In this T-Boy article, please consider it to be an invitation to join me on a personal journey in search of the source of many of the cinema’s most popular musical soundtracks. I’ve tried to make the categories specific, where the composer worked with the director before the film was shot, or used a pre-existing composition after the movie was in the can. Categories also include the innovation of using songs in films that have not been done before. I hope this makes sense once you see the line-up of film soundtracks on the list, where you’ll also notice that there are many others not included which would make the list too long – so here’s a few below:

But first, let’s begin with a quotation by French director, François Truffaut:

“It’s very difficult for a musician to make music for a film, because he is shown a film at a stage of the assembly where the lengths are false, the rhythm is not there. It seems as it is the film, but it is far from the final result. I think you really have to know the cinema and really love it so that you can see the film at that stage and imagine its intentions and its qualities. The musician is called at a time when the director is a little demoralized. We count a lot on him. We say all the time in the editing rooms: ‘It will work out with the music!’ In short, we wait for the musician as we wait for a sort of savior.” – François Truffaut

PSYCHO

Hitchcock and Herrmann

When Alfred Hitchcock, the master of everything, wrote his screenplay for 1960’s Psycho with composer Bernard Hermann at his side, every musical note was placed on his storyboard long before the film was shot. And by the time all the sketches were finished, which also indicated the exact placements of edits, camera angles and lighting, sound effects and more, Hitchcock would become bored before his camera even rolled because all the hard work had already been done before.

So, let’s look at the chilling shower scene in Psycho, where Hitchcock drew and Hermann scored such a precise storyboard, so precise that the audience actually thought that Anthony Perkins’ character’s knife had slashed Janet Leigh’s body.

Overall, Herrmann wrote the scores for seven Hitchcock films, from The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Marnie (1964), a period that included Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho. He was also credited as sound consultant on The Birds (1963), as there was no actual music in the film, only electronically made bird sounds, which succeeded in making some of us have a lifetime distaste for birds. This also applied to Psycho, too, where others were actually afraid to take a shower after seeing the film. Hitchcock coined a knew film term with The Birds, where a high-angle shot looking down on the subject, is now called a Bird’s-Eye Shot. The perspective makes the subject appear short and trivial, often illustrating a fatalistic doom.

It should be noted that Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo, topped the 2012 poll of the British film magazine, Sight & Sound’s, The 50 Greatest Films of All Time.

Later, many film directors would use new musical compositions by Herrmann, along with Hitchcockian images, which included Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and François Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968). And also with Hitchcock emulater, Brian De Palma, in his film’s Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976), in an attempt to capture the magic in which Herrmann and Hitchcock had created.

ALEXANDER NEVSKY

Eisenstein and Prokofiev

In 1938, composer Sergei Prokofiev and film director Sergei Eisenstein worked closely together throughout the production of the film, Alexander Nevsky. Sometimes Eisenstein would do a short episode and give it to Prokofiev to set to music and other times the composer would write a piece and Eisenstein would change the rhythm of the film’s action to suit the music. The climactic Battle on the Ice is spectacularly staged, which starts with a low rumbling of the chorus that depicts the troops riding toward each other. The Russian and Teutonic hymns are played again to represent the opposing forces. The pace quickens to a gallop and then to a cacophonous clash of cymbals, horns, and drums that conjure up the chaos of a medieval battle.

Eisenstein and Prokofiev’s matching of sound to action has made orchestral art music accessible to the general public and also established the use of compositional music as an important part of creating a masterpiece.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

Leone and Morricone

Ennio Morricone was an Italian composer, orchestrator, conductor, trumpeter and pianist who wrote music in a wide range of styles with more than 400 scores for cinema and television

His film scores for director Sergio Leone were regarded just an important as his images. The Spaghetti Western maestro incorporated Ennio Morricone’s musical scores, not just to be background music, but to define many of his characters in his films. In Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), each of the five main characters, played by Claudia Cardinale, Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards and Gabriele Ferzetti have their own theme song in the music score. After listening to one of Morricone’s film compositions, audiences felt as if they were blessed with a sense of heavenly euphoria. In fact, with Once Upon a Time in the West the choruses really did sound like angels singing.

Many important films directors also included Morricone’s film scores into their films, as did T-Boy favorites, Terence Malick in Days of Heaven (1978) and 1976’s Novecento (1900) by Bernardo Bertolucci.

Ennio Morricone also influenced many younger artists including Hans Zimmer, Metallica, Radiohead and the Dire Straits with fingerpicking guitarist virtuoso, Mark Knopfler, who was inspired to  compose and produce his own film score soundtracks, such as Scottish film director Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy, as well as Cal (1984) and The Princes Bride (1987). And Knopfler was particularly taken by Leone and Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, too, and created the Dire Straits – Once Upon A Time In The West (1979), which you can visit below.

THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD

Powell and Rozsa

Francis Ford Coppola once said that his favorite movie is the British film adaption of The Thief of Bagdad (1940) directed by Michael Powell, along with Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan. Michael Powell’s films were profound in in their technicolor imagery, in particular when his co-director was Emeric Pressburger, but they reached unsurpassed heights with the haunting movie music by famed composer Miklos Rozsa. The Thief of Bagdad is scored for full orchestra with extensive percussion (including gong, cowbells, glockenspiel, xylophone, jingle bells, harp, celesta, piano) and both mixed and children’s chorus as well as solo singers. Later, after a frequent revisit to the film, I was surprised upon reading, “There is no real melodic focus, for it is essentially a rhythmic piece, with the vocal parts providing a stabilizing centrum, and with lyrics such as ‘sweet fruit,’ and ‘melons’ sung in syllabic fashion. Unsung words are also noted, such as ‘Oh you nasty little wretches, Oh you dirty pack of thieves.'”

The overall effect of the piece is not really that of an ensemble number in a musical, where there is usually a strong statement of the song melody with refrain by the chorus, but rather a group recitative in an opera. Miklos Rozsa is best known for his nearly one hundred film scores, but nevertheless maintained a steadfast allegiance to absolute concert music throughout his career what he referred to as his, “double life.”

I VITELLONI, LA STRADA &

LE NOTTI DI CABIRIA

Fellini and Rota

Witnessing the images of Italian Maestro, Federico Fellini, could be an enthralling, hypnotic and mesmerizing event. But what made his images work was due to the brilliance of the musical compositions of another Italian Maestro, Nino Rota. In Fellini’s early work, the films they did together, included The White Sheik (1952), I vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), and Le notti di Cabiria (1957). At first Rota’s Le notti di Cabiria score sounded comedic, almost a bit cumbersome, like Chaplin’s earlier Mack Sennent Keystone Kops shorts, after music was later added. But then Rota’s music would transition into the heart wrenching quest of the road for the hope of better things to come. Yes, Fellini was Rota, and Rota was Fellini. And Fellini was highly influenced by Chaplin too; in particular, during his Neo-Realist period. With La Strada, translated in English as The Road, Fellini’ wife of 50-years, the remarkably talented, Giulietta Masina, really does go on the road, and plays Chaplin’s Little Tramp.

Both La Strada and Le notti di Cabiria won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and were described as having been inspired by Masina’s humanity. Nino Rota scored nineteen films written by Fellini, and all of Fellini’s directorial features from 1952 to 1979, the year of Rota’s death at 67-years-old.

Rota wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions at an average of three scores each year over a 46-year period. Among the films included, were Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, (in particular, the Love Theme) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy, which were often better known with casual movie goers than the films he did with Fellini. But, many of us will always remember Nino Rota best for his collaborations with Federico Fellini.

CHINATOWN

Polanski and Goldsmith

Composer Jerry Goldsmith’s musical score for Chinatown (1974,) considered by many critics as one of the cinema’s greatest neo-noirs, transforms movie goers back to a time and place that had no longer existed. At first Goldsmith’s Chinatown Love Theme sounded simple, played by a lone trumpet solo, yet somehow felt lush and romantic. Apparently, director Roman Polanski insisted that Jerry Goldsmith should be a last-minute replacement for Phillip Lambro, though not necessarily due to Goldsmith as a superior composer, but because he was one of the last Hollywood composers to have grown up in the film’s period setting, and was able to capture the mood of the not-so-innocent era. And, as a last-minute replacement, Goldsmith’s contract stated he was to submit his work in ten-days. Yet, Goldsmith delivered compositions which had emotional hooks, providing Chinatown with its own identity.

