MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer, arranger and musician Johnny Mandel died at his home in Ojai, California, on June 29, 2020, at the age of 94.

One of the most sophisticated voices in American film, jazz and popular music, Mandel wrote scores for more than 30 films and created such enduring songs as “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “Emily,” “A Time for Love” and “Suicide Is Painless.”.

John Alfred Mandel was born in New York City on November 23, 1925. Blessed with perfect pitch, he studied at the Manhattan School of Music and briefly at Juilliard, and became a professional trumpeter and trombonist while still young. During the 1940s and 1950s he played or arranged for bands led by Buddy Rich, Jimmy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw and Count Basie, developing the deep understanding of jazz harmony and orchestral color that would define his later film music.

Mandel moved to Hollywood in 1957 and made an immediate impact with Robert Wise’s I Want to Live! (1958), starring Susan Hayward. The score integrated modern jazz directly into the dramatic fabric of the film rather than treating it merely as source music, and its soundtrack brought Mandel three Grammy nominations. He followed it with films including The Third Voice (1960), Drums of Africa (1963) and Arthur Hiller’s The Americanization of Emily (1964), whose lyrical main theme became the song “Emily” after Johnny Mercer added lyrics.

His greatest popular success came with Vincente Minnelli’s The Sandpiper (1965). Mandel wrote a lush, romantic score dominated by a beautiful melody which, with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, became “The Shadow of Your Smile.” The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and subsequently became a jazz and popular standard recorded by countless artists, while Mandel also won Grammys for both the song and the film’s score.

The remainder of the 1960s produced some of Mandel’s strongest screen work, including The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), Harper (1966), John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Pretty Poison (1968) and Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park (1969). His music could be elegant and melodic, but his jazz background also allowed him to write with an unusual rhythmic freedom and harmonic sophistication that distinguished him from more traditionally symphonic Hollywood composers.

Mandel reunited with Altman for M*A*S*H* (1970), writing the mordantly beautiful “Suicide Is Painless” with lyrics by the director’s teenage son, Mike Altman. The contrast between the song’s gentle melody and blackly comic lyrics perfectly suited the film’s irreverent treatment of war, and the instrumental version later became the theme for the enormously successful television series. It remains, alongside “The Shadow of Your Smile,” Mandel’s most recognizable composition.

His 1970s film credits included A New Leaf (1971), Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973), Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), Freaky Friday (1976), The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976) and Ashby’s Being There (1979). Later assignments included Caddyshack (1980), Sidney Lumet’s Deathtrap (1982) and The Verdict (1982), the latter featuring one of Mandel’s most restrained and melancholy dramatic scores.

Away from cinema, Mandel remained one of America’s most admired arrangers, working with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand, Natalie Cole and Shirley Horn. His arrangements for Cole’s Unforgettable and Horn’s Here’s to Life brought further Grammys, and he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010 before receiving the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship the following year.