Music from "Anything Goes"

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Music
Genre:	Broadway & Vocalists
Artist:	Cole Porter

Cole Porter (1891-1964) wrote both music and lyrics to some of the most popular tunes of mid-century America and whose musicals, such as "Anything Goes", are still being revived on "Broadway" long after most others have bit the dust. It would be impossible to do one blog or a series them on all the great songs he created at the piano in a professional career that spanned 40 years. So I'm just going to take some hits from this one show.
Here are a few of the other songs he did: "Begin the Beguine", "Night and Day", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Love for Sale", "True Love", "Let's Misbehave", "In the Still of the Night", "At Long Last Love", "I Get A Kick Out of You", "Don't Fence Me In", et al.




Porter here does the title tune from his 1934 hit Broadway show:


Some Wikipedia Biography: "Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike most successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote both the lyrics and the music for his songs.

After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 30s, but in 1947 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate."



Porter's life did not make for honest easy story-telling in 1945, when Cary Grant and Alexis Smith stared in the first bio film "Night and Day". For one thing Porter much preferred the intimate company of men to that of women. Most people who knew something of Porter's private life considered the film a bit of a farce in part from that omission. He did marry a Kentucky heiress named Linda Lee Thomas around 1920 and they stayed married until her death in 1954. It is generally considered that this was a marriage more of conviviality than conjugal however and Porter continued seeing men, especially in his days in Hollywood working on films starring the likes of Fred Astaire and Judy Garland.


Then there also was the question of if, as he said in some interviews, he was a member of the French Foreign Legion in 1917. (Porter's first Broadway musical, "See America First", had also debut that year.) Biographers dispute what exactly he did in France , although it is safe to say he likely joined an American-organized relief unit delivering supplies to Allied soldiers and may well have entertained troops on a portable piano at hospitals or near the front. The 1945 film errs on the side of Porter as a solider. A more recent film "De-Lovely", with Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, fore-goes the early life of Porter and picks up where he is pianist among Paris expatriate swells in the Twenties.

Porter's music, culled in places like Paris, Venice, London, combined Old World class with New world energy, as one critic noted. There is a sense that a form of popular songwriting is reaching its apex with so many of his works. He became a byword for sophistication in a medium--the Broadway Musical---that sorely needed some Continental polish and some American Middle-West vigor.

Here's the man himself, singing his most famous tune, "You're the Top" from the 1934 show, "Anything Goes". According to Bob Toomey on You Tube, "Porter composed it during a cruise on Germany's Rhine River. He asked his fellow passengers to tell him what they considered important in their lives, or important in general, and Porter worked them into the lyric."

Porter names 37 different people and places in this one, all quite deftly mixing up the pop zeitgeist.




The finale of "Anything Goes" is Blow, Gabriel, Blow". Here it is sung by Sutton Foster and the cast of the 2010 Broadway Musical revival. Ms. Sutton won a Tony for her performance as Reno Sweeney.

"Lost Horizon", 1937 Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt (Dimitri Tiomkin, Composer)

"An endearing scene where Ronald Colman pursues stunning Jane Wyatt (Sonda) on a wild horseback chase over hill and dale!"

Dimitri Tiomkin (1898-1979) composed a magnificent score for this film. The Russian emigre had left his native country a few years after its revolution. He worked in Germany and France before coming to America in the early 1930's.

"Lost Horizon" was his first major Hollywood triumph, and earned him an Academy Award nomination. He would go on to win the award for composing the classic Gary Cooper/Grace Kelly Western "High Noon" (1952), "The High and the Mighty" (1954), and "The Old Man and the Sea" (1958) .

His work covered great scores for many action films and also he had a great romantic touch as you can listen to here.

Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon" was based on a James Hilton novel with a screenplay by Robert Riskin. In the story, six Westerners are flown out of the turmoil of a Chinese city under attack and hijacked to a mysterious Tibetan kingdom called Shangri-La. Here beauty, tranquility and longevity abound. Ronald Colman plays Robert Conway, an outstanding diplomat who is brought here, perhaps to save the rest of civilization from the destruction of war. In the end, he and some of the party brave the peaks of the Himalayas to return to their world--and they discover that some things can only exist in Shangi-La.

An excellent film, and one that was neglected for years until the UC-Los Angeles Film Archive restored the movie in 1985 to it's original running length. Some parts of the original 137 minute film could only be restored by using production stills and the soundtrack.

I was fortunate enough to see a premiere showing at the Pacific Film Achieve inBerkeley shortly after the restoration. It was worth it! What was a sad case of a valuable film that was chopped up and had parts badly neglected in storage by its studio (Columbia) now survives nearly whole as it was meant to be.

