I’ve been thinking about John Barry a lot recently, and listening to his film soundtracks while I work during the day. Here are two particular favourites. The first is one of the lushest, most exotic pieces of music I know. The second perfectly captures the boozy resignation I associate with Dashiell Hammett.
The Girl with the Sun in her Hair:
Hammett:
Voted “the girl most likely to be whistled at in 1947″ by the Whistling Teachers’ Institute of America. A now defunct organization, I presume.
“Tom” Jobim was born on 25 January 1927.
I feel like I’ve been listening to his music all my life. In fact, the first album which I heard was one of his last, Passarim.
It’s still a hugely evocative record for me. Jobim’s voice is cracked, full of experience and sadness. One track in particular, Chansong, seemed to the young Nic impossibly sophisticated and worldly.
As I listened to more of the Jobim back catalogue, I began to see that there were distinct phases to his career. He had become famous in America in the 60s as the languid composer (with Vinicius de Moraes) of The Girl from Ipanema. With Joao and Astrud Gilberto, Jobim embodied a fresh young sound, the bossa nova. It was wistful but vibrant, warm and rhythmic. Significantly, it was worlds away from the introspective jazz that home-grown talent like Miles and Coltrane were producing.
After a decade of collaborating with American artists (including Frank Sinatra!), Jobim’s music started to draw more heavily upon classical influences. I’ve always thought that his 70s work sounds like a swinging Villa-Lobos. The albums of this period were often orchestral, full of lush string sections and soaring choirs.
At the same time, Jobim continued his passion for collaboration. While his orchestral works are dramatic and sweeping, his duets with Elis Regina played to his conversational side. Their recordings and live appearances together were always full of humour. Although he was commited to bringing Brazilian folk music to concert-hall environments, Jobim never lost sight of what made music fun.
In 1993, not long before Jobim’s death, a group of musicians from around the world gathered at the Sao Paolo Free Jazz Festival to pay tribute to his work. The calibre of those involved reflected the high esteem in which Jobim was held: among those contributing were Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Oscar Castro-Neves, Shirley Horn, Jon Hendricks, Gal Costa, Joe Henderson and Alex Acuna. Jobim’s son Paolo, a respected composer in his own right, was also present onstage. Released by Verve as Antonio Carlos Jobim and Friends, the concert is a lively and affectionate celebration to a legend of Brazilian music.
In Stormy Weather (1943), Fats Waller appears as a pianist at Ada Brown’s Beale Street Cafe. Alerted that impresario Chick Bailey is gathering acts for a new revue, Waller and his band prepare to impress him with a rendition of “Ain’t Misbehavin.” There’s an emphasis on making the band look good – Ada brings a handsome instrumentalist stage-front and asks for a “lighting effect on the drums,” while another musician dithers over whether to wear his hat.
Finally, they launch into this marvellous rendition of Waller’s signature tune:
Unsurprisingly, jazz films often privilege visual performance over the music itself. Sometimes these visual elements locate the music within a cultural context (e.g. jungle rhythm, urban art, black expression). Often, we are being told how to receive the music onscreen and, indirectly, what to think about jazz as a musical form.
In this instance, jazz is good time music. Waller’s fluttering eyelashes and rotund phrasing provoke immediate laughter from the diegetic audience. As well as this, the song’s playful assertion of fidelity acts as a backdrop to Bill Robinson noticing, and being overlooked by, the glamourous Lena Horne. We see the music having something like a narcotic effect: one woman dances alone until her companions pull her back to the table, while a portly gentleman at the doorway shakes and shuffles until he falls over!
There is no condescension in this moment. It enjoys jazz. Sadly, it was to be one of Fats Waller’s final performances. Later that year, he contracted pneumonia on a cross-country train and died, just 39 years old. With that knowledge, this happy scene becomes even more precious.
Halfway through Working Girl, Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) and Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) crash an affluent wedding reception. Tess is sure that she can convince the bride’s father to invest in her revolutionary business idea. What Jack doesn’t know is that Tess, who claims to be a hotshot executive, is actually a secretary blagging her way up the corporate ladder. Met at the door by the bride’s parents, Tess and Jack seize upon the explanation that they are “friends of Mark’s”.
