Jazz Soundtracks — Part 7

The following is an excerpt from the book Film and Television Scores, 1950-1979 (McFarland, 2008) by Kristopher Spencer, founder of Scorebaby.com.

What is the soundtrack for sex and seduction? Is it a sultry Latin dance number, smoky torch song, the bump and grind of funky soul, or the vivacious shake of rock and roll? The short answer is all of these things and more...

from Skin-dependent Films
To see nudity and sexual situations in legitimate Hollywood features one is generally limited to the pre-code and post-code eras of filmmaking. While the Hays Code imposed limits on the big studios, outlaw independent impresarios like Dwain Esper, Kroger Babb and David Friedman road-showed the grindhouse circuit during the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s exhibiting their low-budget exploitation flicks for the more daring moviegoer. By selling sin in the guise of seemingly well-intentioned sex hygiene scare films and vice racket exposés, the legendary “Forty Thieves” and their progenitors managed to show audiences a bit of bare thigh, breast or bottom before hastily packing up and high-tailing it to the next town. When the raincoat crowd got their fill of one type of exploitation flick — such as the natives-gone-wild “goona-goona” pictures — the skin-dependent filmmakers produced pasty and g-string burlesque shorts or not-so-naughty nudist camp docudramas.

Needless to say, such skid row cinema was too low profile to warrant legitimate soundtrack releases not to mention an actual score. In fact, most striptease and stag films of the period featured canned recordings of generic jazz, nameless lounge exotica or incognito big band blues. Short of sitting through campy but quaint video reissues like Teaserama (starring Tempest Storm and Bettie Page) or Love Moods (starring Lili St. Cyr), the grind-curious must resort to retro rockin’ strip club compilations like The Las Vegas Grind and Jungle Exotica series or Take It Off: Striptease Classics. These feature long-forgotten groups with cheeky names like the Genteels, the Lushes and the Whips who cut 45s of stroll, jive and slop for seedy joints with names like Louie’s Limbo Lounge and the little films they subsidized...


from Big Budget Seduction
While Hollywood was still under the watchful eye of the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, filmmakers nudged the envelope of acceptable on-screen sexuality with innuendo (like Lauren Bacall suggesting to Humphrey Bogart that he “put his lips together and blow” in To Have and Have Not, ’44), or with symbolic imagery (like frothy waves splashing over the semi-clothed Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity, ’53).

During the ’50s, certain filmmakers pushed the boundaries of subject matter. Elia Kazan transplanted Tennessee Williams’ melodrama A Streetcar Named Desire (’51) from Broadway, complete with its original cast. The film’s hothouse atmosphere of sexual frustration is made all the more palpable by Alex North’s influential jazz-tinged score.

A few years later, Kazan made a film that was even more brazen in its suggestive sexuality as one of its characters is a “child bride.” Baby Doll (’56) concerns a cotton gin owner married to a Lolita-esque teenager who is holding out on her hubby sexually until she turns 20. Another man attempts to seduce the girl and steal her husband’s business. Kenyon Hopkins’ sultry score, as orchestrated by Ray Heindorf, lends Baby Doll an atmosphere of decadent Southern charm. The lush score is like a jazz symphony, with occasional lapses into small group jazz and blues, featuring soloists on harmonica, saxophone, trumpet and guitar. The only break in musical character comes when Smiley Lewis, the legendary New Orleans R&B artist, is featured on the rollicking “Shame, Shame, Shame.” The Legion of Decency condemned the film, though that hardly hurt its box office...

The most celebrated sex comedy of the ’50s remains Some Like It Hot (’59), which the American Film Institute later named as “the funniest film ever made.” Music is integral to the film’s charm, as Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play musicians who have witnessed the Valentine’s Day Massacre, and in an effort to avoid the mob, doll themselves up and join an all-female traveling jazz band featuring Monroe. The movie relies on innuendo, the cheeky kink of its cross-dressing heroes and Monroe’s undeniable sex appeal for much of its illicit kicks. Composer Adolf Deutsch supplies a mix of ’20s hot jazz and pop, including period hits like “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.” Monroe delivers memorable vocal performances on “Runnin’ Wild,” “I Wanna Be Loved By You” and “I’m Thru With Love.”

Jazz Soundtracks — Part 1

The following is an excerpt from the book Film and Television Scores, 1950-1979 (McFarland, 2008) by Kristopher Spencer, founder of Scorebaby.com.

The Silver Age of film music began in the early ’50s when jazz, pop and rock started to influence film composers. It can be argued that Alex North’s jazz-tinged A Streetcar Named Desire (’51) is the first Silver Age soundtrack. But, in general, early jazz soundtracks accompanied movies and TV shows about crime and justice.

Prior to the Silver Age of cinema and Golden Age of television, the crime genre made its transition from pulp magazine pages to radio programs such as The Shadow and the movie serials like Dick Tracy’s G-Men. These hero-oriented productions were presented with rehashed orchestral scores only a few notes removed from 19th Century and early 20th Century classical works such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.” In each case, robust orchestrations accompany the epic struggle between hero and villain as violins soars triumphantly.

By the mid ’50s, however, the line between good and evil became increasingly tenuous. Do-gooder crime fighters came with bad habits and dubious virtue. They didn’t always “get their man” and dames often proved to be more trouble than even the most corrupt criminals. For this new era of moral ambiguity the only music that would prove apropos was jazz.

In the ’50s jazz was still a fairly commercial music genre, though not nearly on the level of its dance floor incarnation better known as swing. To be considered a sophisticate in the post-WWII era often meant digging the sound of jazz whether one was a beatnik or not.

In the context of film noir and TV crime shows from ’50 to ’65, jazz perfectly accompanies the images of rain-drenched streets, smoky private eye consultations and backroom busts.

“(Jazz) represented something lean, tough, cynical, and intelligent — adjectives that applied easily enough to the detective heroes of these pictures. These guys weren’t well described by a soft violin. Instead, the metallic-yet-soulful saxophone summed up this brave new world,” wrote Skip Heller in the CD booklet notes of Crime Jazz: Murder in the Second Degree (Rhino, ’97).

That’s not to say that jazz and the crime jazz of film and TV productions is the same beast. For one thing, crime jazz is mostly scripted and arranged for big bands, whereas the stylistically similar “cool” jazz and bebop of that period favored small group improvisation and long solos. Many West Coast musicians played crime jazz for the paycheck, not for the artistry. In fact, it wasn’t until Johnny Mandel scored I Want to Live in ’58 that true jazz musicians were even granted an opportunity to compose a Hollywood score.

The composer who usually gets credit for introducing jazz to the silver screen is Miklós Rózsa for The Asphalt Jungle (’50). A Hollywood veteran since ’37, Rózsa had scored many films including Double Indemnity and Spellbound before scoring John Huston’s urban potboiler. While The Asphalt Jungle score contains jazz elements, it still leans heavily on the orchestral approach long favored by Hollywood studios. (It’s worth noting that Rózsa’s final film score — the noir spoof Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (’82) — also favors the jazz sound.)

In ’51, a younger composer, Alex North, delivered a score that truly set the tone for iconic crime jazz. North, having written incidental music for the stage production of Death of a Salesman, followed its director, Elia Kazan, to greater success on the screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. On “Blanche,” sultry horns smolder against fiery strings, transitioning into a cooler mood where shadowy piano and furtive horn figures dance against a spare cymbal ride. Although most of his scores favor the traditional orchestral style, North’s contribution to the crime jazz genre proved inspirational to his younger colleagues, including Leith Stevens, Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein.

To be continued...