This is a small selection from the film. Tiomkin's romantic side as a composer is right on the mark.

I Am Love (2009)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

This film, titled "Io sono l'amore" in Italian is a solid romantic-family drama, not the type of film I ordinarily go in for, but it delivers all the drama one would expect for a two hour investment.

It also features a great performance by Tilda Swinton as a Russian-born lady, Emma Recchi, who married early into a wealthy Italian family. She has spent her entire adult life in a secure place in a fashionable center of high society among the elite of Milan. But her daughter coming out as a lesbian ignites a personal search for her own inner being.

Swinton is the center of the film and she turns in quite a performance as a woman who has so assimilated into the haute bourgeoisie of Milan that she quite literally has lost her younger identity. Maybe it didn't matter so much when her kids were growing up but now they are grown and mature. She doesn't even use her original name, and her Russian past has been all but erased from her new life as the wife of a boring, but headstrong businessman.

Swinton reportedly learned Russian and Italian for the film, which took eleven years for her and the director and co-writer of the film, Luca Guadagnino, to being to the screen.

The story starts out slowly and confidently, with the family patriarch announcing over dinner that he has decided to retire the running of his business to both his son AND his grandson, a King Lear-like move that is just the beginning of the undoing of many family ties.

The film's main focus centers in the main around the relationship between Swinton's character and her grown son's best friend, a chef who is a decidedly good cook because he can seduce women with just the way he can saute a sea food entree or caramelize a dessert. Eroticism plays a major part of a couple key scenes, but the film itself also plays up the sterility of an older capitalistic society that has lost its drive.

Emma (a tip to Flaubert's famous literary heroine?) becomes obsessed with the younger man, and perhaps just as obsessed with finding a way out of her stifling life in the gilded cage of northern Italian high society.

The film climaxes to a tragedy, something you can feel coming all along. It's worthy of something out of Tennessee Williams or the two classic "Godfather" films of the seventies. The music score by John Adams, featured on the trailer below, is also outstanding.

Tilda Swinton fans, of course, and those who like seeing unflicnching family drama--with just as much dramatic punch and suspense as there are romantic interludes, will enjoy this one.

Patrick Street - "Music for a Found Harmonium"

This delightful tune was one I first heard performed by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It's done here by the group "Patrick Street" and is featured in their album "Irish Times". If you feel like doing a "riverdance" while listening to this, be sure your home-office or work station is clear of obstacles like children, small pets or diminutive supervisory personnel.

A bit of Wikipedia:
"The band was formed in Dublin in 1986 with Kevin Burke (formerly of The Bothy Band) on fiddle, Jackie Daly (De Dannan) on button accordion, Andy Irvine (Sweeney's Men, Planxty) on bouzouki and vocals, and Arty McGlynn (Van Morrison, Planxty) on guitar. McGlynn later left the group, and other members were added: Ged Foley (The House Band, Battlefield Band) on guitar, and Declan Masterson on uilleann pipes and keyboards. They have also played with Donal Lunny, Bill Whelan and Enda Walsh. Jackie Daly left shortly after recording "On the Fly". On this album John Carty joined the band.


"In 2008, the furniture company MFI used Patrick Street's cover of "Music for a Found Harmonium" (originally composed by Simon Jeffes from The Penguin Cafe Orchestra), in the background of a TV advertisement[1]. The same track was used near the end of the movie Napoleon Dynamite, as well as in the movie It's All Gone Pete Tong."

Ennio Morricone "The Ecstasy of Gold" from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"

This haunting piece of music comes near the end of Sergio Leone's classic 1966 Western. In the film, the "Bad" character Tuco (Eli Wallach) races through a vast desert graveyard of wooden crosses, attempting to find the one marked "Arch Stanton", whose coffin is supposed to contain a cache of gold. Hot on his heels are Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef (the Good and the Bad, respectively).

This is a recent orchestration conducted by Maestro Morricone himself, with Susanna Rigacci as the soloist.

The graveyard was created by the Spanish Army on loan to Leone and company for the shooting of the film. They also blew up a bridge for the cameras during a scene depicting an epic American Civil War battle.

Vampires, KIller Robots and Ghouls Beware! The Bob Wilkins/Creature Feature Phenomenon

It was Saturday Night in the Bay Area some time ago, 1971 to be exact, that I first came across the buttoned-down, low key television persona of Bob Wilkins, the host of "Creature Features".  He worked on  a local independent television station (KTVU-2) out of Oakland/San Francisco, hosting a program called "Creature Features".   The locally-produced show would present a newer horror film in the 9-11 pm slot, followed by an older, often classic horror film from the Universal or Hammer film catalog around 11.  What made Mr. Wilkins  memorable was the way he presented these movies.  

