WHITE HEAT: Jazz, Noir and the Robert Blake Murder Case. Read All About It!
Written: May 11 '01 (Updated Jun 07 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: A number of imaginative jazz arrangements of heavy orchestral film scores.
Cons: Some of the adaptations of the music to jazz work better than others.
The Bottom Line: The Jazz at the Movies Band utilize Noir movie themes. (You sometimes hear their music in theaters before movies begin). Now a band member figures in the Blake Murder Case.
macresarf1's Full Review: White Heat Film Noir by Jazz At The Movies Band
UPDATE: March, 17, 2005: Yesterday, Actor Robert Blake (Baretta on TV; LOST HIGHWAY, Lynch, 1999, etc.) was found Not Guilty of the murder of his wife of six months, Bonny Lee Bakley, a girl he evidently got pregnant in his car during a one night stand after an evening at a jazz club.
In my usual frustrated search for a new movie or a different San Francisco restaurant to review, I came across a little cache in the recently overhauled Music Category which combines all three subjects: Jazz arrangements of Film Noir Themes. And, of course, food and drink figure in a significant number of Film Noirs. In this case, the Robert Blake Murder Case, fits perfectly well into a noir theme.
As readers will know, certainly those who read my movie reviews, Film Noir is a genre of American Movie which enjoyed a vogue between the late 1930's and the Coming of Television in the 1950's.
Named by the French, when American films arrived on their shores again after World War II, film noirs were originally B-Pictures, meant for the lower half of a double bill. Because many were made in wartime, they used the "night for night" method and utilized limited light to save both electricity and money. Therefore, they were darkly hued, often using single light sources, shadows, high contrast film stock.
The stories came from the pulp detective stories of the 1920's on. These stories by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson and others, often based on true crime cases, stressed good versus evil, with a hero, who is often in trouble with the Cops and/or the Mob. He is sometimes an ex-cop turned private detective himself, who against his better judgment tries to occupy the moral ground and is caught somewhere in the middle. He often narrates his sad story. Ambiguity, paranoia, disillusionment, loneliness and corruption abound. And there is always a beautiful femme fatale. Film Noir is regarded as the unique genre created by the Hollywood, and though dismissed at the time by critics, the French Cahiers du Cinema first, in the late 1950's, and later modern observers, have elevated the form to the status of high existential Art.
Music, dramatically scored music, was required to back up the visuals, and classic studio film composers like Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa, Victor Young, Roy Webb and David Raksin provided it. [In time, as Film Noir gained respectability and larger budgets, more independents like Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, and Jerry Goldsmith joined the ranks, bringing the form into color and on to movies like L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (Hanson, 1997) and the present.] The music, in the beginning, was almost always scored for the large studio orchestras of the era. In addition to themes for dark night action and suspense, other music was developed to underscore the disreputable hero, the bad guys, the femme fatale, the good girl (usually in trouble), the unhealthy atmosphere of night clubs and gambling joints, the lush mob-owned restaurants.
[There is often a relationship to food established, especially a scene in a restaurant where the private eye or the villain dines with a femme fatale on dishes that Depression, Wartime, even most present day Americans, at their local beanery, could not even identify, far less order. And that wish fulfillment joins Restaurants with Film Noir and Music.]
I have purchased over the last few years several collections on Compaq Disc, put out for the hot sound track market by Warners, Marco Polo and Varese Saraband. They adapt these essentially expressionistic musical themes to the lighter orchestration of Jazz combos and groups.
The wedding works wonderfully well.
Let me, in the first of several reviews, take up WHITE HEAT (Discovery 77008) from Warner's Jazz at the Movies Band. The Band consists on this disc of Bill Cunliffe, its yeoman pianist; Mark Portman, synthesizer; Matt Harris, synthesizer and rhodes; Roberto Valle, bass; Bernie Dresel, drums; Brad Dutz on percussion -- plus guest artists Gary Foster, alto sax and clarinet; Warren Luening, trumpet; Jack Sheldon, trumpet; Bobby Tricarico, guitar. They are talented group, and of my three collections, this one has the most edge, a cool take on the themes, which in most cases match the mood of the films.
Oh, yes, you want to know, where is the Bobby Blake
Connection?