But how really simple is Jerry Goldsmith’s masterful score, which features a unique ensemble which features strings, four pianos, four harps, guiro, and solo trumpet, which the composer revealed he saw in his head while watching the movie for the first time. The latter instrument went on to define the film noir aspect with its hypnotic bluesy theme for Jack Nicholson’s private eye, and love theme for the mysterious Evelyn (Faye Dunaway). But the score to Chinatown has a darker, more avant-garde heart to it, where Goldsmith presents a series of unsettling cues for the movie’s thriller and mystery elements, remaining a stark contrast to his memorable opening theme. Consider when John Huston’s Noah Cross is introduced. We hear sound from the lowest registers with bells and harp joined by guiro to create dissonance and motion, while strings and eventually a trumpet resonates on an alternate theme. The Jake and Evelyn passage introduces a more contemporary 70’s sound with a beautiful reading of his main theme; here Goldsmith captures intimacy and anticipation with tremolo strings and a delicate piano motif. Later, Chinatown producer, Robert Evans, commented that Goldsmith single handily saved the picture.

JULES AND JIM, DAY FOR NIGHT &

THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR

Truffaut and Delerue

In a span of 24-years, between 1959 and 1983, composer Georges Delerue collaborated with François Truffaut on ten films, which included Jules and Jim (1962), where Jeanne Moreau stars as Catherine, as an alluring young woman whose enigmatic smile and passionate nature lure Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) into one of cinema’s most captivating love triangles. For many of us, it was the first time we heard the French expression, ménage à trois. In 1973, Truffaut directed Day for Night (La nuit américaine), a film that changed my life, which chronicles the troubled production of a film melodrama, and the various personal and professional challenges of the cast and crew. It stars Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Dani, Alexandra Stewart and the floppy-haired actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud, often signaled out as Truffaut’s son or alter ego, due to his appearances in six films and one short of the director’s 21 films. And also for his recurring performances as Atonine Doniel, from 1959’s Les quatre cents coups (the 400 Blows), based on Truffaut’s childhood, to the lighter 1979 comedy-drama, f L’amour en fuite (Love on the Run).

Truffaut cast himself as the director within the film, in Day for Night, whose character is partially hearing impaired, due to his position in the French army’s artillery division during WW2. Truffaut was regarded to be kind and generous, and would often cast handicapped people into his films to remind audiences that they too exist, and show us and other disable people, that they have found a way to march through life as well. Dare I add, that I once sent him a spec script without ever having met him, and to my surprise, he read it and introduced me to the former Czechoslovakian film director Ivan Passer to direct. And this is one of the reasons why I write this article today, for Truffaut’s passion for cinema embodied us to love it just as much as he did, too.

The last collaboration between Truffaut and film composer, Georges Delerue, was The Woman Next Door (1981), where two ex-lovers, played by Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant (Truffaut’s companion, who also appeared in his next and final film, Vivement dimanche! (Confidentially Yours). Delerue also composed film music for Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Renaiss and Bernardo Bertolucci. Truffaut/Delerue are regarded to be in the same pantheon of Fellini/Rota, Hitchcock/Hermann as well as the many pairs that T-Boy just coined in this article, above and below.

Pre-existing compositional music used in film

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Kubrick and Classical Music

Many of us fell out of our seats when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) began with the bombastic opening theme from Richard Strauss’ classical tone poem, Also sprach Zarathustra. Strauss’ symphonic tone poem was popular among classical aficionados in 1968, but today its popularity has surged to such unfound heights, that it is frequently used in other films, TV shows and commercials where manufacturers sell everything from washing machines to trucks and perfume. Kubrick wanted 2001: A Space Odyssey to be a primarily nonverbal experience that did not rely on the traditional techniques of narrative cinema, where pre-existing music would play a vital role in evoking moods and emotions.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to be profound for its innovative use of classical music taken from existing commercial recordings, in contrast to most feature films, which the images are generally accompanied by elaborate film scores or songs written specially for them by professional tunesmiths. Kubrick’s soundtrack also raised the profile of other classical composers and their compositions, which also includes, Johann Strauss II and his 1866 Blue Danube Waltz, where Kubrick made the poetry of motion with the association of the spinning motion of the satellites and the dancers of waltzes. And, there are also compositions by György Ligeti, who was almost completely unknown in 1968, with Atmosphères, which evokes a sense of timelessness where the listener is lost in a web of texture and tonality, Requiem For Soprano; Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio), and Lux Aeterna; as well as Aram Khachaturian’s Adagio from third Gayane ballet suite.

And, who could not forget about HAL: The 9000 series computer – You know, the most reliable computer ever made. And, we are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error and No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.

So, let’s close with HAL’s singing the 1892 song, Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two), written by songwriter Harry Dacre, at the moment when his logic fades to simplicity, and he regresses by 40 years. Which is also notable as the first song ever performed by a computer – specifically, the IBM 704.

The song takes HAL back to its childhood, and emphasizes that Dave, play by Keir Dullea, is killing that child just as much as he is dismantling a malfunctioning computer system. Adding to the overall themes and interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL’s callback to an earlier system command suggests that evolution may be just as possible for computers as it is for humans, given a sufficient level of sentience.

Film critics ponder about HAL

Andrew Sarris:

Film critic and father of American Auteurism, Andrew Sarris, initially panned Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but later changed his opinion after seeing it “under the influence,” which he later said was a contact high. Was Kubrick a visionary? Well, according to Sarris, he did tell us how boring space travel would really become.

“2001 now works for me as Kubrick’s parable of a future world toward which metaphysical dread and mordant amusement tiptoe side by side. Even on the first viewing, I admired all the stuff about HAL literally losing his mind. On second viewing, I was deeply moved by HAL as a metaphor of reason afflicted by the assaults of neurotic doubt. I have never seen the death of a mind rendered more profoundly or poetically than it is rendered by Kubrick in 2001.”

Robert Eggers:

US filmmaker and production designer, Robert Eggers, is best known for directing the horror films, The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and the historical fiction epic, The Northman (2022). It was reported to T-Boy that Egger would direct a remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionistic masterpiece, Nosferatu, also remade by Werner Herzog in 1978.

I had once thought that Murnau’s Nosferatu was the first horror movie, but later learned that director and magician, Georges Méliès, predated it in 1896 with Le Manoir du Diable. As Kubrick once took us on a trip to the moon in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Méliès did so too, but much earlier with his 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon, which took audiences on a trip into the world’s first science fiction film.

“HAL is the most human character in the film despite his perfect computing abilities. The genius of Kubrick is that he makes you sympathetic to HAL comparable to Frankenstein or The Hunchback of Notre Dame. HAL made a mistake, like all humans have done once. Yet, that mistake cost him his life. His final pleas before the Bowman character disconnects him are saddening and remorseful, connecting the viewer’s humanity to the most artificial character in the entire movie.”

A Hard Day’s Night

Lester and The Beatles

Director Richard Lesters’ A Hard Day’s Night is a 1964 musical comedy film starring the Liverpublian rock band, which many of us refer to as The Beatles. The narrative is written by Alan Owen which covers two typical madcap days in the life of the Beatles, where the Fab Four struggle to keep themselves and Paul McCartney’s mischievous grandfather in check while preparing for a live TV performance. The songs featured are written by Lennon and McCartney, which include the title song, taken for a nonsensical Ringoism. Also in the film is I Should Have Known Better, played in a railway storage car where Harrison met future bride, model and muse, Patti Boyd; If I Fell with Lennon at lead vocals in an attempt to heal Ringo’s hurt feelings; and McCartney’s vocal lament about his girlfriend and female actor, Jane Asher, famous for her performance in Jerzy Skolimowski’s stunning 1970 psychological masterpiece, Deep End. Jane’s brother is Peter, the other half of the duo, Peter and Gordon, famous as well for their hit single recording, A World Without Love, penned by McCartney, natch’.

I’m Happy Just to Dance with You is often mistaken as a composition by George Harrison due his taking the lead vocals. But he had a lot of help with John and Paul’s lyrics and harmonies. The film closes with abbreviated versions of Tell Me Why and She Loves You, where the lads conquer the TV stage, complete with screaming fans in the audience. Among the many highpoints is in the middle of the film when the Fab Four break out of the restrictive studio building and charge down the fire escape’s stairs to an open field where they would swing, jump and dance to the explosive, Can’t Buy Me Love. Did this sequence by Richard Lester, who was already famous for his The Running, Jumping & Standing Still (1959) short film, he made with Spike Millidan and Peter Sellers, give birth to MTV? All I can say is, let’s see it again.

