When I bought that album, I hadn't yet seen FRWL, YOLT or OHMSS. Looking again at those images reminds me how I pored over them at the time, imagining the wonders of the unseen films while listening to the music. I'd previously looked over pics from the same movies in John Brosnan's 'James Bond In The Cinema' (several of them the same pics).
Having last week been to the same screening of YOLT as @chrisno1 I know what he means about the experience losing its gloss with repeat viewings and over-familiarity. But the one area where for me the freshness always remains is Barry's music.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Me too! It seems I have a double to outdo @chrisno1 ! I got it on the 1978-80 bounce and what was great about it at first was not just the photos but the fact these were the original tracks, not a Geoff Love cover version thing that was all the rage back then.
Mum got it for me - she recalled the Three Blind Mice song from the opener of Dr No decades ago. But I think Dr No premiered on British TV in 1975 and didn't seem to get shown again for ages... most people of my age range saw it around 1986 or so when it got huge audiences - 24m or 27m - over Christmas because of its rarity value.
Hadn't seen FRWL for similar reasons - I was on a ski holiday in Austria in Xmas 78 when it got resown, then was 11 going on 12 when it got shown again. Very odd times but as I mention on another thread, it would have allowed Moore to be more established as 'James Bond'.
Really my first idea of knowing the chronology of the films and the plots came from Brosnan's book, can't recall which I got first, this or that. Another source of interest were the paperback film tie-ins, found in local 'antique' shops (tat shops, really), but with a charm.
The black and white pics in this generated a real atmosphere even though you'd prefer colour - it helped give the idea that the films were older and more mysterious than they were - similar to the mugshots in Philip Norman's Beatles bio Shout! which came out after Lennon's death. When I first bought this LP the middle section was missing and only when I saw it again in store with all the pics inside did I realise and got a return.
Another book to complement this is Namedroppers, which I got second hand at the time. It came out around 1969 and is of its time in that it profiles the big statesmen and celebs of the 20th century - generals such as Patton, presidents such as JFK and Eisenhower, movie stars such as Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Bob Hope, sportsmen such as Arnold Palmer and Bobby Moore (I think) plus authors such as Somerset Maughan and Ian Fleming. Iconic villains such as Mussolini and Hitler. Tellingly, the only pop band was the Beatles. Elvis might have got in but that was it, pop stars just weren't feted in the same way then unless they had major 'cut through'. In some ways it wasn't so different to the wall art of the Sgt Pepper LP - pick all the big names and put them on the board!
Movie stars would have all their key movies listed, ditto musicians such as Duke Ellington.
George Lazenby was mentioned with a pic of the gals at Piz Gloria as 'the new boy' - either on the Fleming or Connery bio.
You can pick up a copy on eBay now... won't post the link, it's too long. Put on the Barry LP, open a bottle of French Malbec...
Anthony Simmons' monochrome 1965 feature was screened this evening in a reasonably full NFT2. The film includes three narratives, connected by locations along the River Thames at dawn: the body of an unknown woman is recovered by river police (the recovery being presented in documentary style as a 'procedural'); a nightclub worker (Ann Lynn) is taken by an admirer (Brian Phelan) for a coffee after her shift - and then for a fast ride in a stolen motorboat - but the couple fail to relate; a jaded wife (Judi Dench) confronts her husband (Norman Rodway) after he's left her at home, struggling with a crying baby, and gone out boozing all night with his chipper chum (Joe Melia). The idea, I think, is that the unknown drowned woman symbolises a potential for tragedy in the lives of the other two, disconsolate women. Judi Dench's scenes are more compelling but Barry spends longer at work on Ann Lynn's story (perhaps because it has less dialogue): he captures the emotional listlessness of a romance failing to ignite on a misty morning and a sense of danger as the speeding motorboat narrowly avoids collisions.
Who knew that in the same year that Bernard Lee's M was announcing Operation Thunderball his successor but one was tied to the kitchen sink, a frustrated wife and mother fretting to the plaintive sounds of Bond's own composer... or that Barry had already scored daring, high speed boat action on the Thames three decades ahead of David Arnold in TWINE?
'Boy and Bicycle'
'Four in the Morning' was preceded in this evening's programme by a screening of Ridley Scott's first film, a 1965 short featuring brother Tony as a young man who escapes the claustrophobia of his home by cycling along a seafront. We get to hear the boy's reflections in a voiceover. The footage, cleverly edited, occasionally includes disconcerting images, such as a dead dog on the beach, but Barry's theme is upbeat, focused more on the exhilaration of the bike ride getaway. Apparently Barry's involvement was a favour to Scott.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Bryan Forbes' 1968 movie screened this evening in NFT2.
Michael Caine's impassive cool as cat burglar Henry Clarke - broken occasionally when the character's in crisis - occupies seamlessly a place between the star's better known personae as Harry Palmer and Jack Carter. (Clarke even anticipates Charlie Croker of 'The Italian Job' - if only in the sense that he's also a thief). That 'Deadfall' is little seen is probably due to a number of reasons: it's less clearly a genre movie than Caine's greatest hits, instead plumbing some murky psychological themes; too much of its story rests on spoken exposition; Giovanna Ralli, playing love interest Fe, and Forbes favourite Eric Porter as antagonist Richard lack the charisma necessary to give Caine the best context in terms of supporting performances. (I only wish Laurence Olivier had played Porter's part, ahead of his casting as Andrew Wyke opposite Caine in 'Sleuth'; Olivier would have been an ideal fit for the Richard role.) Meanwhile Bond fans will appreciate Vladek Sheybal's (FRWL) comically creepy turn with Caine at the beginning of 'Deadfall'. Issues with casting and performance aside, a strength is the great look of 'Deadfall'. It's artfully framed, photographed and edited; the mise en scene is captivating.