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Robert Blake was one of the Our Gang members, Little Beaver in the Red Ryder series of Westerns, the muchacho who sells Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) a winning lottery ticket in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (Huston, 1948), Perry Smith in Richard Brooks' superb production of Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD (1967), Private Eye Baretta on TV. Blake, now 67, recently reported finding his wife, Bonnie Lee (Bakley) Blake, shot to death in his sports car outside an LA restaurant, under mystifying circumstances. The lady seems to have had a career as a femme fatale which, one way or another, caught up with her.
But what is the connection of this ongoing case with The Jazz at the Movies Band CD, WHITE HEAT?
Let me quote from the Monday, May 21, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle, p A11, (which I actually read after I wrote this piece):
"Almost none of Blake's neighbors had seen Bonny Lee Bakley, 44, who met Blake about three years ago at Chadney's, a now-defunct jazz club and restaurant in Burbank. According to several witnesses, Blake was there to hear his friend, jazz trumpeter and singer Jack Sheldon. Bakely had come with another group. At some point, Blake and Bakely stuck up a conversation."
Jack Sheldon, you will notice, is a featured trumpeter on WHITE HEAT (and its predecessor CD, BODY HEAT).
Intrigue, sex, paranoia, murder, a restaurant = Jazz!
Bobby Blake was caught between the investigation of his wife's murder and the always voyeuristic public. No doubt, whatever the police solution to the mystery, Baretta will eventually narrate his version of what happened for the cameras. Perhaps, Jack Sheldon will be playing a hot, hurt solo in the background, if only in our minds.
I can hear it now . . . .
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Returning to WHITE HEAT, unlike my other two Noir CD's, it deals soley with Classic Noir and may be a good introduction to the subject. (All of the movies whose scores are given a jazz treatment on this disc were shot in the requisite classic Noir black and white.) The tracks are as follows:
1. THIS GUN FOR HIRE (4m, 40s) -- Music for this tight 1942 thriller, directed by Frank Tuttle, adapted from Graham Greene's novel, was provided by little remembered David Buttolph (THE MARK OF ZORRO, 1940; THE KISS OF DEATH, 1947). The movie was given a more ideological twist by writers W. R. Burnett and Albert Maltz. Greene's hitman Raven was turned into a political assassin out to revenge himself against his industrialist employers for double-crossing him. The film made Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake stars. In a memorable scene, hostage/girlfriend Lake inadvertently causes Ladd's location to be revealed by feeding a kitten in the box car where they are hiding from police and intelligence operatives.
The Jazz at the Movies Band turns Buttolph's tense theme into a Jazz Samba, of all things, with the help of Bobby Tricarico's tenor sax, Warren Luening 's trumpet, especially Tim May's guitar and Brad Dutz's percussion.
2. THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (3:49) -- Vincent Minnelli groomed this story of Hollywood greed into a kind of Noir by having Dick Powell as a wry screenwriter telling, in voice over and flashback, the "inside story" of a famous producer/director, played by Kirk Douglas. (Produced by John Houseman, it also is a thinly disguised pastiche of the careers of Howard Hughes, David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, up to the year of its making: 1952.) Lana Turner does some of her best work here as the b*tchy star heroine. Banquets and dinners are much in evidence.
David Raksin created his second most beautiful score for THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL. The theme became a standard, and it is often heard as a background for documentaries on Movie History. The Band can hardly improve on that theme when they turn it into a kind of Blues. Gary Foster sets the mood with an alto sax, while Jack Sheldon's trumpet picks it up and gives the piece some drive.
3. WHITE HEAT is the 1949 movie which lends this disc its title. WHITE HEAT was the last great gangster epic for veteran Warner Brothers Director Raoul Walsh (HIGH SIERRA, 1941), and for Jimmy Cagney, who gave the best performance of his admirable career as a psychopathic career criminal, the unforgettable Cody Jarrett. Jack Warner could almost have been referring to the pair when he said of Walsh: "To Raoul Walsh, a tender love scene is burning down a wh*rehouse." In WHITE HEAT, Walsh and Cagney turn Jarrett's relationship with his Ma Barker-like mother (Margaret Wycherly) and his slutty wife Velma (Virginia Mayo) into a dark, incestuous stew. Edmund O'Brien, as a tough undercover agent, links Jarrett's life to those attempting to catch him. One of a number of long remembered scenes has Jarrett gnawing on a leg of chicken as he pumps round after round into a car's trunk containing a screaming "squealer."
Here, the Band uses pioneer film composer Max Steiner's "down and dirty" theme for Velma to craft an insinuating blues. Gary Foster's sax carries the whole thing with the assistance of a light snare drum and a little rising piano from Bill Cunliffe toward the end.