It should be noted that in this film, Lester and Owen defined the persona of the four Beatles that many of us use today: John as witty, Paul as cute and choir boyish, George quiet, and Ringo sad and lonely. In The Beatles’ final song release, Now and Then, many us were surprised to see Lennon cutting-it-up, twisting the night away, playing the clown. But when we look at past footage, John really does play the clown, and loves being one.

Did someone really say that A Hard Day’s Night is best to be enjoyed when you’re young and a committed Beatlephile. Let’s remember that film critic, Andrew Sarris, once proclaimed, A Hard Day’s Night to be one of the four greatest musical films of all time.

Richard Lester followed up with the 1965 Beatle musical Help! As can be expected the songs were remarkable and often served as soundtracks in our own lives, but some found it to be bizarre when Lennon was asked to compose the title song for a musical-comedy-adventure, and he delivered a plea for others to Help me! during a rough passage in his life. The narrative of Help! played almost like a James Bond spoof, which didn’t work with moviegoers about an eastern cult and a pair of mad scientists, who are obsessed with obtaining a sacrificial ring sent to Ringo by a fan. Nevertheless, the soundtrack was released as the band’s fifth studio album, and proved to be another Beatle smashing success.

And let’s see what T-Boy’s own Emperor of Oldies has to say about it: My favorite Beatles album is “Help!” (the Capitol version) but that may be because I was slightly too young to experience “A Hard Day’s Night” in real time like I did with the “Help”! LP. One thing I noticed about the song performances in the “A Hard Day’s Night” film… they appear to have taken the audio from the LP tracks and slowed them down drastically…. always wondered why? It’s a great album however, with one clunker in my view… “When I Get Home.”

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Bogdanovich and Country Western Music

Set in 1950-51, Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film, The Last Picture Show (1971) is about people who live in a small, dying north central Texas town that never really should have existed. It is a sad story where most of the students at the local high school will probably go nowhere in their lives and are aware of it. Bogdanovich’s images of the tired landscape of this piece of Texas tell us what we already know. But the music Bogdanovich uses in the soundtrack is profound, so profound that it was never done before. It consists as a compilation of popular Country & Western music, heard throughout the film from real sources in real time; music in car radios; on records in homes and on TV; in diners, pool halls and jukeboxes; and at dances and parties, perfectly setting the time period, and most importantly hearing what the characters hear, and, in a sense, defining who they are and who they’ll always be.

The movie begins with Hank Williams’ Country and Western song, Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used to Do) and follows with nine other Hank Williams’ songs, and also songs performed by Tony Bennett, Eddy Arnold, Frankie Laine, Pee Wee King, Hank Snow, Jo Stafford, Webb Pierce, Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, Lefty Frizzell, Eddie Fisher and Kay Starr.

As noted above, the soundtrack of The Last Picture Show is all source music from the early 1950s. At the time of the film’s release there were only two soundtrack LPs available, one from MGM records that included Hank Williams songs and one from Columbia with the selections from their catalog including Tony Bennett and Johnny Ray songs. The CD release from El Records is the first to collect all 28 cues from the movie. Several of these cuts are rare and difficult to find. So, kudos to El/Cherry Red Records in the UK for putting this collection together.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

(Sofia) Coppola and Teenage Angst

Sofia Coppola’s historical drama, Marie Antoinette (2006), is filmed in a stylistic display of sweeping monarchical images, while the movie’s soundtrack consists of punk and indie rock songs. Recently, there has been much discussion regarding the dialectical collision of sound and images, primarily due to Jonathon Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Sofia Coppola does this as well, creating a unique film experience with eye candy for your eyes and something a little bit more darker for your ears.

The narrative of Marie Antoinette takes us on a journey into a world of despair about a 15-year-old Austrian Hapsburg archduchess, Maria Antonia, who is far too young to be the dauphine and then the queen of France. Her struggle is reflected in the 1970s and ’80’s contemporary music by the Gang of Four, the Strokes and New Order.

We first see Kirsten Dunst in the title role, wearing a decadent feathered headpiece, sticking her finger into a cake’s frosting while the Gang of Four’s Natural’s Not in It, is heard in the background. The Strokes’ What Ever Happened? plays as Marie longs for an extramarital affair that is finally over. And Ceremony by New Order dominates the scene of Antoinette’s 18th birthday party. What can be said, other than Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette soundtrack tells us that teenage lust, angst and loneliness continues throughout eternity.

Marie Antoiniette: A Historical Lover of Dogs

Marie Antoiniette’s disparity is illustrated in an early moment in the film, upon her arrival at the French border, when Marie’s new royal family ruthlessly grabs her childhood pet dog, a Pug named Mops, for the more appropriate French Poodle. Thankfully, there was a happy ending in real life, where they were reunited, apparently due to the intervention of new king, her husband, Louis XVI. Sofia Coppola’s film does not close with revealing Queen Marie Antoinette’s less-than happy ending with her beheading, but it is believed that she carried her pet Papillon with her to the guillotine.

Oddities & One Shots

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER

Stigwood and the Bee Gees

Despite John Travolta’s pulsating dance moves on the disco floor, without South Australia’s producer, Robert Stigwood’s 1977’s Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, it would not be considered a Hollywood classic. Stigwood licensed a mostly fictional 1976 article about working class Italian-American men with menial labor some jobs, who would spend their entire paycheck for a Saturday night at a local Brooklyn discothèque. It seemed obvious that the young men were on a fast track to nowhere, but while drinking and dancing on the floor, it was clear that everyone had a chance to become a star.

Saturday Night Fever‘s soundtrack stayed on top of the Billboard charts for six months, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. Stigwood was the manager of the Bee Gees and commissioned the Brothers Gibb to contribute three of their songs: Stayin’ Alive, How Deep Is Your Love, and Night Fever – which all became number one hit songs. Yvonne Elliman’s version of If I Can’t Have You, which the Bee Gees also wrote, topped the charts, as well. Good or bad, Stigwood’s soundtrack has been ingrained into our consciousness and used so often that it’s regarded more than a cliché. Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees later commented that every time he turned on the radio a Saturday Night Fever song was playing, to the point where he would become ill.

THE 007 FRANCHISE

Barry and Bond

The narrative of 1964’s Goldfinger is typical of many of writer Ian Fleming’s plots: While investigating a gold magnate’s smuggling operation, James Bond uncovers a plot to contaminate the Fort Knox gold reserve. Guy Hamilton, an English film director, who directed 22 films from the 1950s to the 1980s, including four James Bond films, is noted in the credits as director. But, with no offense to Hamilton, this is a franchise movie, and does it really matter who directed it. So let’s give it to the duo producer team of Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, better make that Cubby Broccoli, who took exception when people assumed that his last name stemmed from a vegetable. Later, it was revealed that it really did, but his family replied it was the opposite, with broccoli name after the Broccoli family.

A viewing of Goldfinger will take you into a sinister world of suspense, intrigue and betrayal. And you’ll see in action: Sean Connery as MI6’s 007, the only real Bond; Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore, who made the 1960’s seem so carefree and less PC; Harold Sakata’s Oddjob, the man with a sharp hat, who gave us a new name and new meaning to Head Over Heels; and finally, Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger, who turns everything he touches into gold, though still not determined if his hands ever touched a former US president’s gold-plated bathroom toilet.

The soundtrack is the work of composer John Barry, who created a musical vocabulary that will forever be synonymous with 007. Barry is also famous for his first marriage to the deceased and equally iconic, Jane Birkin. While it was hard to choose between his Bond soundtracks, Barry perfected his sound with the bold and brassy theme for Goldfinger, performed by Shirley Bassey.

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

Arkush/Dante and the Ramones

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School is a 1979 musical comedy, co-directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, billed as jukebox extravaganza. The title cut is a song performed by the rock band, the Ramones, who were an American punk rock band formed in the New York City neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens in 1974. Known for helping establish the punk movement in the United States, the Ramones are often cited as the world’s first true punk band. Though initially achieving little commercial success, the band is seen today as highly influential in punk culture. All members adopted pseudonyms ending with the surname Ramone, although none were biologically related; they were inspired by Paul McCartney, who would check into hotels under the alias Paul Ramon.

