BOOK REVIEW BY CHRIS MICH: HENRY MANCINI...REINVENTING FILM MUSIC BY JOHN CAPS (2012)
A MINOR SPOILER REVIEW:
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| Photo by Chris Mich. The film Sunflower (1970) features a Henry Mancini soundtrack and made its way into our Top 100 Henry Mancini Films. Click here to see where it landed! |
For the few of you who are following our blog, you may recall that this year Digging Star Wars is celebrating the centennial year of legendary film composer Henry Mancini with a Top 100 Henry Mancini Films series and more. And so, I’ve decided that our last two entries into 2024’s #classicfilmreading summer challenge will focus on the maestro himself. New to Mancini? Check out this brief bio I wrote about him at the beginning of our year-long celebration.
Now, let us begin with John Caps' 2012 book, Henry Mancini….Reinventing Film Music.
While I have not read Caps’ other works, I can safely say this book has landed in my top 5 favorite books – placing him alongside works from Ernest Hemingway, Alan Frank, Robert Heinlein, and Jack McKinney. Yes, Reinventing Film Music is that good. In fact, this title is the first title I’ve included in the #classicfilmreading challenge as a re-read. And this second read was even more enjoyable than the first.
In addition to telling Mancini’s life story, Caps wonderfully explores, denotes, criticizes, and praises Mancini’s music and the films that were lucky enough to have “Music by Henry Mancini”. Caps pulls no punches but never shirks from giving an in-depth analysis of his work with a musical critique that occasionally surpasses the understanding of a casual music reader such as myself. Caps, however, never flaunts his knowledge but applies it gently for the context of the achievements of Mancini musically – even when (or especially when) no trophies or laurels are associated with the soundtrack/score at hand. Caps’ approach inspired me to write my own analysis of Mancini’s work that, fortunately, got published in Film Score Monthly earlier this year.
Take, for example, Caps review of Mancini’s work on the Number 28 film in the Top 100 Henry Mancini Films, The Molly Maguires (1970) …
Always thinking in melodic terms, even when scoring dramatically, Mancini based The Molly Maguires music on one principal theme, which opens the film. We are shown the world of the nineteenth-century coal miner – the coal conveyors, smokestacks, the slag heaps, the gray earth and the dusty sunrise, the mine shafts and soiled workers seated on iron coal cars being slowly drawn out of daylight into the black hole of the pit, now lit only by the miners’ headlamps and hand lanterns. This first theme begins with a single harp plucking a steady arpeggio, which then begins support for the solo recorder presenting a miner’s tune. It is painfully simple music owing much to ancient Irish folk music (and for film buffs reminding us of a major-key version of Max Steiner’s 1930s Irish theme for The Informer). p. 123
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| Photo by Chris Mich. According to John Caps, Mancini’s Sunflower theme became his most popular tune in Japanese pop music markets “...even beyond Moon River and all the rest” p. 127. |
I like that Caps even had the nerve to call out a flub of the great American lyricist/songwriter and Mancini collaborator Johnny Mercer. Here are his thoughts on one of my favorite Mancini films and tunes: Moment to Moment (1966) which scored as an Honorable Mention in the Top 100 Henry Mancini Films AND my Number One most listened-to song on Spotify last year….
…Moment to Moment (1966), directed by Mervyn LeRoy,
Mancini’s main melody intuitively and intentionally picks up the purple prose
of the film’s script; he gives the film a strong, firmly crafted straight-ahead
tune in A minor that mirrors the movie’s self-consciousness. One of Johnny
Mercer’s rare bad lyrics (“Every moment that I live / I live for every moment
with you”) likewise mirrors the film’s sordid tale. p. 89
Mancini's evolution as an artist is the major theme of Caps’ book. From 1950s Universal Studios assembly line learnings to his jazz-pop posh 60s heyday to 70s experimentations through the muzaky 80s and off-the-radar 90s – cut tragically short by cancer in 1994: it’s all in there. Caps writes, “For that other crowd – posterity – and for those who watch the arts outside of trends, Mancini’s evolution has been a gratifying procession of work in progress.” It was for this reason that I asked my friends in LA to have an outdoor screening of Blind Date (1987) on the eve of the Mancini 100th Celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. Everyone’s seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and The Pink Panther (1963) – or part of them – at least once. Let’s dig into the deep cuts and almost forgotten titles and see Mancini treat them with as much care and grace sonically as he had done with his hits in the JFK era.
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| Photo
by Chris Mich. My college buddies arranged an outdoor screening for my visit to
LA. I insisted on BLIND DATE (1987) to prep for our trip to the Mancini tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl the next day. |
Caps boils down Mancini’s contributions to pop culture to these three: 1] reinventing film scoring from old, boring European classical to perky, catchy jazz-pop that’s brimming with optimism (ironically, Mancini’s protégé John Williams would re-popularize symphonic scores with Star Wars and eclipse Mancini’s success) 2] making soundtrack collecting a thing (Mancini was the first film composer to market his film soundtracks into “pop” albums making him an award-winning recording artist and a millionaire) 3] reintroducing clever harmonic and melodic writing into popular music that bounced from jazz to rock in all its variations (at one point Mancini had the Number Two Billboard Chart single behind The Beatles. Strange days indeed.).
The “missed that fact the first time around” element in this last reading was that Tim Burton wanted Mancini to score Ed Wood (1994). It’s so sad that cancer took Mancini at age 70. Not having Hank score my favorite Burton film is tragic, too. But thank goodness we have so many Mancini film scores to appreciate in that absence. Mancini scored more than 150 feature films and countless TV shows in his lifetime. He left his mark, for sure. Check out this video with clips from each film that made our blog’s Top 100 Henry Mancini Films…
Special thanks to Out of the Past blogger Raquel Stecher for continuing the challenge. To learn more about this summer fun endeavor, visit Raquel’s blog for more details.
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