John Barry's score is hugely important to the film. Firstly, there's Barry's Shirley Bassey theme song, 'My Love Has Two Faces'. This number's a belter, for sure, but it's more romantic than it is 60s Bondian Bassey. It reminds me rather of 'No Good About Goodbye', the David Arnold song for Bassey which was probably Arnold's pitch for the main title of 'Quantum Of Solace' (unused). (I have to wonder, there, whether Arnold was directly inspired by 'My Love Has Two Faces'.) Barry's incidental score for 'Deadfall' is beautifully romantic, sometimes infused with quasi-Bondian moodiness and menace and with splashes of Spanish colour (matching the movie's setting). Barry also contributes some jazz-based pop for a costume party scene and for Nanette Newman's pre-coital musings, as she dances to herself at David Buck's place. (Barry cheekily includes a snatch of 'Beat Girl' there, too.)
But the most extraordinary musical element of the film is Barry's 14 minute guitar concerto, 'Romance for Guitar and Orchestra'. Barry conducts this on screen in a concert brilliantly intercut with a sequence of Caine mounting a perilous mansion burglary. The concerto is certainly the highlight of 'Deadfall' and arguably it's one of the highlights of this entire BFI season. Barry himself looks like a movie star as conductor. His on-screen image and Caine's are both enhanced by Forbes' juxtaposition of their scenes, linked by the concerto: there's a cool similarity of look. Of course, Barry's appearance here foreshadows his later, celebratory cameo as conductor at the end of TLD (1987). (His early career on camera for TV as a pop star leading The John Barry Seven - initially on vocals - is probably what explains his consummate ease appearing in person in these movies.)
As a supplement to my continuing attendance at the BFI Barry sesson I went to the Prince Charles Cinema yesterday to see TB with the popcorn crowd in the downstairs cinema. TB's multiple underwater sequences depend heavily on Barry for their menace, excitement and enchantment.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Thanks for that review @Shady Tree. I watched this on TV last year and considered it to be much better than its general reputation suggests. It is a touch muddled, but many sixties thrillers were a touch muddled. As you say the music is very good, another of Barry's classy 'classic era' soundtracks. I wanted to see this, but my study schedule took priority.
Screening this evening in NFT2 was Joseph Losey's 1968 adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play, 'The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore'. Elizabeth Taylor stars as the irascible, terminally ill Mrs Goforth, spending her last summer in her richly furnished island villa ("I have lots of art treasures in my bedroom - myself included"). Richard Burton is a trespasser poet turned angel of death and Noel Coward is a dinner jacketed wag, self-styled as 'the witch of Capri'.
John Barry leaves alone the 'Boom' title sequence, which plays to the sound of waves crashing against rocks in the wind (metaphorically linking to what Burton's character identifies as "the shock of each moment of being alive.") The score is minimalist and sometimes eerily atonal, reflecting Mrs Goforth's nervous disorder and the gradual hemorrhaging away of her life. (Bond fans might notice occasional hints of similarity with Barry's music of the following year for the more psychedelic aspects of Blofeld's villainy at Piz Gloria in OHMSS.) Ethnic musical colourings include a background performance by sitar players as Mrs Goforth dines with Noel Coward on the terrace, and the Mediterranean rhythms of different tracks on her tape deck (diegetic music bleeding into the extra-diegetic, here. Some of this music keys into the film's Sardinian location. But the less said about the barrel organ track, the better).
'Midnight Cowboy'
Later in the evening an NFT1 screening of John Schlesinger's 1969 film attracted probably the hippest audience of the season so far.
Barry was musical supervisor on 'Midnight Cowboy', his personal compositions set alongside the music of a range of other talent, including countercultural artists for the film's set piece party scene. Harry Nilsson's cover of 'Everybody's Talkin'' is indelibly associated with the film, of course, while Barry writes a memorable harmoica piece contributing his own sense of Americana for Jon Voight's Joe Buck, a Texan hustler in New York. Compared with George Lazenby's wooden performance of grief at the end of OHMSS in the same year, when Bond's wife is shot dead in their car on their wedding day (Barry famously commented that Lazenby "couldn't boil an egg" in the scene), Buck's pain at the passing of Dustin Hoffman's fever-stricken Rizzo during their bus journey to Florida is genuinely moving. At the end of the movie Barry's theme underlines the pathos of that resolution beautifully.
As a sidenote... In the scene where Buck first resorts to turning same-sex tricks he's fellated in a grimy movie theater by a hapless young john. The film screening in the theater while this is happening is a sci fi flick in which an astronaut floats free of his rocket ship during some kind of crisis in space. That may ring a bell for Bond fans: Barry's music, here, for the 'movie within a movie' is indeed Bondian sounding, vaguely along the lines of YOLT's 'Space March' of a couple of years before. But this time the music isn't simply about the plight of an astronaut in a comic book situation of peril: the featured sci fi crisis reflects Buck's psychological turmoil as he hustles in the grindhouse fleapit; Barry's score there is for both modes of drama.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Blake Edwards' 1974 romance/ espionage thriller screened this evening in NFT3 in a now colour-faded original print.
Julie Andrews, a British Foreign Office employee on holiday in Barbados, is charmed and courted by the military attache to the Russian embassy in Paris, Omar Sharif. Trouble ensues. Unfortunately there's no real spark between our romantic leads, meaning that significant stretches of the movie are rather uninvolving. Anthony Quayle is good value as an intelligence chief in London but field agent Bryan Marshall (Commander Talbot in TSWLM) is a rather bland figure. Sylvia Syms and Daniel O'Herlihy add some entertaining intrigue. The casting of Oskar Homolka as an exasperated Russian General borders on the kind of comic stereotyping for which Blake Edwards is best known.