The Rock ‘n’ Roll High School theme song opens with an extended drum beat, with lead singer Joey Ramone eventually singing the opening line, “Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.” And why did we include it: Let’s just say, Because it feels so goddamn good. – Attributed to Sam Peckinpah in his film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a 1974 Mexican-American Neo-Western.

Stay tuned for The Film Soundtracks in Our Lives, Part II: The relationship between auteur, François Truffaut and orchestral composer, Maurice Jaubert. In fact, you can see it now at https://travelingboy.com/travel/the-film-soundtracks-in-our-lives-part-ii/.

The post The Film Soundtracks in Our Lives appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Raoul’s 2 Cents

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

I trust you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with the precious people in your life.

I’m taking a quick break from my own gathering to wish you all a belated Thanksgiving.

Wondering what to watch during this relaxing weekend? If you are a Broadway enthusiast, and you like “The Chorus Line,” and you have access to Amazon Prime, go watch “Every Little Step.” It’s a creative documentary of the making of that dancing blockbuster hit. It juxtaposes the lives of the original cast and the incoming set of dancers. You will experience the emotional drama and bond with the dancers holding on to their dreams. It will keep you guessing who will make the cut.

My daughter is as creative and artistic as I am so it was nice to critique and connect with the characters. As in real life, the reason thousands … millions of artists labor for their craft, for that one moment of glory, is because they do it for the love of their craft. If you never understood their passion, watch the movie. We were so inspired by the film that we did an impromptu mini-concert of our favorite Broadway and Disney musicals in the living room.

My daughter baked duck instead of turkey and I’m telling you, this was the best Thanksgiving meal I had ever tasted. She used seasonings I had never used. Of course the best seasoning of all was love.

Did you go out of town to be with family? Was the bonding good? Did you say a prayer of thanks for all the blessing around us?

It’s a beautiful thing … Thanksgiving.

TGIF people!

Raoul

Joke of the Week

Thanks to Rodney of Manitoba, B.C. for this joke.

Parting Shots

Thanks to Tom of Pasadena, CA. for these senior T-Shirts

Thanks to Art of Sierra Madre, CA. for this family photo.

Thanks to Rodney of Manitoba. B.C.

Thanks to Peter Paul of S Pasadena for this crazy joke.

The post The Older Brother appeared first on Traveling Archive.

An interesting, intriguing even, FACT regarding Top 20 Films for Halloween Viewing on Traveling Boy and the #3 selection, THE SHINING (1980). During my time (1972-1982) with Continental Airline (CAL), in our PR department, in addition to my responsibilities as Manager of Publicity, they also asked I take charge of all movie and TV requests.

The production folks of THE SHINING called and asked if we’d be willing to let them have footage of one of our aircraft as well as some flight attendant uniforms. After checking a variety of factors (what was the story about; would the CAL publicity in this major Hollywood movie be beneficial to us, etc.) I agreed that we’d give them footage of a CAL DC-10 in flight.

We also gave them specific info on flight attendant uniforms, etc. Did they want us to give them a uniform? No, they’d prefer to make their own. The part in the movie where our plane footage was utilized was when a major character flew from Miami to Denver.

The one fact that we all vividly recalled, is enormous attention to detail they gave to the uniform. Were the buttons EXACTLY correct? Was the flight attendant uniform

That may seem somewhat strange, but when the movie came out, we (especially in the PR department!) were stunned to see that when our CAL DC-10 landed (in the movie) in Denver, it landed in a snowstorm, and the aircraft footage they used, was that of a Lockheed L-1011!!! If they were so specific about the buttons on the flight attendant uniforms, how come they DID NOT notice the take-off and landing aircraft were totally different? But maybe ONLY an airplane/airline person would notice!

ANOTHER FACT most do NOT know: Even though the entire movie takes place in America and the Denver area, most of the move was filmed in Great Britain. Indeed, Timberline Lodge in Oregon was used for the exterior of Overlook Hotel. The interior scenes and some of the exterior scenes of the hotel took place at Elstree Film Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, England, UK.

There was a pile of several doors nearby – all had been slashed open! I had no idea (and they did not tell me!) how many “movie takes” had been filmed to get the “right cinematic effect.”

I also found it fascinating as to why so much had been filmed in England. They shared with me that the director and producer, Stanley Kubrick, was afraid of flying.

The post The Shining: Interesting Facts appeared first on Traveling Archive.

The T-Boy Society of Film & Music’s latest poll is devoted to our 20 favorite films of 1971. Part One in the series focuses on films voted by our members from eleven to twenty. Part Two will feature the final top ten.

The genesis of our poll was highly influenced by Christina Newland’s thoughtful piece in BBC Culture, entitled, Why 1971 was an Extraordinary Year in Film.

Ms. Newland writes, In the late 1960s the Hollywood film industry was floundering financially, and many of the struggling major studios were bought out by non-media companies. By ’71, film admission in Hollywood had slowed to less than a quarter compared to the heyday in the 1940s. There was no set path for studios to follow, and no certain road into the future of filmmaking.

When critics and scholars talk about the remarkable artistic flowering that came from the “New Hollywood” of the ’70s, it’s often about how artists slipped through the cracks in the chaos between the old guard fading away and the new guard taking over. By 1971, this seemed to be precisely what was occurring.

Yes, we agree with Ms. Newland’s assessment that the abundance of unique 1971 films were the tip of the iceberg, where young Hollywood filmmakers responded to the decline of U.S. optimism, reflected by the political assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the continuation of the amoral War in Vietnam, complete with napalmed children and unpunished U.S. war criminals a fixture on the evening news. The studio brass was confused, and it seemed that anyone who was young with long-hair and a beard was handed a camera to make a movie. But, keep in mind, most of the new films were of literary content, not necessarily form or visual style.

So, it’s important to note that the young Hollywood directors were highly influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague’s use of new lightweight cameras and sound equipment, natural lighting and high-speed film which allowed shooting on the streets, as director Jean-Luc Godard and photographer Raoul Coutard once did when they pushed a hidden camera in a shopping cart while filming Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg on the Champs-Élysées in À bout de souffle (1960).

But, the Nouvelle Vague influences – similar to how Italian Neorealism effected the French filmmakers – did initially impact the early visual style of certain new Hollywood directors; in particular Francis Ford Coppola, John Cassavetes, Arthur Penn, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Hal Ashby and Brian De Palma. Akin to the Beatles and the British Musical Invasion of the 1960s who taught us to appreciate our own music, the Nouvelle Vague did the same with our Hollywood movies with many of its filmmakers previously film critics on the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, who had an understanding of the works of Hollywood masters such as Hitchcock, Hawks and post-Citizen Kane films by Orson Welles. In Peter Biskind’s landmark text, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, he explains that  Warren Beatty first offered the screenplay of Bonnie and Clyde to Godard and Truffaut before Arthur Penn, which reinforces the influence of La Nouvelle Vague on the new Hollywood directors; where Godard himself is considered the most influential filmmaker of the post-World War 2 era.

But, with that said, our list of top films of 1971 is not made at the expense of established masters such as directors like Don Siegel, Stanley Kubrick, Franklin J. Schaffner.

So, once again, the T-Boy Society of Film and Music’s list of our 20 favorite films of 1971 begins with Part One; films from eleven to twenty.

Initial Comments:

• For me, it’s all about change, realism (not the aging studio, “shot-on-the-backlot” attempts at realism). – Jim Gordon, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• I spent much of my time at college in the dark, at a movie theater steps away from my apartment. A roll of ten tickets cost ten dollars. That might have been the best investment I ever made, because I honestly believe I learned more from these and other films I saw there (a special nod to Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, Rossellini, and Visconti) than I did from all that fancy education. – Stephen Brewer, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Fifty years ago, with both the industry and wider society in turmoil, an astounding set of movies was born – which offer pause for thought about cinema today. Amid US films, there was often a fascinating split between pro-establishment works and those which embraced the spirit of the counterculture. – Christina Newland, BBC Culture
• Violating the boundaries between life and art to make their material their own was a dangerous way for these filmmakers to work. It was successful for a while, enriching both the life and the art, but as the two became more extravagant and interchangeable, New Hollywood directors lost the detachment of artists, and their lives and art sank into quicksand, joined in a fatal embrace. – Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
• “Born again Christian” Johnny Cash was asked why he recorded a cover version of the Nine Inch Nails’ song ‘Hurt,’ which focused on heroin addiction. His reply was simple: “A good song is a good song.” That echoes my selections of films that stand alone devoid of 1971 cultural and literary sensibilities. – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• A movie is a movie is a movie. – Alfred E. Newman, Mad Magazine

Number 20: TWO ENGLISH GIRLS

Director: François Truffaut; Writers: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault (adapted from Les deux Anlaises et le continent by Henri-Pierre Roché); Cinematography: Néstor Almendros; Music: Georges Delerue; Film Editing: Martine Barraqué, Yann Dedet; Production Design: Michel de Broin; Costume Design: Gitt Magrini.

