Cohen’s theme reprises in the final cue, “End of Story,” with an even more impertinent blend of bass, piano, unison horns and — finally — a despondent sax.

 

And here’s a hitherto unknown detail. “[My father and I] were hired as a team,” Bernstein concludes. “It was ‘theme-by, score-by.’ My father wrote a main title and an end title, but they didn’t like his main title. So he said to me, ‘I’m done. You write it!’ 

 

“So I did, uncredited.”

 

Fingers crossed, that this album sells well enough to encourage Dragon’s Domain to produce a Vol. 2, covering Bernstein’s work on the show’s second season.

 

********

 

On a briefer note...

The current issue of Cinema Retro (Vol. 20, #59) includes Nichola Anez’s excellent four-page discussion of 1967’s Warning Shot, a seriously underrated police thriller that star David Janssen made during his hiatus between the third and fourth seasons of television’s The Fugitive. Back then — as opposed to now — actors rarely moved gracefully between television and big-screen projects; TV actors who made the attempt often were regarded as “uppity,” and suffering from delusions of grandeur.

 

(James Garner was a rare exception. He quickly parlayed his three seasons on TV’s Maverick into an enormously successful film career, starting with 1963’s The Great Escape and The Thrill of It All, 1964’s The Americanization of Emily and many, many more.)

 

Paramount’s execs clearly had little faith in Warning Shot, assuming that few people would spend movie theater money to watch somebody they could see free, on a weekly basis, at home, in — as Anez succinctly puts it — “the role with which [Janssen] was identified.” The studio quietly debuted Warning Shot in small, regional markets in January 1967, after which it slowly migrated to larger territories — granted virtually no publicity — before opening in major cities that summer, as the bottom half of a double bill. But nobody noticed; Janssen’s fans cared only for August’s two-part finale of The Fugitive, which would reveal the fate of Dr. Richard Kimble.

Ironically, Jerry Goldsmith's excellent score for the film — an engaging blend of the suspense and action cues that he had been writing for Thriller and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. — suffered a similarly ignominious fate. As discussed in my first volume, Goldsmith wasn’t allowed to produce his own soundtrack album; the assignment went instead to trombonist/big band jazz leader Si Zentner, who reorchestrated the title theme and five underscore cues for a Liberty LP with the catalog-unfriendly title of Si Zentner Plays Music from the Original Motion Picture Score of Warning Shot and Other Themes Composed by Jerry Goldsmith. In fairness, it’s an excellent jazz album, with swinging arrangements by Bob Florence and Donald D. Dimick, but the half-dozen Warning Shot cues don’t convey the film’s complex emotional sweep. Goldsmith’s original 40-minute score had to wait for a 2012 La-La Land Records release, which was superseded by a superior 2019 release by the same label, paired with Goldsmith’s score for the TV series Archer. 

Recent discovery: Small Vices

I was a fan of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series from the moment I purchased 1978’s The Judas Goat, fifth in the series. I immediately snatched up its four predecessors, and then eagerly awaited each new release: ultimately 40 novels, one per year, until Parker died in 2010. (Although Ace Atkins has been doing an excellent job of continuing the series, he isn’t quite up to Parker’s unique style.)

The character was a natural for television, and the three seasons of Spenser: For Hire, from 1985 to ’88, proved quite popular ... with everybody except Parker’s fans, and most notably Parker himself. The character’s surface trappings were retained, but the tone was wrong; Robert Urich was too young, too handsome, and much too swaggering. Spenser is quietly smug, not boldly cocky; he knows that he’s the toughest and smartest guy in the room, and has no reason to announce it. Although Parker was involved with the show as a “consultant,” he famously said — in a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview — “I read scripts and offered comments which no one paid attention to.”

 

Urich nonetheless reprised the role for a quartet of made-for-TV movies from 1993 to ’95; although each was based on one of Parker’s novels, the results still were disappointing. That said, they were akin to Citizen Kane, when compared to 2020’s Spenser Confidential, which must’ve had Parker spinning in his grave. Everything about that Netflix original is awful, starting with the badly miscast Mark Wahlberg, but most notably the production’s jokey, action/comedy tone. Sacrilege!

 

Ah, but in between — from 1999 to 2001 — cable’s A&E Network delivered a trio of films starring Joe Mantegna, who is note-perfect as Spenser. Co-star Marcia Gay Harden is equally fine as his longtime main squeeze, psychologist Susan Silverman. Parker exercised far more creative control over these three films — Small Vices, Thin Air and Walking Shadow — all of which are adapted from his novels; he scripted the first two, and co-scripted the third with his wife, Joan. Unfortunately, the parsimonious budgets compromised the results, particularly with the second and third films ... which cut short what A&E originally had intended as a five-film series. Small Vices, however, is a little gem; Parker’s fans must’ve been delighted to hear so much of the dialogue being lifted, word for word, from the source novel.