John Barry's score is a highlight of the film, alongside Freddie Young's cinematography, the location work in Barbados and Julie Andrews' Dior fashions. The combination of Barry's music and a titles sequence by Maurice Binder inevitably puts one in mind of Bond. When Binder has Sharif and Julie Andrews walk speculatively past each other in pop-art, silhouetted profile it's easy to see this as a template for his classic TSWLM titles (1977). I hear echoes of Barry's TMWTGG soundtrack (1974), insistent and lyricallly mournful, as Julie Andrews strolls along the beach, replaying in her mind images of her husband's death in a car accident. Barry later foregrounds a dominating, linear suspense theme, building tension as a Russian hit squad tails and targets Sharif. Finally, Barry's composition for the film's romantic resolution has the same graceful, full-bodied symphonic quality towards which he later moved Bond-as-lover in MR (1979) and OP (1983): that style was already here in 1974.
It was good to see @chrisno1 at the screening. This is one we'd anticipated when chatting after the panel event last month which trailed it.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I have struggled to get through Tamarind: it’s quite dull.
I love the score, it’s one of my favourites. Despite it being one of Barry’s kind of stock approaches during this time: beautiful main theme which is also a song plus a B theme of a more sinister variety, rinse and repeat. Something like Quiller Memorandum is cut from the same structure. The score album actually gets a bit repetitive as the sinister theme takes over but the main theme is so gorgeous it’s hard to complain.
I personally found this with a couple of Barry LPs - Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time. Both have great main themes but he doesn't half repeat them, also both feature a classical track that is not actually Barry's. The Bond LPs had more 'choones.' As does, The Lion in Winter.
Further to the review from @Shady Tree, I'd like to add that the music score was probably the best thing about the film, although the supporting performances were very good - Sylvia Syms was nominated for a BAFTA. I can't comment on the photography because the BFI print was so appalling - the colours were almost totally washed out - we may as well have watched it in black and white, or red and white, as it were.
I really like the main theme, called Play It Again, both in the instrumental and the vocal version sung by Wilma Reading. I had to look her up as she is not credited on screen, on IMDB or mentioned in the BFI notes. I found it on a the link for the Silva Screen Records 2022 release, which won an award for Best Retro Issue, or something. Don Black wrote the lyrics.
For me, the music often had a slow, jazzy DAF vibe. There was a faint echo of the intro to Bond Meets Bambi & Thumper. Without listening to the OST I can't tell you exactly the other pieces of music I enjoyed, but the romantic theme, or a variation of it, was used well in two extended scenes, one in Barbados where Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif share dinner and a palm sheltered stroll, the other during a tryst at a London dance club. Both times the music brilliantly captured the essence of place and emotion. Towards the climax, Barry uses a repetitive 'pulse beat' to increase tension, similar to some of his work in OHMSS [Gumbold's Safe] and GF [The Laser Beam]. It was a very good soundtrack.
In NFT2 this evening the season curator Bob Stanley and Jason Wood, the BFI's Executive Director of Public Programmes and Audiences, introduced a screening of Nicolas Roeg's 'Walkabout' (Australia, 1970) in its Criterion Collection print: Wood praised Roeg in a pre-recorded message, hinting at more Roeg screenings to come; Stanley, in person, praised Barry... and Bond. Edward Bond. Stanley dedicated this screening to the memory of Bond, a groundbreaking British political dramatist ('Saved', 'Lear') who adapted and repurposed James Vance Marshall's 1959 novel 'Walkabout' for the film's screenplay, darkening the story in the process. Sadly, Edward Bond passed away just this weekend, aged 89.
In 'Walkabout' Barry's music adds texture and complexity to the binary which Roeg sets up between a soulless metropolitan culture, exemplified by the concrete jungle of Sydney, and the noble self-sufficiency of indigenous rootedness in the outback. In a clever reversal Barry levels opening shots of the city with the dirge of the didgeridoo and scores later scenes set in the desert with orchestral strings in his familiar European idiom. Barry also helps to neutralise a potentially salacious voyeurism in the movie, countering with expansive, life-affirming compositions a preoccupation on the part of the camera with the leggy physicality of an adolescent Jenny Agutter and the sexual curiosity she has about David Gulpilil's athletic, Aboriginal youth. The sequence of outright, carefree nudity towards the end of Roeg's cut of the movie is celebratory - Barry amplifies this - though probably just part of an imaginary resolution; without the sequence the censored version of the movie would have seemed problematically skewed.
As a fan of DAF, a movie of the same vintage, I found a couple of moments in 'Walkabout' of note. The light skittinesh of Barry's accompaniment to a shot in the desert where the girl's young brother, Lucien John, slides down a sand bank reminded me briefly of the playful music for the dune bikes' pursuit of the moon buggy in DAF. And when a weather balloon is released to a single-note musical 'salute' it brought to mind DAF's shenanigans on the oil rig. (That said, 'Walkabout''s close-up on a scorpion misses the sleek 'plunk' accorded to the toothy grin/ scorpion segue in DAF and which cues the sinister Wint and Kidd theme.) Different movies, different experiences, different styles... the same musical genius.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
WALKABOUT was a much better experience than my view of The Tamarind Seed, basically because the print was a lush Criterion restoration. Both Bob Stanley and Jason Wood seemed to have great affection for this movie, based I felt on initial youthful memories of television showings. Not always the best way to assess a piece of art, but there you have it. Wood didn't seem interested in John Barry's soundtrack music at all. To be fair, I wasn't too much either. The music is good. The string arrangements are lovely. Overall, the music rather passed me by. It is the silences that speak more and Barry - having apprenticed his craft well - understands that sometimes less can effectively mean more.
The main theme has lyrics, by frequent Barry collaborator Don Black, and a version is featured on the Tony Bennet album Summer of 42, although I do not believe the song was recorded for the film. Someone is selling a 45 on eBay for £9.10.
No. The lyrics do not appropriately reflect the movie. But it's a nice tune for Tony at a time when he was struggling to find decent material suited to his style.
My god, that's terrible. I have never heard tracks from this album - the rerecording of Something aside - now I do not wish to. Awful cover as well. This album is infamous among Bennett fans. I always wondered why, now I guess I don't need to.