Players: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Kika Markham, Stacey Tendeter, Sylvia Marriott, Marie Mansart, Philippe Léotard, Mark Peterson, David Markhm, Georges Delerue (the film’s music composer in small role).

Synopsis:

At the beginning of the 20th century, Claude Roc, a young middle-class Frenchman meets in Paris, Ann Brown, a young Englishwoman. They become friends and Ann invites him to spend holidays at the house where she lives with her mother and her sister Muriel. During the holiday, Claude, Ann and Muriel become very close and he gradually falls in love with Muriel. But both families lay down a one-year-long separation without any contact before agreeing to the marriage. So, Claude goes back to Paris where he has many love affairs and sends Muriel a farewell letter.

Memorable Line:

Stacey Tendeter as Muriel Brown (in letter): Dearest Claude, I came to see you to bury this thing. I’m glad you were the first, because it’s you, because you wanted it. I shan’t cry. Listen to me as you once did when I told you love was stirring in me. Now I tell you that it must die. So that I may live.

Extras:

• Truffaut had earlier adapted another Henri-Pierre Roché novel, Jules and Jim.
• Anne’s last words in the film are, If you send for a doctor, I will see him now. These were writer Emily Brontë’s last words before she died. We assume that Truffaut probably used her words in the film as an homage or to compare her to the character of Anne.
• Jean-Pierre Léaud ultimately appeared in seven films directed by Truffaut.

Critics:

• Truffaut’s “Two English Girls” is a film of such beautiful, charming and comic discretion that it isn’t until the end that one realizes it’s also immensely sad and even brutal, though in the non-brutalizing way that truth can sometimes be. – Vincent Canby, NY Times
• As a man obsessed with memories of the past, Truffaut continues with his tradition of period pieces. Even many of his contemporary genre films feature flashbacks to earlier days. – Ringo Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Because Truffaut doesn’t strain for an emotional tone, he can cover a larger range than the one-note movies. Here he is discreet, even while filming the most explicit scenes he’s ever done; he handles sadness gently; he is charming and funny even while he tells us a story that is finally tragic. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

Number 19: NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner; Writing: James Goldman, screenplay (based on the book by Robert K. Massie); Cinematography: Freddie Young; Film Editing: Ernest Walter; Production Design: John Box; Art Direction: Ernest Archer, Jack Maxsted, Gil Parrondo; Costume Design: Yvonne Blake.

Players: Michael Jayston, Janet Suzman, Ania Marson, Lynne Frederick, Candace Glendenning, Fiona Fullerton, Tom Baker, Jack Hawkins, a young Brian Cox as Trotsky, and Daniel Day Lewis (uncredited).

Synopsis:

Tsar Nicholas II, the inept last monarch of Russia, insensitive to the needs of his people, is overthrown and exiled to Siberia with his family.

Memorable Line:

Michael Jayston as Tsar Nicholas II: The Russia my father gave me never lost a war. What shall I say to my son when the time comes? That I had no pride? That I was weak? I’ve always thought God meant me to rule. He put me here. He chose me, and whatever happens is His will. We shall fight on until victory.

Extras:

• Tsar Nicholas II was the first cousin of Great Britain’s King George the 5th and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm the 2nd.
• Director Franklin J. Schaffner deliberately cast unfamiliar leads (Jayston, Suzman, Baker) so the audience would focus on the storytelling.
• Schaffner had Michael Jayston, Janet Suzman, Roderic Noble, Ania Marson, Lynne Frederick, Candace Glendenning, and Fiona Fullerton live together during filming so that the actors would form a family-like bond, in an effort to make their scenes together more authentic.

Critics:

• The writing is excellent. “Nicholas and Alexandra” is a slice of history and intriguing. –  Richard Carroll, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• There’s always a kind of fascination in royalty. We democratic Americans even seem to like royalty more than those nations who have some. Nicholas and Alexandra may not have been the flashiest of czars and czarinas, but maybe they weren’t entirely to blame; the muted tone of the age was set by Queen Victoria, who (as Vincent Canby notes) was the grandmother of practically everybody in World War I – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

Number 18: THE DEVILS

Director: Ken Russell; Writing: Ken Russell, screenplay (based on the play by John Whiting & novel by Aldous Huxley); Cinematography: David Watkin; Music: Peter Maxwell Davies; Film Editing: Michael Bradsell; Art Direction: Robert Cartwright; Costume Design: Shirley Russell; Set Design: Derek Jarman.

Players: Vanessa Redgrave, Oliver Reed, Dudley Sutton, Max Adrian.

Synopsis:

In 17th-century France, Father Urbain Grandier seeks to protect the city of Loudun from the corrupt establishment of Cardinal Richelieu. Hysteria occurs within the city when he is accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun.

Memorable Lines:

Oliver Reed as Grandier: Lies! Lies and heresy. The Devil is a liar, and the father of lies. If the Devil’s evidence is to be accepted, the most virtuous people are in the greatest of danger, for it against these that Satan rages most violently. I had never set eyes on Sister Jeanne of the Angels until the day of my arrest, but the Devil has spoken, and to doubt his word is sacrilege.

Vanessa Redgrave as Sister Jeanne: Oh, Christ, let me find a way to you. Take me in your sacred arms. Let the blood flow between us uniting us.

Grandier: My lords, I am innocent of the charges. And I am afraid. But I have the hope in my heart that, before this day ends, Almighty God will glance aside and let my suffering atone for my vain and disordered life. Amen.

Extras:

• Soon to be a director in his own right, Derek Jarman’s sets are modeled on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
• Ken Russell wanted to avoid the clichéd look of period films and insisted on anachronistic, even futuristic, design.
• Russell’s guidance to Jarman was that it should echo the ‘rape in a public toilet’ line from the Huxley novel that inspired the film.

Critics:

• Two years before “The Exorcist” hit the screen, Ken Russell puts the Catholic Church in the spotlight by filming one of the most disturbing films of all times. Except from being a sheer technical and aesthetic masterpiece, “The Devils” provokes as a film with its relentless sense of anarchy. Religious hysteria and illusions, the horror of human arrogance and depravity and the love that turns to cherishing that turns to hatred. – Vassli, IMDB.com
• Though Russell wrote the screenplay for “The Devils” his scripts and by others are only a starting point for him to transcend his own personal vision. Frustrating for many, but glad he was around. – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

Number 17: WALKABOUT

Director: Nicolas Roeg; Writing: Edward Bond, screenplay (based on novel by Donald G. Payne and story by Nicolas Roeg); Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg; Music: John Barry; Film Editing: Antony Gibbs, Alan Pattillo; Production Design: Brian Eatwell Art Direction: Terry Gough.

Players: Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg, David Gulpilil, John Meillon.

Synopsis:

Two city-bred siblings are stranded in the Australian Outback, where they learn to survive with the aid of an Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, a ritual separation from his tribe.

Memorable Lines:

Jenny Agutter as the Girl: I don’t know why you are telling him all this. He can’t understand. He doesn’t know what a ladder is. I expect we’re the first white people he’s seen.

Luc Roeg as White Boy: He didn’t say goodbye to us. The Girl: Yes, he did. That’s what the dance was about. It’s there way of saying goodbye to people they loved.

Narrator (last lines from “Poem XL” by A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad”): Into my heart an air that kills, From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went, And cannot come again.

Extras:

• In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Sleep on it. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the walkabout.
• In his first screen role, David Gulpilil spoke no English at the time of filming.
• Director Nicolas Roeg’s son, Luc Roeg, in his first film role, was actually sun-burnt in the scene where the aboriginal boy treats his back by rubbing him with fat from a wild boar. Nicolas Roeg thought it would make a good scene for the film so he picked up the camera and shot it.