Those old enough to remember the horror movie craze that was directed at teens and pre-teens at the time probably recall television hosts who dressed up like characters out of "The Munsters" or "The Addams Family".  The generally hammed it up mercilessly while selling commercial products and introducing movies they played off as "scary" or "chilling".  Their were probably dozens of these local part-time "ghouls" in major markets, trying to scare up some ratings with the younger crowd not yet able to go out on Saturday Night.  

Wilkins  was decidedly different.  For one thing, he presented the films dressed as what one critic called "The Nerd-Hipster": the sort of television host who was a cross between comic intellectual Dick Cavett and the Anglo-American swell, Alister Cooke, of "Letter From America" and "Masterpiece Theater" fame. 

Here's some idea what I'm talking about:     

 Wilkins was famous for beginning his programs with admonishments if the film chosen for that evening by the program director was less than top-notch. "Don't stay up tonight," the host would warn. "It' not worth it". I remember being quite amused one weekend night as a kid when he opened up a copy of the tube-junkie's bible, "TV Guide" and began reading  aloud to viewers what was on other channels in the Bay Area and how discerning viewers would be better off checking out other option besides the trashy 'Dracula Vs. Frankenstein' (1971) film that was on for that night.

How did Wilkins get away with this and stay on the air? It was because he was honest about what he presented and, because of that, people who didn't normally watch horror films tuned in just for his ironic sense of wit and humorous asides to the main features.  The ratings for his shows were through the roof compared to other independent television offerings, according  to a recent article in San Francisco's "Metro" magazine. He also offered some interesting interviews with minor and sometimes major stars and directors and f/x people from the horror and fantasy side of the television and film industry.  

The 9:00 showing, as I said, was usually the newest and often the lesser of the double feature.      I'll spare you the bad previews and show one I remember that was on one night and was pretty good, 1973's "The Legend of Hell House", starring a good cast with a screenplay by top notch science-fiction writer Richard Matheson.  (Warning: the following contains scenes of "bad, bad kitty" behavior and the breaking of nice crockery.) 

   

The later show was the one I usually looked forward to.  Not all of them were classics, but they were films made by better and more experienced hands than those who cranked out flicks from the 50's and 60's with titles like "The Horror of Party Beach" and  "Attack of the Mushroom People".  And the photography was certainly better, as this video tribute to early sound horror films proves:

When Halloween comes around, I remember fondly all the  movies I saw as a youngster, some scary and some silly.  But, since he passed away this year at age 76, I also fondly recall the sarcasm and good humored fun that Bob Wilkins brought to the presentation of these "creature features."    

Pictured below: Northern California's favorite Saturday night horror film host, the inimitable Bob Wilkins, interviewing Christopher Lee on the set of "Creature Features" sometime in the 1970's. 

Musical Dynamos: Four By Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

With a song in my heart
I behold your adorable face.
Just a song at the start
but it soon is a hymn to your grace.
When the music swells
I'm touching you hand
It tells that your're standing near, and ..
At the sound of your voice
heaven opens his portals to me.
Can I help but rejoice
that a song such as ours came to be?
But I always knew
I would live life through
with a song in my heart for you.

(Rodgers and Hart, "With a Song in My Heart" from "Spring is Here")   

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Lorenz (Larry) Hart (1895-1943)  began their  collaboration  as Broadway and later Hollywood musical-comedy  composers in 1919, when they both met while enrolled at Columbia University in New York City.  After working on reviews and selling individual songs to stage shows, they finally broke through big time with a New York production of  "Garrick Gayities" in 1925.  Success nearly came too late for Rodgers, who almost left show business  to become a underwear salesman.  

   By the time their partnership ended with Hart's death (to a combination of double pneumonia exacerbated by alcoholism and acute depression) little over  two decades after their meeting, the duo had written 550 songs for  twenty six broadway shows and over a dozen Hollywood films. Many of the songs from these shows are still sung in cabaret shows, musical revivals and on CD by popular contemporary performers like Diana Krall and Rod Stewart. 

The American musical story form that pervaded Broadway in the 1920's was a pretty tame medium, with librettos almost entirely based on threadbare romantic boy-meets-girl plots with cardboard characters and predictable situations.  Rogers and Hart came to dominate this form and, when audiences were more receptive, transcended it with more sophisicated songs, culminating in the landmark 1941 production of "Pal Joey", based on a John O'Hara story that featured a main character who was a dislike able heel.