After this, a dejected Tony Bennett - who never really got on with modern music, I mean at least Sinatra tried to do a few modern things like Something or a Stevie Wonder or Simon and Garfunkel track - gave up on his career pretty much I understand, until he reverted to solid classics and evergreens of old. It is odd though, because in some ways you think there are at lest some modern songs or Beatle tracks if must he could have made his own and do very nicely. I thought Sinatra could have done a good version of The Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want , or Marlene done one of Say Hello, Wave Goodbye by Soft Cell - then again, the staid and conventional trappings of their surroundings at that point would have killed it.
How about Sexy Sadie for Bennett? Or are the notes too high?
Peter Hunt's 1969 entry to the Bond series screened this evening at NFT1.
What's not to love? Barry on top form in Bond mode and with that great song too - the Louis Armstrong one, that is, not the Nina song!
A number of Bond films since have sought to renegotiate OHMSS and capture its spirit, notably FYEO, LTK and NTTD, but all fall more or less short. Barry's distinctive contribution is, of course, a huge part of what makes the difference (a fact which NTTD's musical homages attempt to address). It's always worthwhile enjoying OHMSS again on its own terms.
The film's dated, dubious sexual politics, particularly during the first third of the film, are a direct import from Fleming but the abiding romance of the 'We Have All The Time In The World' sequence goes a long way in dissipating their residue.
This was the first time since Elizabeth II's passing that I'd seen on the big screen again Lazenby-Bond toasting that portrait of Her Majesty in his office.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Tonight I concluded my visits to the BFI Southbank for this season by seeing in NFT2 Carol Reed's 1972 comedy-flecked romance, the screenplay for which Peter Shaffer adapted from his own one act play, 'The Public Eye'.
Michael Jayston, who sadly passed just last month, plays a staid London accountant of good stock who falls in love with and marries Mia Farrow, a hippy-ish, free spirited emigree intent on exploring the city. Failing to recognise that his new wife simply needs her own time and space, Jayston suspects her of infidelity and turns to a firm of private investigators, who field Topol to spy on her for him. But Topol, a clownish eccentric, is enchanted by Farrow, the woman he's employed to tail and, from a distance, he establishes a goofy rapport with her. When she discovers that Topol's actually a private dick hired by her hubby (rather than simply an affable stalker!) she's mortified and decides on divorce. Topol rescues the marriage by persuading Farrow to allow Jayston to make amends and renew his devotion to her on her terms: she insists that Jayston must follow her all around London for five days - just as Topol had been doing. The film ends with Jayston embarking on this odd rehabilative project, following Farrow onto a Thames pleasure boat and smiling at her across the deck as though he were a stranger signalling his attraction to her. (Again, it's arguably all rather stalker-friendly!)
What we get is a simple, sweet tale, with fine, contrasting but complementary performances by the three principals and a flavour of early 70s London to boot. Adding to the texture are brief supporting roles by British character actors who will be familiar to Bond fans from later movies: James Cossins (Calthorpe in TMWTGG), James Villiers (Tanner in FYEO - which of course also features Topol) and Douglas Wilmer (Fanning in OP).
As ever, John Barry keys brilliantly into the spirit of the film. He variously captures Mia Farrow's love of being out and about (locations include Windsor Safari Park and Syon House), her groovy courtship with Jayston, Topol's tomfoolery and, generally, the romance of it all.
One of Farrow's favourite pastimes during her wide-eyed excursions is sitting through double bills of horror flicks in the cinema. What's novel about this is that Barry moves in to (re-)score glimpses of various Hammer movies, momentarily displacing the work of composers like Malcolm Williamson and James Bernard for action which includes Andree Melly rising from her coffin in 'The Brides of Dracula' and a masked Peter Cushing attacking Harold Goodwin in 'Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!' As far as I'm concerned, the snatches here of Barry-meets-Hammer are fanboy fodder to savour! (On the other hand, Nino Rota's strains for Zeffirelli's 'Romeo and Juliet' are left intact for a scene in which Topol lures Farrow into a cinema to see that film instead... Topol's weaning her off schlock horror!) In respect of Barry's play on films-within-a-film I'm reminded of the cinema scene in 'Midnight Cowboy' - as well as the biographical detail that as a boy Barry had spent many happy an hour in the cinema his father had built, imbibing film and film music.
This was a positive note on which to end a fine season by the BFI. It truly has been 'Bond and Beyond', an eclectic range of films showcasing Barry's awesome talent during the vibrant, earlier phase of his career as a film composer. The Bond scores generally have the most going on, but Barry's Midas touch had a wide reach indeed.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
And many thanks for your informed reviews, @Shady Tree , as my commitments meant I could not attend as many screenings as I would like - Midnight Cowboy & Deadfall were sad omissions for me.
The BFI is embarking on a refurbishment program, so the Southbank Film Theatre is closed until Easter week, and NFT 1 will be closed at least until June. NFT 2 &3 as well as the Studio screen will all be open, but they don't have the big screen, so the up coming programs tend to be for smaller scale pictures.
Comments
And of course, here is the rest of that James Bond gatefold compilation:
I'd love it if there were a Roger Moore version of this.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Very nice 😀
When I bought that album, I hadn't yet seen FRWL, YOLT or OHMSS. Looking again at those images reminds me how I pored over them at the time, imagining the wonders of the unseen films while listening to the music. I'd previously looked over pics from the same movies in John Brosnan's 'James Bond In The Cinema' (several of them the same pics).
Having last week been to the same screening of YOLT as @chrisno1 I know what he means about the experience losing its gloss with repeat viewings and over-familiarity. But the one area where for me the freshness always remains is Barry's music.
Me too! It seems I have a double to outdo @chrisno1 ! I got it on the 1978-80 bounce and what was great about it at first was not just the photos but the fact these were the original tracks, not a Geoff Love cover version thing that was all the rage back then.