4. In the year 1944, DOUBLE INDEMNITY brought Miklos Rozsa together with Director Billy Wilder for possibly their most successful collaboration. The music helps inflame the murderous affair of a randy insurance adjuster (Fred MacMurray) and a bored, greedy suburban house wife (Barbara Stanwyck, in a blonde wig). MacMurray and Stanwyck plot her husband's murder furtively in shady bars and supermarkets. It is one of the great film noirs, perhaps the greatest. MacMurray narrates in the form of a Dictaphone confession to his boss (Edward G. Robinson).
Bobby Tricarico's tenor sax blends seamlessly with Gary Foster's clarinet in making you smell the sweaty sheets in their riff on Rozsa's regretful, guilty "lust theme" for the lovers. (3:30).
5. TOUCH OF EVIL (3:41) -- Often called the last classic film noir, Orson Welles' final completed film in Hollywood pitted a crooked (but, by his lights, idealistic) border Chief of Police (Welles) against a sophisticated straight arrow Mexican drug investigator (Charlton Heston) over the railroading of a suspected Latino bomber. Marlene Dietrich, the Chief's old paramour, tells him that he's been eating too many candy bars.
This pounding Noir music was Henry ("Moon River") Mancini's first important film score. Ironically, Welles wanted to jettison much of the orchestral portion in favor of "source" arrangements from radios and clubs on the location, Venice, Ca. (His intention has been fulfilled in Walter Murch's recent reconstruction of the film.) The Jazz at the Movies Band arrangement of the title theme stresses Brad Dutz's percussion, joined by Gary Foster on sax over Cunliffe's piano and Roberto Valle's bass.
6. In KEY LARGO, John Huston and Richard Brooks updated Maxwell Anderson's 1939 play to 1948, as a warning to Post-World War II audiences that organized crime, moving into America from Cuban exile, was about divide the country into corrupt fiefdoms. Humphrey Bogart is a war-shattered veteran up against Mob Boss Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) in a hurricane threatened resort hotel in the Florida Keys, where the gangs are gathering to parley. Unfortunately, the message was ignored for over a decade, until it was nearly too late. (May be it was too late.) Caught in between the protagonists are the hotel owner (Lionel Barrymore), his daughter (Lauren Bacall), and Bogart, who must eat, sleep, and wait fitfully as the metaphoric storm and the gangsters approach. Claire Trevor won an Academy Award for performance as Rocco's drunken mistress. Pioneer film composer Max Steiner provided appropriate themes.
In KEY LARGO, Steiner adopted a hymn of patriotic heroism to score the climactic confrontation between Bogart and Robinson. Warren Luening's trumpet solo signature leads the hymn into the band's lazy tropical jazz meditation, evoking the Keys where the action is set. This rendition is one of the best on the disc. (5:36).
7. Otto Preminger's 1944 production of LAURA is a renowned and well-remembered Noir in film history. Troubled, rather twisted Police Detective Mark McPherson falls under the spell of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), whose murder he is called to investigate. As he looks at Laura's picture, we hear David Raksin's theme for her. (Later, it given words by Johnny Mercer, which made it a standard). "Laura, " a melody Raksin had to fight for with the film's producers, was inspired by the end of his marriage. The plot is steeped in the intrigue of 1940's cafe society.
Jack Sheldon plays Raksin's famous theme in full on trumpet. Then, Gary Foster embroiders it on the alto sax with the full rhythm section. Cunliffe's piano, for some reason, quotes in the mix "Pop Goes the Weasel" and "The Theme for 77 Sunset Strip"! It is a beautiful arrangement. (5:25).
8. THE LOST WEEKEND (1945) reunited Composer Miklos Rozsa and Director Billy Wilder in an adaptation of Charles Jackson's novel, an expose of Alcoholism which was startling and revelatory for its time. Ray Milland won an Academy award for his portrayal of a writer concealing his problem from his friends and relatives, even from his fiancee. Not a conventional Noir, it nevertheless was shot in part on the streets of New York and borrows its lighting from film noir, especially in the acclaimed (but slightly dated now) scenes of delirium tremens. A famous series of scenes involves Milland bargaining for drinks with his godlike bartender (Howard DaSilva, who also won an Oscar). The book and the movie gave the phrase "lost weekend" to the language.
Gary Foster, alternating on alto sax and clarinet, leads the Band in an arrangement that is almost upbeat, using Rozsa's theme to create a piece of late night New York Jazz. (3:46).