Critics:

Roeg’s desert in “Walkabout” is like Beckett’s stage for “Waiting for Godot.” That is, it’s nowhere in particular, and everywhere. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

Roeg revels in the hallucinatory, creating a wilderness that exists as much in the mind as it does the land. – Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian Australia

Number 16: GET CARTER

Director: Mike Hodges; Writer: Mike Hodges, screenplay (based on the novel Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis); Cinematography: Wolfgang Suschitzky; Music: Roy Budd; Film Editing: John Trumper; Art Direction: Roger King.

Players: Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland, John Osborne, Tony Beckley, George Sewell, Geraldine Moffat.

Synopsis:

When his brother dies under mysterious circumstances in a car accident, suave London gangster Jack Carter travels to his working-class hometown in Newcastle to investigate his death in this chilling neo-noir.

Memorable Line:

Eric the gangster: So, what’re you doing then? On your holidays?
Michael Caine as Jack Carter: No, I’m visiting relatives.
Eric: Oh, that’s nice.
Jack Carter: It would be… if they were still living.

Extras:

• Mike Hodges’ work was influenced by Raymond Chandler and Hollywood tough guy films such as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), as they showed “how to use the crime story as an autopsy on society’s ills.”
• Mike Hodges favored the use of long-distance lenses (as he had used previously on ITV Playhouse: Rumour.
• The role of mobster Cyril Kinnear is played by writer John Osborne, whose play Look Back in Anger ushered in the British cultural movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, known as the Angry Young Men or kitchen sink realism. The movement changed the artistic landscape of contemporary Britain, which reflected the disillusionment of society, anger and an impatience for change.

Critics:

• Mike Hodges has thrown his actors into real life – the faces of the old men in the pubs and betting shops, and the revelers at the dancehall take the movie into something akin to cinéma verité, even as mayhem erupts in the foreground. – Michael Hann, The Guardian
• No one can play a tough like Michael Caine; a disturbing mix of charm, kindness and savage restitution. – Ringo Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• “Get Carter” is Hodges’ best film, where the coaly Northeastern English Industrial Revolution town of Newcastle actually serves as a character in the film. Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

Number 15: SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY

Director: John Schlesinger; Writing: Penelope Gilliatt; Cinematography: Billy Williams; Film Editing: Richard Marden; Art Direction: Norman Dorme.

Players: Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Head, Peggy Ashcroft, Tony Britton, Maurice Denham, Vivian Pickles, Frank Windsor, Daniel Day-Lewis (uncredited).

Synopsis:

A Jewish doctor, Daniel Hirsh and a middle-aged woman, Alex Greville are both having affairs with the same male artist, Bob Elkin. Not only are Hirsh and Greville aware that Elkin is seeing the other but they actually know each other as well. Despite this, they are willing to put up with the situation through fear of losing Elkin who switches freely between them. Schlesinger’s film highlights some worrying facts about how much people’s attitudes to relationships and each other have changed over just two generations.

Memorable Lines:

Peter Finch as Daniel (speaking to the camera): When you’re at school and you want to quit, people say, “You’re going to hate it out in the world.” Well, I didn’t believe them and I was right. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be grown up, and they said “Childhood is the best time of your life.” Well, it wasn’t. And now, I want his company and they say, “What’s half a loaf? You’re well shot of him,” and I say I know that… but I miss him, that’s all and they say “He never made you happy” and I say, But I am happy, apart from missing him.

Critics:

• A story of a ménage à trois is a sad reflection on settling for less than we want, with London drizzle setting the mood and an onscreen, same-sex kiss crashing through barriers. – Stephen Brewer, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• I think “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is a masterpiece, but I don’t think it’s about what everybody else seems to think it’s about. This is not a movie about the loss of love, but about its absence. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com
• Director John Schlesinger reportedly used the approach associated with Alain Resnais in preparing this film; he asked Penelope Gilliatt, a writer with a definite and highly developed fictional world, to produce an original screenplay, and he influenced the work through discussions but did not contribute a single word himself. – Walt Munkowsky, Traveling Boy, Time Capsule Cinema

NUMBER 14A (Tie): CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

Director: Mike Nichols; Writer: Jules Feiffer; Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno;
Film Editing: Sam O’Steen; Production Design: Richard Sylbert.

Players: Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margret, Rita Moreno, Carol Kane.

Synopsis:

Chronicling the lifelong sexual development of two men who meet and become friends in college.

Memorable Lines:

Jack Nicholson as Jonathan (narrating his slide show): Marcia, 13 1/2 or thereabouts, I kissed her one night at a spin-the-bottle party. This one’s Rosalie. Rosalie looked just like Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet.” I had a crush on Rosalie from 14 to 15 and I never went near her. In those days, we had illusions. Here’s Charlotte. Not much on looks, but great tits for 15. Here’s Gloria, the best-built girl at Evander Childs. I took her to the Bronx Zoo once and on the bus, copped a cheap feel. Here’s Bobbie! My wife. The fastest tits in the West and king of the ball-busters. She conned me into marrying her and now she’s killing me with alimony.

Extras:

Jules Feiffer said Mike Nichols told him he was considering Jack Nicholson for the role of Jonathan. Feiffer went to see Easy Rider(1969) and thought the guy with the “hip Henry Fonda stance and twangy New Jersey drawl” had nothing in common with “the young Jewish misogynist” at the center of his script. Nichols told him: “Trust me, he’s going to be our most important actor since Brando.”

Critics:

• “Carnal Knowledge”‘ was ahead of its time (as was Mike Nichols). – Jim Gordon, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• The structure of the film, as well as the visual form given it by Nichols (lots of soliloquys in tight close-ups), is that of a Feiffer cartoon, or, more specifically, like a series of cartoons that cover the 1940s (when Jonathan and Sandy are in college), the 1950s (when Sandy is married and beginning to envy Jonathan’s bachelor freedom), the 1960s (when Sandy begins to wander from his suburban paradise), and the 1970s (when the only way in which Jonathan can successfully overcome his impotency is by elaborately pre-arranged masquerades). – Vincent Canby, NY Times

Number 14B (Tie): FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

Director: Norman Jewison; Writing Credits: Joseph Stein, screenplay (based on stories by Sholom Aleichem, with further adaptation by Arnold Perl); Cinematography: Oswald Morris; Music: Jerry Bock (based on music for the stage play by Alexander Courage, and Sheldon Harnick, lyricist for the stage play by Isaac Stern); Music Department: Jerry Bock, orchestrator; Eric Tomlinson, violin soloist; John Williams, conductor and music adapter.

Players: Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon.

Synopsis:

In prerevolutionary Russia, a Jewish peasant contends with marrying off three of his daughters while growing anti-Semitic sentiment threatens his little village of Anatevka. Among the traditions of the Jewish community, the matchmaker arranges the match and the father approves it. The milkman Reb Tevye is a poor man that has been married for twenty-five years with Golde and they have five daughters. When the local matchmaker Yente arranges the match between his older daughter, Tzeitel, and the old widow butcher, Lazar Wolf, Tevye agrees with the wedding. However, Tzeitel is in love with the poor tailor Motel Kamzoil and they ask permission to Tevye to get married that he accepts to please his daughter. Then his second daughter Hodel (Michele Marsh) and the revolutionary student Perchik decide to marry each other and Tevye is forced to accept. When Perchik is arrested by the Czar troops and sent to Siberia, Hodel decides to leave her family and homeland and travel to Siberia to be with her beloved Perchik. When his third daughter Chava decides to get married with the Christian Fyedka, Tevye does not accept and considers that Chava has died. Meanwhile the Czar’s troops evict the Jewish community from Anatevka.

Memorable Lines:

Topol as Tevye: Traditions, traditions. Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as… as… as a fiddler on the roof!

Tevye to God: I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?

Tevye: You are just a poor tailor!
Motel: That’s true, Reb Tevye, but even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness!

Extras:

• Canadian director Norman Jewison was brought into the project by executives at United Artists who thought he was Jewish. His first words to the executives upon meeting them were, “You know I’m not Jewish, right?”
• The title comes from a painting by Russian artist Marc Chagall called The Dead Man which depicts a funeral scene and shows a man playing a violin on a rooftop. It is also used by Tevye in the story as a metaphor for trying to survive in a difficult, constantly changing world.
• To get the look he wanted for the film, Jewison told director of photography Oswald Morris to shoot the film in an earthy tone. Morris saw a woman wearing brown nylon hosiery, and thought, “That’s the tone we want.” He asked the woman for the stockings on the spot and shot the entire film with a stocking over the lens. The weave can be detected in some scenes.
• Morris nabbed the Best Cinematography Oscar for his work.