Mum got it for me - she recalled the Three Blind Mice song from the opener of Dr No decades ago. But I think Dr No premiered on British TV in 1975 and didn't seem to get shown again for ages... most people of my age range saw it around 1986 or so when it got huge audiences - 24m or 27m - over Christmas because of its rarity value.
Hadn't seen FRWL for similar reasons - I was on a ski holiday in Austria in Xmas 78 when it got resown, then was 11 going on 12 when it got shown again. Very odd times but as I mention on another thread, it would have allowed Moore to be more established as 'James Bond'.
Really my first idea of knowing the chronology of the films and the plots came from Brosnan's book, can't recall which I got first, this or that. Another source of interest were the paperback film tie-ins, found in local 'antique' shops (tat shops, really), but with a charm.
The black and white pics in this generated a real atmosphere even though you'd prefer colour - it helped give the idea that the films were older and more mysterious than they were - similar to the mugshots in Philip Norman's Beatles bio Shout! which came out after Lennon's death. When I first bought this LP the middle section was missing and only when I saw it again in store with all the pics inside did I realise and got a return.
Another book to complement this is Namedroppers, which I got second hand at the time. It came out around 1969 and is of its time in that it profiles the big statesmen and celebs of the 20th century - generals such as Patton, presidents such as JFK and Eisenhower, movie stars such as Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Bob Hope, sportsmen such as Arnold Palmer and Bobby Moore (I think) plus authors such as Somerset Maughan and Ian Fleming. Iconic villains such as Mussolini and Hitler. Tellingly, the only pop band was the Beatles. Elvis might have got in but that was it, pop stars just weren't feted in the same way then unless they had major 'cut through'. In some ways it wasn't so different to the wall art of the Sgt Pepper LP - pick all the big names and put them on the board!
Movie stars would have all their key movies listed, ditto musicians such as Duke Ellington.
George Lazenby was mentioned with a pic of the gals at Piz Gloria as 'the new boy' - either on the Fleming or Connery bio.
You can pick up a copy on eBay now... won't post the link, it's too long. Put on the Barry LP, open a bottle of French Malbec...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Put on the Barry LP, open a bottle of French Malbec...
from Languedoc, I hope, @Napoleon Plural 🍷🍷🍷
'Four in the Morning'
Anthony Simmons' monochrome 1965 feature was screened this evening in a reasonably full NFT2. The film includes three narratives, connected by locations along the River Thames at dawn: the body of an unknown woman is recovered by river police (the recovery being presented in documentary style as a 'procedural'); a nightclub worker (Ann Lynn) is taken by an admirer (Brian Phelan) for a coffee after her shift - and then for a fast ride in a stolen motorboat - but the couple fail to relate; a jaded wife (Judi Dench) confronts her husband (Norman Rodway) after he's left her at home, struggling with a crying baby, and gone out boozing all night with his chipper chum (Joe Melia). The idea, I think, is that the unknown drowned woman symbolises a potential for tragedy in the lives of the other two, disconsolate women. Judi Dench's scenes are more compelling but Barry spends longer at work on Ann Lynn's story (perhaps because it has less dialogue): he captures the emotional listlessness of a romance failing to ignite on a misty morning and a sense of danger as the speeding motorboat narrowly avoids collisions.
Who knew that in the same year that Bernard Lee's M was announcing Operation Thunderball his successor but one was tied to the kitchen sink, a frustrated wife and mother fretting to the plaintive sounds of Bond's own composer... or that Barry had already scored daring, high speed boat action on the Thames three decades ahead of David Arnold in TWINE?
'Boy and Bicycle'
'Four in the Morning' was preceded in this evening's programme by a screening of Ridley Scott's first film, a 1965 short featuring brother Tony as a young man who escapes the claustrophobia of his home by cycling along a seafront. We get to hear the boy's reflections in a voiceover. The footage, cleverly edited, occasionally includes disconcerting images, such as a dead dog on the beach, but Barry's theme is upbeat, focused more on the exhilaration of the bike ride getaway. Apparently Barry's involvement was a favour to Scott.
'Deadfall'
Bryan Forbes' 1968 movie screened this evening in NFT2.
Michael Caine's impassive cool as cat burglar Henry Clarke - broken occasionally when the character's in crisis - occupies seamlessly a place between the star's better known personae as Harry Palmer and Jack Carter. (Clarke even anticipates Charlie Croker of 'The Italian Job' - if only in the sense that he's also a thief). That 'Deadfall' is little seen is probably due to a number of reasons: it's less clearly a genre movie than Caine's greatest hits, instead plumbing some murky psychological themes; too much of its story rests on spoken exposition; Giovanna Ralli, playing love interest Fe, and Forbes favourite Eric Porter as antagonist Richard lack the charisma necessary to give Caine the best context in terms of supporting performances. (I only wish Laurence Olivier had played Porter's part, ahead of his casting as Andrew Wyke opposite Caine in 'Sleuth'; Olivier would have been an ideal fit for the Richard role.) Meanwhile Bond fans will appreciate Vladek Sheybal's (FRWL) comically creepy turn with Caine at the beginning of 'Deadfall'. Issues with casting and performance aside, a strength is the great look of 'Deadfall'. It's artfully framed, photographed and edited; the mise en scene is captivating.
John Barry's score is hugely important to the film. Firstly, there's Barry's Shirley Bassey theme song, 'My Love Has Two Faces'. This number's a belter, for sure, but it's more romantic than it is 60s Bondian Bassey. It reminds me rather of 'No Good About Goodbye', the David Arnold song for Bassey which was probably Arnold's pitch for the main title of 'Quantum Of Solace' (unused). (I have to wonder, there, whether Arnold was directly inspired by 'My Love Has Two Faces'.) Barry's incidental score for 'Deadfall' is beautifully romantic, sometimes infused with quasi-Bondian moodiness and menace and with splashes of Spanish colour (matching the movie's setting). Barry also contributes some jazz-based pop for a costume party scene and for Nanette Newman's pre-coital musings, as she dances to herself at David Buck's place. (Barry cheekily includes a snatch of 'Beat Girl' there, too.)
