Archive
SABRINA – John Williams
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Sabrina is a modern remake of Billy Wilder’s 1954 romantic comedy which starred Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden, and which was itself based on the stage play Sabrina Fair by Samuel Taylor. Directed by Sydney Pollack, the story follows Sabrina Fairchild (Julia Ormond), the shy and awkward daughter of a chauffeur who works for the wealthy Larrabee family on Long Island. Sabrina has spent her life quietly pining for David Larrabee (Greg Kinnear), the charming but superficial younger son. After a transformative stay in Paris, she returns home confident and stylish, immediately catching David’s attention, just as he is about to marry a woman whose family is vital to a major business deal. To protect the merger, David’s older brother Linus (Harrison Ford), the work-obsessed head of the Larrabee corporation, inserts himself into Sabrina’s life to distract her. His plan is to win her over and then send her back to Paris, but as they spend time together, Linus unexpectedly falls in love with her, and she discovers her long-standing infatuation with David has been eclipsed by a deeper connection with Linus. Read more…
Marilyn Bergman, 1928-2022
Lyricist and songwriter Marilyn Bergman died at her home in Los Angeles on January 8, 2022, at the age of 93, from respiratory failure related to COVID-19.
For more than six decades she worked almost inseparably with her husband Alan Bergman, forming one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in Hollywood history. Together they won three Academy Awards, four Emmys and two Grammys, creating enduring film songs including “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “The Way We Were” and the song score for Yentl.
Marilyn Keith was born in Brooklyn on November 10, 1928, remarkably in the same hospital where Alan Bergman had been born three years earlier. She studied music at New York’s High School of Music and Art and later psychology and English at New York University. After moving to Los Angeles she began writing lyrics professionally and met Alan while both were collaborating separately with composer Lew Spence. They married in 1958 and thereafter wrote almost exclusively as a team.
Their early successes included “Yellow Bird” and Frank Sinatra’s “Nice ‘n’ Easy,” but cinema soon became central to their careers. They supplied lyrics to Quincy Jones’s title song for In the Heat of the Night (1967), performed by Ray Charles, before achieving their first Academy Award with Michel Legrand’s “The Windmills of Your Mind” from The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). The Bergmans’ intricate, circular lyrics perfectly matched Legrand’s melody and helped make the song one of the most distinctive movie themes of its era. Read more…
THE PRINCE OF TIDES – James Newton Howard
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Prince of Tides is a serious romantic drama, directed by Barbra Streisand, and adapted from the acclaimed novel by Pat Conroy. The film stars Nick Nolte as Tom Wingo, a football coach from South Carolina, who is asked to travel to New York to help his sister, Savannah, who has recently attempted suicide. In New York Tom meets with Savannah’s psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein (Streisand), and the two have an immediate attraction to each other, despite them both being married. As time goes on Tom and Susan grow closer, and Tom begins to reveal long-suppressed details about his past and his private life, some of which relates directly to the issues plaguing Savannah, However, their deepening romantic relationship also threatens to break up their respective marriages, which could have devastating consequences for both families. The film co-stars Blythe Danner, Jeroen Krabbé, and Melinda Dillon, and was both a critical and commercial success, grossing more than $135 million at the box office, and picking up seven Academy Award nominations. Read more…
THE RUSSIA HOUSE – Jerry Goldsmith
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The great British author John le Carré died at the age of 89 just a couple of weeks ago on December 12th, so it is perhaps appropriate that we’re taking a look at the music from one of the best films adapted from his work – The Russia House, which was released thirty years ago. The film is directed by Fred Schepisi and stars Sean Connery as Barley Blair, a publisher who, after attending a book fair in the Soviet Union, finds himself becoming embroiled in a labyrinthine plot about nuclear arms proliferation, the military industrial complex, and a disgruntled Soviet nuclear physicist who is trying to smuggle his own state secrets to the west through Barley’s company, in the hope that it will hasten the end of the cold war. Thrown into the middle of all this is the increasingly romantic relationship between Barley and the beautiful Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), a Russian book publisher acting as the go-between for the information exchange, who may or may not be a KGB agent. The film has a terrific supporting cast, including Roy Scheider, James Fox, John Mahoney, and Klaus Maria Brandauer, and has a score by Jerry Goldsmith. Read more…
THE WAY WE WERE – Marvin Hamlisch
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Producer Ray Stark saw pay gold in the script and bought the film rights. He hired veteran director Sydney Pollack to direct. Casting the right principle actors was essential to the story’s success and so Barbara Streisand was cast as Katie, and Robert Redford as Hubble – a perfect pairing. The supporting ensemble included Bradford Dillman (J.J.), Lois Chiles (Carol Ann), Patrick O’Neal (George Bissinger) and Allyn Ann McLerie (Rhea Edwards). Writer Arthur Laurents created the screenplay based on his real life experiences as an undergraduate at Cornell in 1937. The story revolves around two people attracted in love by their differences, yet ultimately broken apart because of their inability to reconcile those differences. Katie is a strident and vocal Marxist Jew, while Hubble is carefree unaffected, apolitical WASP. They date and eventually marry, with her constantly pushing Hubble to excel and utilize his gift. He however settles for less, a Hollywood screenwriter where he becomes successful writing banal sitcoms. They are affluent, yet increasingly alienated. Her political activities begin to intrude into their lives as Studio executives pressure Hubble to rein her in, in light of the House Committee On Un-American Activities, which is targeting the Hollywood establishment. Well when an emotionally exhausted Hubble has an affair with his ex-girl friend while Katie is pregnant the relationship is ruptured. They divorce and years later re-encounter each other, she with militant flyers in her hand he insulated, but happy with a new wife. It is bittersweet as she relates that he was at his best as a writer when he was with her. They part, cherishing the memory of the way they were… Read more…
THE INFORMANT! – Marvin Hamlisch
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The last time Marvin Hamlisch had a movie in theaters – ANY movie – was in 1996, when he scored the Barbra Streisand vehicle The Mirror Has Two Faces, almost 13 years ago. The younger generation of film music fans who grew up listening to scores from the 2000s might be forgiven for not knowing that Hamlisch, in the 1970s, was one of the bonafide stars of the soundtrack world. He was the youngest student ever accepted at the acclaimed Juilliard School of music in 1951 when aged just seven, and worked on a slew of hit movies in the 1970s, scoring the likes of “The Sting”, “The Way We Were”, “Save the Tiger” and even a Bond movie, “The Spy Who Loved Me”, while simultaneously writing hit songs like “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows”, “Nobody Does It Better”, “Life Is What You Make It”, and of course “The Way We Were” for Streisand herself. He won three Oscars, and was nominated for nine more, before effectively disappearing off the film music map. Now, after a decade away (during which he wrote the hit Broadway musicals The Goodbye Girl and The Sweet Smell of Success), he’s back with a brand new score for The Informant!, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh. Read more…
THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR – Bill Conti
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When you look at Bill Conti’s list of credits over the past five years or so – memorable titles such as Rookie of the Year, Bushwhacked, Spy Hard and Wrongfully Accused leap out – it is all the more surprising and gratifying to see him attached to such a high profile and comparatively serious movie as The Thomas Crown Affair. He has repaid the trust invested in him by director John McTiernan with an unusual, challenging, peculiarly percussive score that has generated heated debate amongst score fans, with equal amounts of admirers and detractors. Personally, I fall into the former category. While I can appreciate that Conti’s efforts were not entirely successful, and although one key musical sequence was utterly destroyed through careless digital editing, I find it refreshing that a composer such as Conti would be willing to try something so new and original at a time when most film scores are rejected if they don’t adhere to tried and tested formulas. Read more…
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