The Screengrab

We've discussed a few great pairings between director and composer in this space before:  the energetic, dynamic films of Sergio Leone, accompanied by the postmodernist, propulsive music of Ennio Morricone; the accomplished, thrilling work of Alfred Hitchcock, paired with the inventive, restless music of Bernard Herrmann; and others.  Today we're going to look at one of the great film partnerships at its very inception:  the mystefying, surreal films of David Lynch and the eerily gorgeous music of Angelo Badalamenti that frequently accompanies them.  Blue Velvet was the first of a creative partnership that would last for two decades (and arguably reach its zenith in the Twin Peaks soundtrack) but this is where it all began in 1986.

Like a lot of the best collaborations, the one between David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti (who, despite the florid name, hails from the Mediterranean clime of Brooklyn) almost didn't happen.  Mixing as it did a great deal of original score, all written by Badalamenti, and rights-managed classic rock and pop songs, the soundtrack to Blue Velvet was almost scuttled early on by clearance issues.  In particular, the title track, as sung by Bobby Vinton, proved costlier to license than the studio would allow, so Badalamenti recorded his own sound-alike version -- before getting news that Vinton himself was willing to re-record it (albeit two registers lower, thanks to age's effect on his pipes).  That didn't quite work out either, and they were faced with the legal and aesthetic problems of going with the copycat, until, finally, the studio decided to finally pony up for the original.  Roy Orbison likewise held out permissions for "In Dreams" until the last moment, and Lynch, who'd been trying for months to secure the rights to This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren", eventually had to give up when the band wouldn't budge on giving him the licence.  (Ironically, Balalamenti's replacement song turned out to be one of the most moving and effective pieces in the score.)

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"You better stick to singing," Sammy Jackson, one of the two male leads of The Fastest Guitar Alive tells his partner. "I don't think you've got much future as a spy." It turned out that hardly anybody connected with this movie had much of a future except for Jackson's sidekick--Roy Orbison, who, as it turned out, did stick to singing. The movie, which coincided with the start of a long career slump for the most beautifully masochistic of white rock crooners, was Roy's one fling at movie acting. In this Civil War-era Western, he plays the performing half of a team of snake oil salesman and saloon entertainers who ride from town to town hauling a wagon full of dancing girls. Sammy pitches his miracle elixir and serves as manager to Roy, who hits the stage at the local watering hole and sings the songs written specially for the movie, such as the Marty Robbins knockoff "Pistolero", the Ren-and-Stimpyesque "Happy Party Time" ("Have a good time party,dance the night away/ Have a good time party,it's time to laugh and play") , and "Snuggle Huggle" (" I want to be as snuggle as a buggle in a ruggle/ When my sweety does the snuggle huggle with me"), which was deemed to hot for inclusion on the soundtrack album. This serves as their cover while they go about trying to break into the U.S. mint to steal gold to help fund the Confederate state. The title itself refers to Roy's special guitar, which is also a secret weapon; when he plucks a particular string, a long, thin gun barrell slowly emerges from the side--an image whose unintentionally hilarious phallic overtones are not helped by the funny sound effect that accompanies it. Shooting an interloper's hat off just to get his attention, Roy warns him, "If you're interested, I could kill you with this, and play your funeral march at the same time."

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NEW YORK: Over the course of a remarkably long career, Sidney Lumet has taken a crack at directing just about every kind of movie, while making a certain kind of film — the high-energy, acting-centered New York melodrama — his own. Last year he enjoyed a bit of a comeback with his 44th feature film, Before the Devil Know You're Dead, so the career retrospective at the Film Forum that kicks off this Friday with the 1976 Network couldn't be more timely. Highlights include Long Day's Journey into Night starring Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell, the greatest production of Eugene O'Neill ever caught on film and the high point of Lumet's sideline as a TV-trained specialist in filming plays; The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes, and The Offense, all of which feature powerfully charged performances by Sean Connery, an actor who Lumet was prescient in seeing as having the potential to be more than James Bond; and of course the two "based on a true story" films co-starring Al Pacino and the city of New York, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, which had such an impact that Lumet and his star could have practically taken out a copyright on Fun City in the seventies.

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The ever-busy John Cusack stars in Martian Child, opening wide this weekend. Based on an award-winning novel by legendary sci-fi author and Star Trek scribe David Gerrold (who also executive-produced the film and had final approval on the script, ensuring that, if nothing else, it’ll be loyal to its source), the film focuses on an older man — Cusack, essentially playing a straight version of Gerrold himself — who, battling his own personal demons, adopts a disturbed young boy who thinks he’s from Mars. It’s not your typical science-fiction scenario, but it’s one that echoes a number of other films in the genre that play on the ambiguity, or at least strangeness and charm, of the idea of an alien among us. As with many other types of genre films, science fiction is often at its most successful when it eschews the gimmicks, special effects, and labyrinthine plots and focuses instead on drama, revelation and humanity, even if the human is very possibly an alien. Here’s a fiver of films to get you in the mood for Martian Child.

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Christopher Jones as President Max Frost, WILD IN THE STREETS (1968)

This A.I.P. exploitation classic from the hippie era predates the lowering of the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Here, a presidential candidate played by Hal Holbrook courts the youth vote by promising to lower the mandatory voting age and turns to rock star Max Frost (née Max Jacob Flatow, Jr.), the voice of his generation, to help him with his campaign. Max startles everyone by publicly demanding that fourteen-year-olds be given the right to vote, then, after Holbrook is elected, starting a national drive to lower the minimum age for election to public office to fourteen as well. Inevitably, Max runs for president himself, and after his youthful hordes propel him into the White House, he decrees that thirty is now the mandatory retirement age and has everyone over thirty-five bused to "re-education camps" to spend the rest of their days forcibly blitzed on LSD. But Max's reign may not last long; the movie ends with ominous shots of children giving the fish-eye to their teen-aged overlords and murmuring that they, too, will soon get theirs.

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