But the most extraordinary musical element of the film is Barry's 14 minute guitar concerto, 'Romance for Guitar and Orchestra'. Barry conducts this on screen in a concert brilliantly intercut with a sequence of Caine mounting a perilous mansion burglary. The concerto is certainly the highlight of 'Deadfall' and arguably it's one of the highlights of this entire BFI season. Barry himself looks like a movie star as conductor. His on-screen image and Caine's are both enhanced by Forbes' juxtaposition of their scenes, linked by the concerto: there's a cool similarity of look. Of course, Barry's appearance here foreshadows his later, celebratory cameo as conductor at the end of TLD (1987). (His early career on camera for TV as a pop star leading The John Barry Seven - initially on vocals - is probably what explains his consummate ease appearing in person in these movies.)
As a supplement to my continuing attendance at the BFI Barry sesson I went to the Prince Charles Cinema yesterday to see TB with the popcorn crowd in the downstairs cinema. TB's multiple underwater sequences depend heavily on Barry for their menace, excitement and enchantment.
Thanks for that review @Shady Tree. I watched this on TV last year and considered it to be much better than its general reputation suggests. It is a touch muddled, but many sixties thrillers were a touch muddled. As you say the music is very good, another of Barry's classy 'classic era' soundtracks. I wanted to see this, but my study schedule took priority.
'Boom'
Screening this evening in NFT2 was Joseph Losey's 1968 adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play, 'The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore'. Elizabeth Taylor stars as the irascible, terminally ill Mrs Goforth, spending her last summer in her richly furnished island villa ("I have lots of art treasures in my bedroom - myself included"). Richard Burton is a trespasser poet turned angel of death and Noel Coward is a dinner jacketed wag, self-styled as 'the witch of Capri'.
John Barry leaves alone the 'Boom' title sequence, which plays to the sound of waves crashing against rocks in the wind (metaphorically linking to what Burton's character identifies as "the shock of each moment of being alive.") The score is minimalist and sometimes eerily atonal, reflecting Mrs Goforth's nervous disorder and the gradual hemorrhaging away of her life. (Bond fans might notice occasional hints of similarity with Barry's music of the following year for the more psychedelic aspects of Blofeld's villainy at Piz Gloria in OHMSS.) Ethnic musical colourings include a background performance by sitar players as Mrs Goforth dines with Noel Coward on the terrace, and the Mediterranean rhythms of different tracks on her tape deck (diegetic music bleeding into the extra-diegetic, here. Some of this music keys into the film's Sardinian location. But the less said about the barrel organ track, the better).
'Midnight Cowboy'
Later in the evening an NFT1 screening of John Schlesinger's 1969 film attracted probably the hippest audience of the season so far.
Barry was musical supervisor on 'Midnight Cowboy', his personal compositions set alongside the music of a range of other talent, including countercultural artists for the film's set piece party scene. Harry Nilsson's cover of 'Everybody's Talkin'' is indelibly associated with the film, of course, while Barry writes a memorable harmoica piece contributing his own sense of Americana for Jon Voight's Joe Buck, a Texan hustler in New York. Compared with George Lazenby's wooden performance of grief at the end of OHMSS in the same year, when Bond's wife is shot dead in their car on their wedding day (Barry famously commented that Lazenby "couldn't boil an egg" in the scene), Buck's pain at the passing of Dustin Hoffman's fever-stricken Rizzo during their bus journey to Florida is genuinely moving. At the end of the movie Barry's theme underlines the pathos of that resolution beautifully.
As a sidenote... In the scene where Buck first resorts to turning same-sex tricks he's fellated in a grimy movie theater by a hapless young john. The film screening in the theater while this is happening is a sci fi flick in which an astronaut floats free of his rocket ship during some kind of crisis in space. That may ring a bell for Bond fans: Barry's music, here, for the 'movie within a movie' is indeed Bondian sounding, vaguely along the lines of YOLT's 'Space March' of a couple of years before. But this time the music isn't simply about the plight of an astronaut in a comic book situation of peril: the featured sci fi crisis reflects Buck's psychological turmoil as he hustles in the grindhouse fleapit; Barry's score there is for both modes of drama.
I keep meaning to watch Deadfall as I know it mainly because of Romance for Guitar and Orchestra, but it doesn't pop up very often.
'The Tamarind Seed'
Blake Edwards' 1974 romance/ espionage thriller screened this evening in NFT3 in a now colour-faded original print.
Julie Andrews, a British Foreign Office employee on holiday in Barbados, is charmed and courted by the military attache to the Russian embassy in Paris, Omar Sharif. Trouble ensues. Unfortunately there's no real spark between our romantic leads, meaning that significant stretches of the movie are rather uninvolving. Anthony Quayle is good value as an intelligence chief in London but field agent Bryan Marshall (Commander Talbot in TSWLM) is a rather bland figure. Sylvia Syms and Daniel O'Herlihy add some entertaining intrigue. The casting of Oskar Homolka as an exasperated Russian General borders on the kind of comic stereotyping for which Blake Edwards is best known.
John Barry's score is a highlight of the film, alongside Freddie Young's cinematography, the location work in Barbados and Julie Andrews' Dior fashions. The combination of Barry's music and a titles sequence by Maurice Binder inevitably puts one in mind of Bond. When Binder has Sharif and Julie Andrews walk speculatively past each other in pop-art, silhouetted profile it's easy to see this as a template for his classic TSWLM titles (1977). I hear echoes of Barry's TMWTGG soundtrack (1974), insistent and lyricallly mournful, as Julie Andrews strolls along the beach, replaying in her mind images of her husband's death in a car accident. Barry later foregrounds a dominating, linear suspense theme, building tension as a Russian hit squad tails and targets Sharif. Finally, Barry's composition for the film's romantic resolution has the same graceful, full-bodied symphonic quality towards which he later moved Bond-as-lover in MR (1979) and OP (1983): that style was already here in 1974.
