Shameless Retro – We´ll send you back to the past.
Farfisa organs by the pool and Martini in hand. Eyelashes, hair lacquer. The playboy paradise. Kitsch, corny, retro! Expletives or virtues? In a time when mass culture reaches the extremes of the creative void, in a time when exhaustion characterizes the moment, a review of values happens naturally. And stigmatizing adjectives magically turn into virtues. Or will they?
Currently the term retro serves to define a time and a production line more than a warning expletive. Besides that, the cultural industry has its inventory filled and need to recycle concepts (our concepts) to sell the stranding. And what was unimportant in other decades reveals unnoticed values. Cultural review? Improvement of reference? Media manipulation? Well. Here's a modest selection of retro cinema.
Who is to blame for the inclusion of popular appeals in film music? Henry Mancini? Possibly yes. In a time when the film industry desperately looked for renew, for update its production and follow period impositions, the market was living the explosion of youth culture in the late 50 and early 60. The success of theme Moon River from Breakfast at Tyffany (1961) made of Henry Mancini a trusted name for scores full of catchy themes. His compositions, starting from jazz models, added the rock electrification, and the lightness of pop music, ended up creating an alternative music genre that only was produced for the movies. See for example the main theme of The Party (1968), that clearly reference to the body culture, the dance appeal that meant so much in the period. And if we add these ingredients to the musical tradition of Broadway will have the score to the melodrama Valley of the Dolls (1967) by Andre Previn, an unquestionable retro classic in many ways.
American composer Burt Bacharach is another great who made his name during this period also adding, as Mancini, the romantic tradition to electrification that took the market with the rise of rock groups. What's New Pussycat? (What is What's Kitten, 1965) was a score of great success at the time and definitive entry of pop music in film scoring. Bacharach enhanced his musical recipe with After the Fox (1966) and Casino Royale (1967), in which the instrumental exuberance sees no limits. See here.
In this way of keeping up to date with popular codes, cinema included period references from youth culture, comics and pop music, in films that assumed the uncompromising farce. In another time certainly the James Bond theme would not have the electric guitar intro. The moment was increasingly disposed to to short and memorable themes, and less favorable for ambitious symphonic arrangements.
After acceptance of the James Bond series, spy movies became very popular and characteristic of the period and also gave room to a lot of interesting soundtracks as Kaleidoscope (1967) first work of Stanley Myers. Elmer Bernstein would make his foray into the genre with pop-big band music for The Silencers (1966), the first Matt Helm movie. Lalo Schifrin would also be required in Murderer's Row (1967, another Matt Helm) and The Liquidator (1965) with main theme sung by Shirley Bassey (repeating her Goldfinger performance). Bedazzled (1967) has a very nice score of songs by Dudley Moore, who besides actor and composer was also notable pianist.
Several films adapted directly from comics and pulp literature emerged then as Fantomas (1964) with Michel Magne music or Modesty Blaise (1966) with music by saxophonist John Dankworth. In Barbarella (1968) the Bob Crewe and Charles Fox music display pop songs, rock and psychedelia, almost like in a musical. In Kriminal (1966) the music of Roberto Pregadio uses all the popular standard for maximum effect: rock, exotic bossa nova, romantic jazz, jamesbondian guitars, electric organs, bongos!
Antonioni´s Blow Up (1967) with music between jazz and rock by Herbie Hancock, would give some intellectualized respectability for the moment. But it was an isolated case. Parallel to it, production in Europe, especially in Italian cinema, was responsible for irresistible fantasies as La Decima Victim (The Tenth Victim, 1965) a film in which converged all references of the period: the futuristic fiction, comic book narrative, satirical exploration of violence, emphasis on graphic aspects, pop art, but still keeping the critical view (director Elio Petri would be one of the most important of Italian political cinema), and had starring two fetish-stars of the period: Ursula Andress and Marcelo Mastroianni (in blond dyed hair!). The Piero Piccioni's music is a crossroad of musical references: mixing with extreme talent pop, jazz, electric organs (then the modernity symbol in popular music), scat singing (vocals without lyrics) in an extremely catchy result.
To look on Italy production without hearing Piero Umiliani would be unforgivable. King of pop kitsch and author of Ma-Ma-Nah Nah, Umiliani came from the jazz tradition to a work in which converged all fashions, vices and virtues of the 60´s pop. His score for the documentary Sweden Heaven and Hell (1968) is practically a catalog of the period with its electric organs, psychedelic rock and rhythmic appeals. Umiliani even on scores for thrillers did not abandon his sense of musical humor and his unique instrumental inventiveness. More Umiliani in Part 2.
And what to say about Francis Lai? French genius of melody that marked the 60´s with the iconic (da-ba-da-ba-da) theme for Un Homme et Une Femme. Probably (along with Bacharach´s Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head) the most mentioned, rewritten and lampooned musical film theme in history. Francis Lai with Un Homme et Une Femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966), Ennio Morricone with Metti Sera A Cena (1969), Luis Bacalov with L'Amica (1969) and Piero Piccioni with Scacco Alla Regina (1969) left to story unbeatable memorials to pop cinematic kitsch.
With the strengthening of the erotic film (drama, comedy or even simple appeals) the demand for kitsch trails would increase in the early 70s.
In Part 2, the musical kitsch of dirty 70s.