In 1927, one of their first major hit musicals was "The Girl Friend".  Here's the title tune by the Savoy Orpheans:

    

 

From Wikipedia:

"Time Magazine devoted a cover story to Rodgers and Hart (September 26,1938). They wrote that their success "rests on a commercial instinct that most of their rivals have apparently ignored". The article also noted the "spirit of adventure." "As Rodgers and Hart see it, what was killing musicomedy [sic] was its sameness, its tameness, its eternal rhyming of June with moon."

 "Hart's lyrics, facile, vernacular, dazzling, sometimes playful, sometimes melancholic, raised the standard for Broadway songwriting. "His ability to write cleverly and to come up with unexpected, polysyllabic rhymes was something of a trademark, but he also had the even rarer ability to write with utmost simplicity and deep emotion." Rodgers, as a creator of melodies, ranks with Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin."

Here's an apex of early American musical films--"Isn't It Romantic", from "Love Me Tonight (1932),  performed by Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, an aging budding groom, a taxi-driver, some Hispanic extras playing gypsies, an effete songwriter, and  a lost patrol of French infantry men marching aimlessly  in the San Fernando Valley above Hollywood. If this isn't romantic, then nothing is!   

   

    

This next song is from the Rodgers and Hart Broadway hit, "On Your Toes".  Produced in 1936, it was the first Broadway show to combine jazz music with classical ballet, featuring an extended ballet sequence with the music to "Slaughter on 10th Avenue".  It was conceived originally as  a movie vehicle  for Fred Astaire, but he thought the ballet was "too highbrow" for his film fans, and he was equally reluctant to trade in his debonair image for the role of a meek professor.   

"Glad to be Unhappy" was recorded in February, 1955, for a Frank Sinatra album called "In the Wee Small Hours".  Some music critics have noted that his marital break-up with Ava Gardner helped bring a greater poignancy to his superb voice.      

 

Here is a 2002 recording of for a PBS Special saluting Richard Rodgers. "With a Song in My Heart" is performed by Ron Raines,  Rebecca Luker, Audra McDonald, Douglas Sills, Mary Testa, and Lillias White..

After Hart's death, Richard Rodgers collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein on a series of other major musicals like "The King and I", "The Sound of Music", et al.  But, in my opinion, this was his best and least pretentious  work was with with Lorenz Hart, a great lyricist not replaceable.  

 

Music for Impossible Missions: Four By Lalo Schifrin

Lalo Schifin was born in 1932 in Buenos Aries, Argentina. As a composer he came to my attention for the great film and television scores he composed and conducted in the USA from the sixties  into the nineties.  Very often his music was the best thing about the films--especially the Clint Eastwood "Dirty Harry" films, of which I am not a fan.    He did dozens of other film scores, usually in the action genre, as well as independent work in jazz and romantic music. 

the official website of Lalo Schifrin 

His most famous score in America was the title track and incidental music for the series "Mission: Impossible" (1966-72), usually featuring Peter Graves, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and a repertory of good actors playing con-artists/espionage agents in an above-average spy series that relied less on flashy characters and more on genuine suspense. (More Hitchcockian  than derivative James Bond.) The show  benefited greatly from the hard-driving,robust tempo of the music.   

Schifrin came early to music, studying with some of the best teachers in Buenos Aries.  His father was a violinist with a major symphony orchestra.  

From Wikipedia:

 "At age 20, he successfully applied for a scholarship to the Paris Conservatory. After returning home to Argentina, Schifrin formed a jazz orchestra, a 16-piece band that became part of a popular weekly variety show on Buenos Ai-res TV. Schifrin also began accepting other film, television and radio assignments. In 1956, Schifrin met Dizzy Gillespie  and offered to write an extended work for Gillespie's big band. Schifrin completed the work, Gillespiana, in 1958.    