It was good to see @chrisno1 at the screening. This is one we'd anticipated when chatting after the panel event last month which trailed it.
I have struggled to get through Tamarind: it’s quite dull.
I love the score, it’s one of my favourites. Despite it being one of Barry’s kind of stock approaches during this time: beautiful main theme which is also a song plus a B theme of a more sinister variety, rinse and repeat. Something like Quiller Memorandum is cut from the same structure. The score album actually gets a bit repetitive as the sinister theme takes over but the main theme is so gorgeous it’s hard to complain.
I personally found this with a couple of Barry LPs - Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time. Both have great main themes but he doesn't half repeat them, also both feature a classical track that is not actually Barry's. The Bond LPs had more 'choones.' As does, The Lion in Winter.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Yeah for a lot of perhaps more minor films he seemed to draw the line at two themes and thats all you get! Maybe he even had a payment structure 😁
For the Bonds he seemed to pull out more melodic stops and individual scenes etc. would get more melodies.
Further to the review from @Shady Tree, I'd like to add that the music score was probably the best thing about the film, although the supporting performances were very good - Sylvia Syms was nominated for a BAFTA. I can't comment on the photography because the BFI print was so appalling - the colours were almost totally washed out - we may as well have watched it in black and white, or red and white, as it were.
I really like the main theme, called Play It Again, both in the instrumental and the vocal version sung by Wilma Reading. I had to look her up as she is not credited on screen, on IMDB or mentioned in the BFI notes. I found it on a the link for the Silva Screen Records 2022 release, which won an award for Best Retro Issue, or something. Don Black wrote the lyrics.
Silva Screen Records
For me, the music often had a slow, jazzy DAF vibe. There was a faint echo of the intro to Bond Meets Bambi & Thumper. Without listening to the OST I can't tell you exactly the other pieces of music I enjoyed, but the romantic theme, or a variation of it, was used well in two extended scenes, one in Barbados where Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif share dinner and a palm sheltered stroll, the other during a tryst at a London dance club. Both times the music brilliantly captured the essence of place and emotion. Towards the climax, Barry uses a repetitive 'pulse beat' to increase tension, similar to some of his work in OHMSS [Gumbold's Safe] and GF [The Laser Beam]. It was a very good soundtrack.
For my full film review, see the link below.
https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/comment/1067629#Comment_1067629
The recent Silva Screen expanded release of the soundtrack is on Spotify at the moment.
'Walkabout'
In NFT2 this evening the season curator Bob Stanley and Jason Wood, the BFI's Executive Director of Public Programmes and Audiences, introduced a screening of Nicolas Roeg's 'Walkabout' (Australia, 1970) in its Criterion Collection print: Wood praised Roeg in a pre-recorded message, hinting at more Roeg screenings to come; Stanley, in person, praised Barry... and Bond. Edward Bond. Stanley dedicated this screening to the memory of Bond, a groundbreaking British political dramatist ('Saved', 'Lear') who adapted and repurposed James Vance Marshall's 1959 novel 'Walkabout' for the film's screenplay, darkening the story in the process. Sadly, Edward Bond passed away just this weekend, aged 89.
In 'Walkabout' Barry's music adds texture and complexity to the binary which Roeg sets up between a soulless metropolitan culture, exemplified by the concrete jungle of Sydney, and the noble self-sufficiency of indigenous rootedness in the outback. In a clever reversal Barry levels opening shots of the city with the dirge of the didgeridoo and scores later scenes set in the desert with orchestral strings in his familiar European idiom. Barry also helps to neutralise a potentially salacious voyeurism in the movie, countering with expansive, life-affirming compositions a preoccupation on the part of the camera with the leggy physicality of an adolescent Jenny Agutter and the sexual curiosity she has about David Gulpilil's athletic, Aboriginal youth. The sequence of outright, carefree nudity towards the end of Roeg's cut of the movie is celebratory - Barry amplifies this - though probably just part of an imaginary resolution; without the sequence the censored version of the movie would have seemed problematically skewed.
As a fan of DAF, a movie of the same vintage, I found a couple of moments in 'Walkabout' of note. The light skittinesh of Barry's accompaniment to a shot in the desert where the girl's young brother, Lucien John, slides down a sand bank reminded me briefly of the playful music for the dune bikes' pursuit of the moon buggy in DAF. And when a weather balloon is released to a single-note musical 'salute' it brought to mind DAF's shenanigans on the oil rig. (That said, 'Walkabout''s close-up on a scorpion misses the sleek 'plunk' accorded to the toothy grin/ scorpion segue in DAF and which cues the sinister Wint and Kidd theme.) Different movies, different experiences, different styles... the same musical genius.
WALKABOUT was a much better experience than my view of The Tamarind Seed, basically because the print was a lush Criterion restoration. Both Bob Stanley and Jason Wood seemed to have great affection for this movie, based I felt on initial youthful memories of television showings. Not always the best way to assess a piece of art, but there you have it. Wood didn't seem interested in John Barry's soundtrack music at all. To be fair, I wasn't too much either. The music is good. The string arrangements are lovely. Overall, the music rather passed me by. It is the silences that speak more and Barry - having apprenticed his craft well - understands that sometimes less can effectively mean more.
The main theme has lyrics, by frequent Barry collaborator Don Black, and a version is featured on the Tony Bennet album Summer of 42, although I do not believe the song was recorded for the film. Someone is selling a 45 on eBay for £9.10.