As a statement of intent, the film couldn’t be clearer about its screwball aspirations. (The specific allusion is to Bringing Up Baby, in which Katharine Hepburn explains Cary Grant’s presence in Connecticut in the same way.) It’s a moment that suggests a lineage between Griffith/Ford and Hepburn/Grant.
It’s true that Jack’s discomfort with his surroundings, and his anger at Tess, recall the impotent frustration of Grant’s David Huxley. Jack grimly sucks an elaborately decorated cocktail through a straw, channelling Grant’s way with silent comedy. Even his outburst at Tess sounds like a moment from Bringing Up Baby: “You’re like one of those crazed cops, aren’t you? The kind nobody wants to ride with, because his partners all end up dead or crazy.”
The moment is so good it merits another photo:
The film has motioned toward screwball in earlier scenes. Following convention, Tess and Jack’s first encounter is a classic “meet cute”: she goes to a party to develop a business acquaintanceship with him, he hits on her at the bar, she responds without knowing who he is, he doesn’t tell her. However, while the reference to screwball is clear, this is a determinedly post-Production Code encounter. Tess ends the night by passing out from a combination of alcohol and Valium.
The physically compatible couple.
While Ford’s performance owes something to Grant, the correspondence breaks down with Griffith. She bears no resemblance to Hepburn. A more fitting comparison, given her working-class background and determination to advance without falling back on sexual wiles, might be with Jean Harlow in Wife vs. Secretary.
"You want to be taken seriously?"
"You need serious hair."
If there is a Hepburn analogue in the film, it’s – note the first name – Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), who plays Griffith’s unscrupulous boss. She’s an ice-cold operator who will do anything to close a deal. Unlike her secretary, she doesn’t think twice about using sex as a weapon in the boardroom. It’s no surprise that Weaver is fantastically funny in the role (there’s a great sight gag playing on her performance as Dian Fossey); what’s unexpected are the cracks Weaver shows in her armour. Ultimately, however, the film rejects her cynicism and selfishness. Despite their shared confidence, Katharine betrays the progressive feminism inscribed in Hepburn’s persona.
When Griffith does gets her own office at the end of the film, it’s not at the expense of female solidarity. She’s successfully crossed from Staten Island to The City without rejecting her past. The final shot of the film tracks back from Tess’ office window, taking in the expanse of the skyscraper. She has found a place in the business world through her own intelligence and ambition, an inspiration to best friend Cyn (Joan Cusack) and every other working girl.
It’s far too long since I posted one of these (July? Blimey!) but the truth is, I’ve been trying to be restrained in my book buying. The flat is full to bursting as it is, and money’s tight. Still, this was a pre-Christmas treat and since it was only 99p on Ebay, it didn’t break the bank!
Great Pan edition, 1959
As with my copy of The Way Some People Die, it’s nice to see Ken Millar’s original pseudonym “John Ross Macdonald” on this cover. I don’t think the illustration is quite so strong in this case though. The looming head-and-shoulders of Hester (the wannabe starlet around whom the mystery revolves) is nice enough, but the image of Archer discovering a body is rather clumsy. There’s something weird about the way Archer’s neck connects to his shoulders here, as though this was retouched by another artist.
I do love the description of this as “A tough Lew Archer thriller” – it’s the kind of thick-ear branding that Millar deplored! The back cover offers up similar pleasures…
I haven’t seen this little Lew Archer seal before. I assume it’s supposed to resemble a bloody thumbprint? If I ever lay my hands on the Pan printing of The Ivory Grin, it’ll be interesting to see whether it carries this too.
