The Screengrab : lee remick

OST: "Anatomy of a Murder"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Last week in this space, we discussed the highly effecting soundtrack to The Man with the Golden Arm -- a moody post-bop jazz score that came from a highly unlikely source in the person of Elmer Bernstein. This week's original soundtrack focus, the 1959 courtroom classic Anatomy of a Murder, was penned by someone who hardly needed to prove his jazz credentials. Duke Ellington was a jazz elder statesman by the time the movie started production, but jazz had long been considered off-limits in most movies thanks to its connotation as "race music" through most of the '30s and '40s. It took the work of men like Bernstein and Henry Mancini to normalize it for film use to the degree that Otto Preminger could call upon a living legend like Ellington to score his crime drama a few years later. The picture wrapped in record time, and Preminger rushed to get it into theaters, partly in fear that its highly controversial nature (it was built around a revenge killing for the rape of the accused's wife, and used language that was extremely explicit for its day) would cause it to receive flak from the censors, so Ellington was pressured to work fast. Luckily, years of working with a talented group of improvisors -- some of whom, including Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, and Cat Anderson, can be seen and heard in the film -- had prepared him well.

Ellington had done film work before, but by and large, it was for shorts, concert films, and the like. Anatomy of a Murder would be his first full-length feature film, and the pressure was on in more ways than one, since for all the controversy surrounding it, it was meant to be an A picture. It featured a prestige director, a highly coveted source for its script, and some of Hollywood's brightest actors in the lead roles: Jimmy Stewart, George C. Scott and Lee Remick among them. (Ellington even has a minor role himself, playing the owner of a local roadhouse.) He was also something of a grandee of jazz, one of the old men of the medium's golden age, and not exactly known for being able to hit the clanging, atonal, and often dark aspects of the post-bop era. But he acquitted himself better than anyone could possibly have expected: his score to Anatomy of a Murder reels convincingly from swinging to subtle to romantic to comic to clever to violent when the scene calls for it. While it's not quite a great enough accomplishment from one of the finest jazzmen in history to stand unquestioned alongside his greatest sides, it's a remarkably effecting film score that strikes -- if a bit late -- a mightily convincing blow in favor of using jazz as a material for film scores just as suitable, if not more so, than the second-rate symphonic music that was the norm at the time.

What makes the score even more accomplished -- and credit here is due to Preminger and his editors as well as to Ellington and his sidemen -- is that it was designed and executed as a diagetical piece, where the music does not exist extraneous to the filmed action, but is meant to be heard in the context that characters in the film might hear it. The fact that it succeeds so well in this regard and stands up so strongly as an album, independent of the film, testifies to both Ellington's strengths as a composer and Preminger's as a director. Anyone seeking out an album version of this critically important moment in the history of jazz on film is highly advised to find the 1995 Columbia CD reissue; it features restored cover art based on the original ad campaign (which drew heavily on the Blue Note Records design style of the day), a lengthy and engaging interview with Duke Ellington, numerous outtakes, studio sessions, and rehearsal pieces, and best of all, an expert digital remastering that dumps the unnecessary and distracting level of echo that mars some of the original releases. The result is a much clearer, more immediate sound for what should be remembered for decades as one of the best blends of film and music of the 1950s.

BEST TRACKS: Most people who have only seen the film remember only for its opening theme, and that's perfectly understandable: "Main Theme/Anatomy of a Murder" is a dynamite piece of music, jazzy and powerful but with a good pop music composer's understanding of what makes a memorable movie theme. But there's plenty more than that to enjoy on an album that could easily be stuck in alongside Ellington's better work of the 1950s: the moody, steamy "Midnight Indigo", the bouncing, witty "Flirtibird", and, especially, the majestic and melodic "Sunswept Saturday", with its terrific, hooky clarinet work by Jimmy Hamilton.

Related Posts:

OST: The Man with the Golden Arm

OST: The Pink Panther

Summerfest '08: "The Long Hot Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT

When we started Summerfest '08 a few weeks ago, our goals were simple: identify a handful of movies with the word 'summer' in the title; figure out which ones were worth popping on to your DVD player while waiting for your watermelon to fully saturate with vodka; make a couple of snotty comments about them; and carry on with the knowledge that we have helped keep you cool for a few hours. This week's picture, though, falls rather short of that final goal. Whether you're watching it from a hammock in your backyard or a clean, sleek love seat in the basement, 1958's The Long Hot Summer won't cool you down. It'll make you hot: hot like a sweaty southern summer. Hot like a repressed debutante. Hot like Paul Newman in an undershirt before his face became synonymous with upscale salad dressings and organic Orio knockoffs. Reading (and with good reason) like a bizarre mash-up of Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, The Long Hot Summer lives up to its name like no movie before or sense, and if you weren't sweating before you started watching it, you will be afterwards. Hell, you don't even have to watch it -- although we don't know why anyone would deny themselves the pleasure of watching Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick looking like wilted hothouse flowers, all you have to do is listen to the overblown hotbox noir dialogue in this picture to positively swoon from the torridness of it all.