Here's Schifrin performing with Gillespie's quintet , holding forth a great piano performance in a 1959 television variety show:    

 

In the category of spy film music, this Schifrin tile track is a very guilty pleasure.  Only John Barry himself could have captured a score that brought out the pop-art best in the title sequence from the Dean Martin/Matt Helm mock-spy feature "Murderer's Row" (1966);

 

 

One of the best non-title tracks I've found from Schifrin's works  comes from this piece called "Shifting Gears" which was used to set up the famous and authentic nine-minute car chase for the movie "Bullitt" with Steve McQueen and Jacqueline Bisset. (Video compilation by "Trouserparts")    

And now, to bring the maestro full-swing back to his Argentine roots, here is a more recent musical work, "Tango de artardecar"

Theme from "A Summer Place" (1959)

Since it's been getting quite hot up here in the Rogue Valley of Oregon, what we in the Northern Hemispheres call "Summer", I've thinking quite a lot about going the 120 miles or so out to the Coast where my wife and I could escape the 100 degree heat for a spell. It's just not possible right now. But, at work recently, this song came on the radio and I've decided this is my official Summer Song. My apologies to Fred and all other Jimmy Buffett fans from "Margaritaville". Here's the Max Steiner composition from the 1959 film that was arranged into a major hit by Percy Faith the following year.

The Beatles "I've Just Seen A Face"

A song reputed to have been written by Paul Mc Cartney for his on again-off again girlfriend from 1963-67, Jane Asher. One of the most cheerful in the Beatles catalog, and found on the soundtrack to their funny and picaresque little espionage musical-comedy, "Help", directed by Richard Lester.

I always thought the scene with the powerful electric hand-dryer in the movie one of the best bits of physical comedy from that time and you can see a clip of it in this nice compilation of the film.

PS--I'm guessing the Lads never actually lived in four adjoining flats.

with thanks to:
http://www.youtube.com/user/hannah4monkees

Maurice Jarre (1924-2009) A Great Composer

Three-time Oscar winner Maurice Jarre died today in Los Angeles. Although mainly known to the public for his classic scores for the films of Sir David Lean, he also composed directly for orchestra and did dozens of other film scores, far removed from the romantic "Lara's Theme" from "Doctor Zhivago". He was also the composer on the hard-as-nails Lee Marvin-Burt Lancaster western "The Professionals" (1966) as well as the World War II classic "The Tin Drum" (1979) , and the post-apocalyptic "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" (1985) .

Here he conducts one of my favorite scores from his prolific works--the overture to Lean's adaptation of E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India" (1984).
The occassion was a 1992 tribute to Lean, and portions of a documentary on his last motion picture are interwoven with the French-born Jarre and the orchestra.
Next to John Barry and John Williams, Jarre was one of the giants of international cinema, and a creative artist who made one appreciate music all the more for its power to inspire every emotion necessary for great drama.

Women on Film: "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" --Cyndi Lauper

A tribute to famous ladies past and present from the Hollywood and European Dream Factories. Hope you enjoy. (Thanks to Shawn Cornwell)

John Barry, Movie Music Scores

 

John Barry(1933--) is one of the great living film composers, and I wanted to feature a selection of some of his earliest scores.  The  first one is the title trac to "Beat Girl" (1960) which is also known as "Wild for Kicks".  The movie doesn't look like much--a rather unsubtle teenage exploitation film keyed to the type of juvenile delinequint films popular in the USA,such as the more famous James Dean vehicle, "Rebel Without A Cause", (1956)  and the campy black and white opus,"High School Confidential" (1958). 

Barry was a friend of the musician/actor Adam Faith and this jazzy opening was a hit in Britain and is still performed today by the Brian Setzer Orchestra.  You might spot a young Oliver Reed dancing with Gillian Hills, the star of this sordid little peek into the lives of crazy thrill-seeking kids high on dancing, playing "chicken" by racing automobiles drag-strip style, digging that hip daddy-O "race music" from America and of course that demon drug, Coca-Cola.               

 

This next piece is "The 007 Theme", not to be confused with the more famous "James Bond theme" usualy fatured at the very begining of most Bond films. .  Barry first composed it for the film "From Russia With Love" and it was been used in several  Bond films thereafter. For me, it's better than Monty Norman's more-famous theme.   The success of the early Bonds owes much to Barry's great use of incidential music, particularly in films like "Goldfinger" (1964).  Barry's last complete Bond film score was featured in 1987's "The Living Daylights" with Timothy Dalton.  

 

Barry composed a lot of scores in the Sixties, including "Zulu" (1964), "Midnight Cowboy" (1969),  "The Ipcress File"--a clever, and more realistic  counter-James Bond secret agent film with Michael Caine (1965) and this sllightly surreal romantic comedy from "The Beatles" film director Richard Lester called "The Knack--and How To Get It" (1965) with Michael Crawford and Rita Tushingham.      

 

This last score is pretty famous,too, and it's from a movie set in east Africa. The sense of grandeur and scope Barry wove into the overture to "Born Free" (1966) points the way ahead to other  soaring scores he would go on to write in the next couple decades.