Point Blank/The Outfit (Limited
Edition CD Soundtrack)
Sound: B Point
Blank Music: A- Outfit Music: A-
Johnny Mandel’s score for John Boorman’s Point Blank
(1967) marks a major turning point for music in American cinema and some genres
in particular, like the Detective film, Thriller, and Police drama. It was very unusual music, with a
comparatively more European feel to Hollywood product of the time, an American
New Wave was starting up. This first
occurred with Arthur Penn’s The Chase in 1965/6, and continued with his Bonnie
& Clyde (also 1967), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (both 1968), and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild
Bunch (1969). The studios loved the
commercial success, but panicked, so they tried to bury this newfound freedom,
supporting films after Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider and doing what they
could to reintroduce conservative bends.
Mandel’s more abstract music was a match for the
innovative way the film told its story in complex flashbacks, editing, and
other layers that were more grim and challenging than the book-like films
Hollywood was used to producing assembly line and cookie-cutter. French filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard,
Alain Resnais, and Francois Truffaut haunt the film, as does its lead character’s
origins, as the liner notes booklet explains.
It offers a great history of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker and the films
made from the book series.
The European influence since the end of Film Noir in 1958
and beginning of the French New Wave in 1959 had already turned up in Penn’s Mickey
One (1965) and John Frankenheimer’s brilliant thriller Seconds
(1966). Point Blank was the
first time it had reached the hard-boiled genre of storytelling. In the story, Walker (Parker renamed, as
played by Lee Marvin in one of his greatest performances) is shot in the head,
at the distance the title refers to, by Reese (the ever reliable John
Vernon). When Walker actually survives,
he wants his money he was cheated out of and at any cost. Based on the 1962 novel The Hunter,
the film was half-effectively remade as the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback
(1999), with Brian Helgeland not getting his final cut. The film, either way, tries to replace the
cerebral with “black comedy”, always a desperate move. More impressively, Steven Soderbergh totally
understood the Boorman film when he pulled off his incredible The Limey
that same year.
Mandel was a musician and conductor, rarely entering into
the world of film production, but it is no mistake that he co-wrote the theme for
M*A*S*H (“Suicide is Painless”), or did the music for the dark
likes of the Paddy Chayefsky-scripted Americanization of Emily (1964) or
Vincente Minnelli’s drama The Sandpiper. This was an honest artist of integrity and his work bares this
out four decades later.
The Outfit (1974) is based the
Westlake/Parker book of the same title, with Robert Duvall in the Parker role,
renamed Earl Macklin in this case. This
time, he wants revenge for the death of his brother. What the music lacks in the abstract challenge of Point Blank,
John Flynn’s film more than makes up with in the still-complex score by the
great Jerry Fielding (Demon Seed, which you can read more about in the
soundtrack review elsewhere on this site of the CD it shares space with, Soylent
Green).
He also creates the kind of atmosphere necessary for the
genre, but it is not the usual urban music you might hear Lalo Schifrin deliver
for a Dirty Harry, great as that is.
This world is not so simple, and Fielding’s music increases the impact
in the same way Mandel’s does. This is
the best pairing of scores the FSM label of Film Score Monthly has
issued yet. That includes the fine PCM
CD Stereo that is really clear, from masters that are in exceptionally great
shape. The CD is sadly limited to 3,000
copies pressed, so I strongly urge you to order yours. It is available exclusively at www.filmscoremonthly.com while it
lasts. Now, we wait for Warner Bros. to
finally issue the DVDs of these great films.
- Nicholas Sheffo