Critics:

There are some contrived and artificial moments in “Fiddler,” but it becomes more convincing, naturalistic, and involving as it goes on, and finally builds to a powerful climax. It ranks high among the best musicals ever put on film. -Paul Sargent Clark, The Hollywood Reporter

Number 13: THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Director: Peter Bogdanovich; Writing: Peter Bogdanovich & Larry McMurtry, screenplay (based on Larry McMurtry novel); Producers: Stephen J. Friedman, Bert Schneider; Cinematography: Robert Surtees; Editing: Donn Cambern, (Peter Bogdanovich, uncredited); Production & Costume Design: Polly Platt; Music: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Phil Harris, Johnny Standley, Hank Thompson.

Players: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid, Sam Bottoms.

Synopsis:

In 1951, a group of high schoolers come of age in a bleak, isolated, North Texas town.

Memorable Lines:

Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion: You boys can get on out of here, I don’t want to have no more to do with you. Scarin’ a poor, unfortunate creature like Billy just so’s you could have a few laughs. I’ve been around that trashy behavior all my life, I’m gettin’ tired of puttin’ up with it. Now you can stay out of this pool hall, out of my cafe, and my picture show too. I don’t want no more of your business.

Sam the Lion: If she was here I’d probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about 5 minutes. Ain’t that ridiculous? Naw, it ain’t really. Cause being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being an old decrepit bag of bones, that’s what’s ridiculous. Gettin’ old.

Timothy Bottoms as Sonny Crawford:  Nothin’s really been right since Sam the Lion died.

Cloris Leachman as Ruth Popper (last line in film): Never you mind, honey. Never you mind.

Extras:

• Ben Johnson was persuaded to accept the role of Sam the Lion by his friend, director John Ford. Johnson had turned the part down three times because, according to Peter Bogdanovich, the part had too many words, but Ford reportedly persuaded him by asking if he only wanted to be playing John Wayne’s sidekick for the rest of his career.
• This film was one of the first to use already popular recordings by original artists to score a film that included songs by Frankie Laine, Hank Williams, Jo Stafford and others.
• Cloris Leachman’s last scene in the movie was printed on the first take without any previous rehearsals. She wanted to rehearse the scene, but director Bogdanovich thought it would ruin the scene if it was rehearsed. After she completed the take, she said to him, I can do better. Bogdanovich replied, No, you can’t; you just won the Oscar. Ultimately his sense of direction paid off, as Leachman won the Academy Award for her performance as Best Supporting Actress.

Critics:

• A relentless look at the banality of life manages to be energizing and affirming. – Stephen Brewer, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Bogdanovich was more than a director, having embraced the “Auteur Theory” in 1963. With his reviews of earlier Hollywood genre films made by masters, he too taught us much about our own films. – Ringo Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

Number 12: FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER (quatre nuits d’un rêveur)

Director: Robert Bresson; Writing: Robert Bresson (loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights); Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme; Music: F.R. Daid, Louis Guitar, Chris Hayward, Michel Magne; Film Editing: Raymond Lamy; Production Design: Pierre Charbonnier.

Players: Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forêts, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Giorgio Maulini.

Synopsis:

Loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights, the lead character is Jacques, a young painter, who by chance runs into Marthe as she’s contemplating suicide on the Pont-Neuf in Paris. They talk, and agree to see each other again the next night. Gradually, he discovers that her lover promised to meet her on the bridge that night, and he failed to turn up. Over the next couple of nights, Jacques falls in love with her, but on the fourth night her original lover returns.

Memorable Lines:

Marthe as the woman: ” What’s the matter?
Jacques as the dreamer: ” I love you. That’s the matter.

Extras:

• Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc…) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create. – Robert Bresson
• To be constantly changing lenses in photographing is like constantly changing one’s eye glasses. – Robert Bresson

Critics:

• Though considered to be Bresson’s ‘lightest’ film, “Four Nights of a Dreamer” offers an intense emotional experience that began with “Diary of a Country Priest” and ended with his last film, “L’Argent.” Due to the economy of his directorial style, many consider his films slow, when in fact they are remarkably fast. Each image is ironed out, with no image taking on a greater significance than the other. Bresson frees himself from what he calls ‘postcardism,’ which he considers a forced, superficial aestheticism. – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• ” Four Nights of a Dreamer” is a rare Bresson film where the mainstream audience actually laughs along with the film as opposed to laugh at it, due to a lack of understanding of Bresson’s deeply personal style. The staged ‘movie premiere’ is the closest he’s ever come to a comedy. – Phil Marley, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

Number 11: KLUTE

Director: Alan J. Pakula; Writing: Andy Lewis & David E. Lewis; Cinematography: Gordon Willis; Film Editing: Carl Lerner; Music: George Jenkins, Michael Small.

Players: Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Roy Scheider, Dorothy Tristan, Rita Gam.

Synopsis:

A small-town detective searching for a missing man has only one lead: a connection with a New York prostitute.

Memorable Lines:

Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels: Men would pay $200 for me, and here you are turning down a freebie. You could get a perfectly good dishwasher for that. And for an hour… for an hour, I’m the best actress in the world, and the best fuck in the world.

Bree Daniels: Tell me, Klute. Did we get you a little? Huh? Just a little bit? Us city folk? The sin, the glitter, the wickedness? Huh? Donald Sutherland as John Klute: Ah… that is so pathetic.

Extras:

• The first installment of what informally came to be known as Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy. The other two films in the trilogy are The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976).
• According to her autobiography, Jane Fonda hung out with call girls and pimps for a week before beginning this film in order to prepare for her role. When none of the pimps offered to “represent” her, she became convinced she wasn’t desirable enough to play a prostitute and urged the director to replace her with friend Faye Dunaway.
• Jane Fonda said that she had to throw up while preparing for the scene where Bree goes through photos of dead prostitutes to identify her friends. She actually had gone to the city morgue too and it came as a great shock.

Critics:

• “Klute” showed the world Jane could act (though I always knew she could). – Jim Gordon, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• “Klute” is Fonda’s movie, and both Pakula and Sutherland seem to recognize that. It is not an argument in favor of sex work per se, even though it does the necessary service of combating the cliches and stigmas around the practice. But Fonda’s Oscar-winning performance as Bree does argue for a fullness of character – and of womanhood – that feels radically open to different possibilities and a wide spectrum of emotional experiences, including moments during therapy where she expresses uncertainty about her future and the choices she’s made. – Scott Tobias, The Guardian

END OF PART 1
Stay Tuned for the Top Ten Films of 1971 in PART 2 of our series which proves to be both mind boggling and hopefully educational.

If readers have a favorite that’s not listed in Part One or Two, no doubt you can access it on Feature Film, Released between 1971-01-01 and 1971-12-31 (Sorted by Popularity Ascending) – IMDb.

Send us your own list, at ed****@Tr**********.com and we will publish it in our Readers’ Poll.

The post The 20 Best Films of 1971, Part One appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Directed by

Writers: Carole Eastman (screenplay, as Adrien Joyce), Bob Rafelson (story), Carole Eastman (story, as Adrien Joyce)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach, Lois Smith, Billy Green Bush, Ralph Waite, Sally Struthers, John Ryan

Cinematography by: László Kovács

Five Easy Pieces

By Walt Mundkowsky

Fogged with the Easy Rider air of self-defeat, Five Easy Pieces is much stronger on feelings than on insight. It’s not art but still affecting; the actors under Bob Rafelson’s direction lend a certain truth.

There’s no plot worthy of the name; it gives us several weeks in the life of Bobby (Robert Eroica) Dupea, a former piano prodigy who fled his aristocratic family years ago and is now working in a California oil field. He is living with a none-too-bright waitress named Rayette Dipesto who dreams of becoming a country singer. (His dissatisfaction with her and his existence is conveyed in a few keen details. Over the titles we hear “Stand by Your Man.” As Bobby comes home, he too hears the song, played on a phonograph. He pauses at the door as one might in front of an activated bomb. Once inside, he helps himself to a beer. The chorus blares forth as he walks into the living room; he stops and glares at the record player for several seconds.)

Bobby enjoys the pleasures at hand — bowling, drinking, whoring — without a hint of conscious slumming. His friend Elton confides to him that Rayette is pregnant, and “she’s all torn up about it, which I hate to see.” “I tell ya,” Elton continues, “somewhere along the line you even get to liking the whole idea.” “Keep on telling me about the good life, Elton, because it makes me puke.” Bobby storms off. Elton is taken away by the police for jumping bail after a robbery that’s a year old. It is the last we see of him.