So mop your face with a handkerchief, push your hat back on your head, order up a tall mint julep, and get ready for The Long Hot Summer.

THE ACTION: In what is, surprisingly, not the beginning of a porn movie, a young stud named Ben Quick hitches a ride into a town called Frenchman's Bend, in rural Mississippi. Ben has a reputation for barn-burning, which is the sort of thing people did for kicks back then while waitig for a new farmgirl to seduce. Most people are none too happy to see Ben come to town -- most especially Clara and Eula Varner, played by Woodward and Remick, but town patriarch Will Varner sees a youthful reflection of himself in the sweaty hothead. He also sees a number of qualities lacking in his son Jody (Tony Franciosa), who, this being the 1950s and all, the movie is not allowed to say is a homosexual. Gaudy, sexually charged patter ensues. Eventually, everyone in town erupts in an explosion of damp clothing and meaningful looks, and the barns of Frenchman's Bend will never be the same again.

THE PLAYERS: The Long Hot Summer is directed by Martin Ritt, a longtime Hollywood pro who directed dozens of pretty decent movies without ever having developed much of a reputation for anything other than reliability. He does have to his credit the fact that, according to Hollywood legend, during filming of this movie, he became the only person to get the notoriously implacable Orson Welles to behave by driving the great man out to the middle of the Louisiana swamp and threatening to abandon him there if he didn't shape up and start making nice. While the movie is based on three short stories by William Faulkner ("Spotted Horses", "The Hamlet", and "Barn Burning"), it's written in high noir style by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, a duo mostly noted for their work in westerns, and plays like Tennessee Willliams if he liked girls as much as he liked decadence. The entire cast, including a shockingly smokin' Angela Lansbury as Welles' mistress, absolutely swelters in the crushing heat.

SUMMER FUN: No one goes to the beach, but everyone's having fun, if you know what we mean. Volleyball is likewise in short supply, but Newman's Ben Quick seems to be having a great time trying to decide which of the two innocent flowers of southern maidenhood he's going to trample into the dust first. Orson Welles is a holy terror in this movie, overacting like there's no tomorrow and no doubt making everyone else on the set wish that Ritt had shot him a few times before dumping him in the swamp; but he seems to be having a good time despite the fact that it was so hot during filming that the big honking prosthetic nose he wore as Will Varner kept falling off of his face. The only person who isn't having any fun (at least until the movie's tacked-on happy ending) is the relentlessly abused Tony Franciosa. who everybody else yells at.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: It was once a fashion truism that the south was always ten years late on picking up any new fashions, and this was certainly true at the time; while denizens of the West Coast had been rocking jazzy Aloha shirts just after WWII, in the Louisiana of The Long Hot Summer, it was the kind of garment that only someone like Tony Franciosa would wear, if you get catch the drift. Newman, however, permanently etched himself in the libidos of America's women by parading around in nothing but a fedora, an undershirt and a few strategically placed sweat stains, and Orson Welles was kind enought to refrain from sporting a fat-guy Hawaiian until his Muppet-era films. The kind of fun being had in this movie was far too nasty and naughty to lend itself to the cheap signifier of Nylon with Polynesian patterns.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Sadly -- almost unforgivably, given that this is a movie that contains not only a young Joanne Woodward but Lee Remick as well -- there are no bilkinis to be found anywhere in The Long Hot Summer. However, that's understandable; with no cooling sea breezes on their way from the humid Gulf Coast, they probably wouldn't have been all that comfortable; and with a guy like Ben Quick (which one hopes merely describes his method of seduction and not its end result) around, bikinis would probably just get in your way. In the end, the movie is a bit overripe, far too determined to be Tennessee Williams with too little Valium, and not as deep as it should be given the Faulkner pedigree. But it's hot as hell in that partcular southern-Gothic way, it's reasonably well-acted, and it's got enough snappy dialogue to choke Orson Welles. Of whom Newman says: "I respect him. I admire his manners and I admire the speeches he makes and I admire the big house he lives in. But if you're saving it all for him honey, you've got your account in the wrong bank". Now that's hot.