You can hear it here: https://youtu.be/c9nsSVnCnUY
For my full review of the movie, look up the Last Movie Seen thread here: https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/comment/1067728#Comment_1067728
And thanks for the drink @Shady Tree - I am glad you enjoyed the season !
Thanks, I've never heard that Tony Bennett version before. Not sure it works!
No. The lyrics do not appropriately reflect the movie. But it's a nice tune for Tony at a time when he was struggling to find decent material suited to his style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwbIah8xjEI
Roger Moore 1927-2017
My god, that's terrible. I have never heard tracks from this album - the rerecording of Something aside - now I do not wish to. Awful cover as well. This album is infamous among Bennett fans. I always wondered why, now I guess I don't need to.
Yes it’s horrible. That and Walkabout have made me reconsider if he was any good! 😅
That really is abysmal 🙉 who did that arrangement for him?
After this, a dejected Tony Bennett - who never really got on with modern music, I mean at least Sinatra tried to do a few modern things like Something or a Stevie Wonder or Simon and Garfunkel track - gave up on his career pretty much I understand, until he reverted to solid classics and evergreens of old. It is odd though, because in some ways you think there are at lest some modern songs or Beatle tracks if must he could have made his own and do very nicely. I thought Sinatra could have done a good version of The Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want , or Marlene done one of Say Hello, Wave Goodbye by Soft Cell - then again, the staid and conventional trappings of their surroundings at that point would have killed it.
How about Sexy Sadie for Bennett? Or are the notes too high?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
'On Her Majesty's Secret Service'
Peter Hunt's 1969 entry to the Bond series screened this evening at NFT1.
What's not to love? Barry on top form in Bond mode and with that great song too - the Louis Armstrong one, that is, not the Nina song!
A number of Bond films since have sought to renegotiate OHMSS and capture its spirit, notably FYEO, LTK and NTTD, but all fall more or less short. Barry's distinctive contribution is, of course, a huge part of what makes the difference (a fact which NTTD's musical homages attempt to address). It's always worthwhile enjoying OHMSS again on its own terms.
The film's dated, dubious sexual politics, particularly during the first third of the film, are a direct import from Fleming but the abiding romance of the 'We Have All The Time In The World' sequence goes a long way in dissipating their residue.
This was the first time since Elizabeth II's passing that I'd seen on the big screen again Lazenby-Bond toasting that portrait of Her Majesty in his office.
'Follow Me!' (UK)/ 'The Public Eye' (USA)
Tonight I concluded my visits to the BFI Southbank for this season by seeing in NFT2 Carol Reed's 1972 comedy-flecked romance, the screenplay for which Peter Shaffer adapted from his own one act play, 'The Public Eye'.
Michael Jayston, who sadly passed just last month, plays a staid London accountant of good stock who falls in love with and marries Mia Farrow, a hippy-ish, free spirited emigree intent on exploring the city. Failing to recognise that his new wife simply needs her own time and space, Jayston suspects her of infidelity and turns to a firm of private investigators, who field Topol to spy on her for him. But Topol, a clownish eccentric, is enchanted by Farrow, the woman he's employed to tail and, from a distance, he establishes a goofy rapport with her. When she discovers that Topol's actually a private dick hired by her hubby (rather than simply an affable stalker!) she's mortified and decides on divorce. Topol rescues the marriage by persuading Farrow to allow Jayston to make amends and renew his devotion to her on her terms: she insists that Jayston must follow her all around London for five days - just as Topol had been doing. The film ends with Jayston embarking on this odd rehabilative project, following Farrow onto a Thames pleasure boat and smiling at her across the deck as though he were a stranger signalling his attraction to her. (Again, it's arguably all rather stalker-friendly!)
What we get is a simple, sweet tale, with fine, contrasting but complementary performances by the three principals and a flavour of early 70s London to boot. Adding to the texture are brief supporting roles by British character actors who will be familiar to Bond fans from later movies: James Cossins (Calthorpe in TMWTGG), James Villiers (Tanner in FYEO - which of course also features Topol) and Douglas Wilmer (Fanning in OP).
As ever, John Barry keys brilliantly into the spirit of the film. He variously captures Mia Farrow's love of being out and about (locations include Windsor Safari Park and Syon House), her groovy courtship with Jayston, Topol's tomfoolery and, generally, the romance of it all.
One of Farrow's favourite pastimes during her wide-eyed excursions is sitting through double bills of horror flicks in the cinema. What's novel about this is that Barry moves in to (re-)score glimpses of various Hammer movies, momentarily displacing the work of composers like Malcolm Williamson and James Bernard for action which includes Andree Melly rising from her coffin in 'The Brides of Dracula' and a masked Peter Cushing attacking Harold Goodwin in 'Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!' As far as I'm concerned, the snatches here of Barry-meets-Hammer are fanboy fodder to savour! (On the other hand, Nino Rota's strains for Zeffirelli's 'Romeo and Juliet' are left intact for a scene in which Topol lures Farrow into a cinema to see that film instead... Topol's weaning her off schlock horror!) In respect of Barry's play on films-within-a-film I'm reminded of the cinema scene in 'Midnight Cowboy' - as well as the biographical detail that as a boy Barry had spent many happy an hour in the cinema his father had built, imbibing film and film music.
This was a positive note on which to end a fine season by the BFI. It truly has been 'Bond and Beyond', an eclectic range of films showcasing Barry's awesome talent during the vibrant, earlier phase of his career as a film composer. The Bond scores generally have the most going on, but Barry's Midas touch had a wide reach indeed.
And many thanks for your informed reviews, @Shady Tree , as my commitments meant I could not attend as many screenings as I would like - Midnight Cowboy & Deadfall were sad omissions for me.
The BFI is embarking on a refurbishment program, so the Southbank Film Theatre is closed until Easter week, and NFT 1 will be closed at least until June. NFT 2 &3 as well as the Studio screen will all be open, but they don't have the big screen, so the up coming programs tend to be for smaller scale pictures.