I’m currently re-reading the novel and, while it’s not one of the best Archer mysteries, it does deliver on many counts. As in other Archer novels, the characterization of Hollywood as a modern-day Gomorrah seems crude and unconvincing. Maybe Millar was too much of a literary man to ever really get his head around the movie business? But his detective Lew Archer is as brilliantly drawn as ever. Here he is going easy on a suspect:
“I caught myself doubting my premises, doubting that she could be any kind of hustler. Besides, there was just enough truth in her accusation, enough cruelty in my will to justice, enough desire in my pity, to make the room uncomfortable for me. I said goodnight and left.
The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.”
See my other Archer covers here!
Telegram from reporter: HOW OLD CARY GRANT?
Grant’s reply: OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?
Happy 107th, Cary!
This is a blog for Louise, who told me before Christmas about her collection of Russian dolls. I don’t know who made these ones unfortunately – my dad brought them home from a craft fair when I was very young.
1. The Hound of the Baskervilles
2. Professor Moriarty
Shifty-looking devil, isn’t he?
3. Inspector Lestrade
I love the wispy ‘tache and the way his hands are dejectedly thrust into his pockets!
4. Dr. Watson
Note the pocket watch and handcuffs.
5. Sherlock Holmes
The Great Detective’s looking rather chubby. Maybe it’s meant to be the Reginald Owen Holmes?
And here they all are together!
Joe Gores died this week. Like his inspiration, Dashiell Hammett, Gores had led one of those packed American lives. He’d worked as a logger, truck driver, carnival roustabout, motel manager, teacher in Kenya and, again like Hammett, as a detective. It was Gores’ twelve year experience as a gumshoe that led him to write mystery novels.
There are fine tributes to Gores at The Rap Sheet and Mystery File, which say far more than I could about Gores’ career and contribution to the crime story.
Gores’ novel Hammett (1975) put its eponymous hero in a San Francisco-set mystery involving crooked politicians, gangsters, Oriental femme fatales and ex-Pinkerton agents. As the mystery progresses, the seeds are sown in Hammett’s mind for his masterwork, The Maltese Falcon.
The novel was made into a film by Francis Ford Coppolla’s Zoetrope Studio. It was a famously troubled production, going through many drafts and two directors, Nicolas Roeg and Wim Wenders. It’s rumoured too that Coppolla reshot some of the scenes in the final cut. Gores was philosophical about the thing, describing Wenders as having “a very poor sense of what makes a story work” but judging the end product as “a pretty good B picture”. (These quotes are pulled from an extensive interview with Gores and Ross Thomas, who worked on the screenplay, in the Spring 1984 issue of The Armchair Detective.)
It is a very strange movie, but weirdly hypnotic for the Hammett buff. Frederic Forrest is wonderful in the title role, and there are nice cameos for Elisha Cook Jnr, Sylvia Sidney, Samuel Fuller and Ross Thomas. Trying to replicate the feel of a Bogart movie, many of the exteriors are shot on studio sets, creating an oppressive, artificial world. Ultimately, it’s a film of pieces, where valuable fragments fail to make up a cohesive whole. But it’s a film I return to again and again.
New Year, new feature! Since I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time googling for images of old Hollywood film stars, I’ve decided to create an ongoing gallery of the best that I find. I expect this’ll mainly be photographs, but I thought I’d start with a cigarette card depicting the lovely Myrna Loy, which is currently tacked to the corner of my monitor.
FILM STARS, A Series of 50, Described by FLORENCE DESMOND.
No.2 Myrna Loy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)
Myrna Loy spent the first years of her career trying to convince the studios that there were other parts she could play besides Oriental vamps, for which she was continually being cast. Perhaps her most successful part was opposite William Powell in “The Thin Man.” When I met her in Hollywood, I hardly recognised her, she is so entirely different off the screen. She is freckled, has auburn curly hair and uses no make-up at all. She is very quiet, reads a good deal and studies music, but never goes to parties.
CARRERAS LTD (Estd. 1788) Arcadia Works, London, England.
KEEP THIS ATTRACTIVE SERIES OF ART PICTURES IN THE CARRERAS SLIP-IN ALBUM OBTAINABLE FROM ALL TOBACCONISTS (PRICE ONE PENNY)