9. For THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946), George Bassman, another largely unheralded studio composer (RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, 1962), contributed a score which echoed the fog horns of the Pacific Coast where the action of this adaptation of James M. Cain's novel is set. Tay Garnett's film starred Lana Turner and John Garfield, an almost historic pairing, in a story of a drifter and a beautiful, dissatisfied blonde married to an older man, the owner of a roadside restaurant. It can come to no good, and it doesn't.
Bobby Tricarico introduces the forlorn foghorn love theme on tenor sax and, with the Band in the background, it is commented upon by the mocking muted trumpet of Warren Luening. (4:21).
10. THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950) began a trend in caper movies. John Huston's classic noir of how a gang of jewel thieves are employed by a corrupted attorney to steal a fortune in the burglary of a jewel store, and then how they lose it, has been repeated umpteen times down to the present. Sterling Hayden revived his career as a tough, unlucky gunman, Dix, security for the gang. He hangs out at a safe diner run by his pal (James Whitmore). Jean Hagen is Dix's shopworn but loyal girlfriend. Marilyn Monroe scored in her first important role, as the attorney's sleepy mistress who turns out to be the true femme fatale. Miklos Rozsa provided the music.
Rozsa's score for THE ASPHALT JUNGLE was remarkable in that it was limited to the opening credits (over sinister shots of an unnamed Midwestern city) and to a relentless chase theme during the film's last 10 minutes or so. The Band uses the angular Title Theme and makes it a saturnine jazz nocturne for Cunliffe's piano, with Gary Foster featured on alto sax. (3:35).
11. Howard Hawk's THE BIG SLEEP presented Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe, his second great detective role, and paired him with his love, Lauren Bacall. In this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel (worked on by William Faulkner, no less), there is a good femme fatale and a bad femme fatale, and they're sisters. Lauren is the good one, and Martha Vickers plays the bad one, in a tale of offspring run wild. Several important scenes, especially in the restored version, prominently feature restaurants. Max Steiner composed a big, typical Warner Brothers-type score.
The band gives Steiner's love theme the full treatment. Warren Luening's trumpet hands it over to Gary Foster on clarinet, with Cunliffe's piano and the rhythm section creating a surprisingly successful rumba in the background. (4:20).
12. THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (1946) was uncharacteristically helmed by Lewis Milestone, and was driven by Barbara Stanwyck's performance as wealthy heiress Martha Ivers, a woman who is held in a loveless marriage to a husband who was involved in a crime she committed long before. Van Heflin, her rediscovered childhood playmate and lost love, and smoky Lizabeth Scott, his paramour, are also present. Martha settles her problems with a pistol in what might be called American Gothic Noir. Miklos Rozsa composed appropriately foreboding and tense music.
Once again, the Band uses a Rozsa theme of desire, with Gary Foster on the alto sax and Jack Sheldon's trumpet. (4:20).
The disc comes to splendid conclusion using Miklos Rozsa's first rate score for Jules Dassin's THE NAKED CITY (1948). This semi-documentary police procedural film, starring Barry Fitzgerald as an old NYPD detective, was shot on the streets of New York in almost its entirety. It can now be seen as highly influential on movies and TV series which followed it. The plot follows the murder investigation of a model who had ties to jewel thefts. The hitman murderer (played by Ted DeCorsia) ironically becomes a kind of Noir protagonist as he attempts to escape the police and New York itself in a chase through the streets, little shops and restaurants of New York's Lower East Side to his fate high on the Williamsburg Bridge above the City.
Rozsa's harshly poignant, tragic theme, introduced at the identification of the model's body (and reprised at the end of THE NAKED CITY), is the basis for one of the Band's best efforts. It begins as a kind of syncopated march, with Warren Luening's trumpet, and develops into another nocturne with Cunliffe's piano, and Bobby Tricarico's tenor sax. When Luening returns on the trumpet, it finishes off as a jazz dirge (one can't help feel) for New York. (4:38)
Nan Mishkin is credited with the arrangements, and she deserves considerable praise. We don't have 8, 000, 000 Film Noirs, but give us time. The Jazz at the Movies Band has created new music for a few of them.
Recommended.
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"White Heat" is now featured with his sexy sister, "Body Heat," on the juke box at the Noir City Bar, "The Ha-Ra Club," at Geary and Larkin, Midtown San Francisco. Ask Karl Kickery to show you #16 and #91. Tell him that Macresarf1 sent you!
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