Bobby drives to a studio to visit Tita, his concert-pianist sister; she obviously worships him and hopes to convince him to return (“I want to talk to you about so many things”). In a telling shot Tita, in sharp focus, looks at Bobby, slightly blurred in the foreground; she gives him the bad news: “Robert … I have to tell you. Daddy’s very ill — he’s had two strokes.” He doesn’t want to hear about it and doesn’t want to go back, but she won’t relent — “But don’t you think it’s right that you should see him at least once?” He agrees to drive up to the family place, on an island in Puget Sound. Rayette comes along, but Bobby drops her in a nearby motel. He finds his father reduced to a vegetable state, alive but not living. (“He doesn’t even know who the hell I am,” Bobby snaps.) Also at the house are Tita; her condescending brother Carl, recovering from a painful neck injury; his fiancée and student, Catherine Van Oost; and Spicer, the ex-sailor male nurse. Mealtime conversations nearly equal scenes in Losey’s Accident — hostility under a veneer of politeness. “One thing I find very difficult to imagine is how one could have this incredible background in music and then just walk away from it without giving it a second thought.” The threat is implicit, and Bobby returns the volley: “I gave it a second thought.” He pursues Catherine and, bristling with anger, she succumbs.

Uh oh. Rayette shows up in a taxi and Bobby seethes, though the situation is of his own making. He dashes out and gets drunk. The next evening a woman invited to the house is spewing fake-intellectual gibberish and patronizing Rayette; Bobby finally explodes. Later he asks Catherine to leave with him. She sensibly refuses: “It’s useless. I’m trying to be delicate with you, but you just won’t understand.” A painful, touching monologue follows: Bobby tries to justify his life to his mute father, but keeps breaking into tears. He and Rayette leave, heading south. They stop at a gas station; Bobby examines his face in a large mirror. The process takes perhaps a minute: a tiny but detectable change of expression. He leaves his jacket behind (he has given his wallet to Rayette) and hitches a ride on a big logging truck.

What the film chooses to do, it generally does well; problems arise in what it omits. If we are to experience loss over the violence Bobby does to himself and those around him, we need to know in some tangible way what is discarded. How good a pianist might he have become? At the end of his monologue he says, “We both know that I was never that good at it anyway,” but he is defending the decision he made long ago. More important, what kind of person is he? Bobby is absent from very few shots in this movie, but much about him remains annoyingly unclear.

That monologue merits examination because, sharply written and acted though it is, it raises more questions than it answers. Bobby begins nervously (“Are you cold?”), already sounding defeated at the start (“I don’t know if you’d be particularly interested in hearing anything about me”). He thinks the very attempt is futile: “I’m trying to imagine your half of this conversation. […] It’s pretty much the way it got to be before I left. I don’t know what to say.” The key lines are: “I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but ’cause I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay. Auspicious beginnings, you know what I mean?” This is unrelated to what we have seen. How did Bobby meet Rayette and why has he stayed with her? What drove him away from his family and music?

Particularly puzzling is Bobby’s seduction of Catherine. She wants everything he left home to get away from; they are constantly sparring. (“Well, it must be very boring for you here.” — “It is,” he replies. — “I find that very hard to comprehend. I don’t think I’ve ever been bored.”) The scene where she rejects his offer is full of the same crackling aggressiveness, Bobby asking her impossible questions and Catherine parrying them. Earlier she seems affected, convention-bound, smug. But she is a dedicated musician; the first thing she asks him is, “You no longer play at all?” I fail to grasp why he should be so interested in her, given what we know about him, and why he should regard her as his potential savior. Her refusal to leave Carl for Bobby is the most intelligent choice any character in the film makes. She is perfectly aware of the situation: “You’re a strange person, Robert. […] When a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love for his friends, family, work, something, how can he ask for love in return? I mean, why should he ask for it?”

One guesses Bobby is victimized not by the world but by design; the closest he comes to criticizing the society which traps him is in a freeway traffic jam, but none of the people he encounters is truly up to his level and many are caricatures. The two life styles — oil rig worker and concert pianist — are sketched without inside knowledge of either. Take your camera into a small town at dusk and point it at a garishly hyped nudie theater, a barber college, the nearly deserted streets with expanses of neon, the desolate headlights of the few passing cars. Slap a solo piano on the soundtrack (a wind instrument can be substituted), and you have captured indelible images of the emptiness of modern life. Five Easy Pieces has this standard sequence, and it cuts as deeply as expected (i.e., not at all).

The drive home from California is crammed with incident. The lesbian hitchhiker’s diatribe (“I had to leave this place because I got depressed seeing all the crap … people’s homes, just filth … people are filthy … I think they wouldn’t be so violent if they were clean…. I don’t even want to talk about it”) is linked thematically to Bobby’s final escape north, but outstays its welcome. Bobby’s battle of wits with a crusty waitress is also too amusing for its own good. Some of the material is arbitrarily “shaped” — it begins to involve us with interesting relationships and then patly cuts them off. Bobby and Elton walk it off after arguing, but moments later the police come to take Elton back and Bobby rushes to his aid. What would have happened between them if melodrama had not intervened?

Still, the film is frequently arresting and sometimes truthful. Lois Smith gives the most complex, inventive performance as Tita, Bobby’s sister. When she sees him at the recording studio, she bursts into tears. “You always do this to me,” she sobs. “Well, I don’t mean to,” he counters. She refuses to admit that her father’s condition is likely unchangeable (“He has ways of communicating, Robert. I can tell when he’s expressing approval or disapproval, just by his eyes”). When Bobby’s attempt to reach the old man fails, he leaves abruptly. She intercepts him, and her accusation — “You were going without saying goodbye to me” — pierces us to the heart. Karen Black’s Rayette has been overvalued; the most I can say is that she firmly resists tugging for sympathy, and brings some depth and detail to a stock role. One splendid delivery sticks — she brays at Bobby, “Why don’t you just be good to me for a change?” Susan Anspach, an actress from the theatre, is an ideal Catherine; her arresting features, at once blunt and delicate, reticent appeal and cool, edgy voice are exactly right. She gets Catherine’s maddening natural elegance with ease. With less screen time, Billy “Green” Bush (Elton) and Ralph Waite (Carl) impart openness and a sublime ability to annoy, respectively.

That takes us to Jack Nicholson, on whose Bobby Dupea the film stands or falls; it stands, sort of. One can almost hear a motor humming inside the character. The best moments are those when Bobby is not doing anything, yet his mind is clicking away. After a scene with Rayette in a bowling alley, Bobby stares down at his feet only to be interrupted by two local hookers. At the end, sitting in the logging truck, he mutters to himself, “I’m fine”; again, the same words, this time softer; he mouths “I’m fine” a third time as the truck starts up, blotting out his words. Nicholson never finds an inner consistency for the character despite the many excellent moments; but one can hardly ask the actor for what is nowhere indicated in the script. He fits into the oil field better than into the music room, especially his voice. A major performance, even if all its facets do not mesh.

I yield to many in my evaluation of László Kovács’ camerawork on Easy Rider and Getting Straight, but Five Easy Pieces is more straightforward. Not that it is wholly free of the arty: Bobby walks away from the oil field in an over-composed shot — elaborate cloud formation, row of sunspots on the lens, oil pumps Bobby walks past resembling Easter Island statues, camera position and lighting chosen to render the thing Beautiful. And one overripe sunset wouldn’t be out of place in David Lean. But most of Kovács’ work here is intelligent and understated. The editing (Christopher Holmes, Gerald Shepard) is in the same vein; transitions are generally unforced, and two of them deepen our comprehension of connections. Bobby is enticing the two pickups in the bowling alley: “I sure wish I had more time to talk to you girls, but … uh … I have to … I’ll … uh …” — cut to him walking across the parking lot to a hurt Rayette waiting in the car. Bobby chases Catherine into the house at the conclusion of some silly game, both of them laughing — cut to a similar shot, this time the camera moving in the opposite direction: A taxi pulls up to the Dupea house and Rayette steps out. The sure cutting also heightens the impact of the good performances.

Five Easy Pieces has that curse, the promising film; but it breaks its promises as it makes them. We shall have to wait and see where Rafelson and Carole Eastman (script, as “Adrien Joyce”) go from here.

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