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Taking Mancini’s Comedy Scores Seriously

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Abstract

Henry Mancini is primarily remembered today as the talented and songful composer of a handful of scores for (romantic) comedies from the first half of the 1960s, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s (‘Moon River’, 1961, dir. Blake Edwards), Charade (1963, Stanley Donen), and The Pink Panther (1963, dir. Blake Edwards). Such an assessment, however, neglects his prolific career as composer and arranger for film comedy, ranging from the early 1950s through the early 1990s. This chapter explores the breadth and variety of his work in comedy, explaining the musical and biographical contexts for his ongoing cultivation of that genre of film composition. After brief overviews of Mancini’s musical training and position within composition for film comedy, the chapter proceeds to trace his stylistic evolution, from the big-band sounds of the early 1950s, through the West Coast cool and jazz-pop of the 1960s scores, to the motivically integrated scores of the 1970s and beyond (e.g. Blake Edwards’s 10 and Victor/Victoria). In doing so, we will observe his stylistic development from writing memorable tunes for soundtrack albums to composing motivically tight-knit scores, all the while informed by his reliance on stylistic diversity, ear for timbral effect, and innate sense of comic effect. The study looks more closely at two representative scores in particular, that for Charade and for Silver Streak (1976, dir. Arthur Hiller). Of course, his long-term collaboration with first-rate directors Blake Edwards and Stanley Donen and fine lyricists Johnny Mercer and Leslie Bricusse contributed in no small way to Mancini’s success in creating appropriate musical settings for film comedy of all types, from slapstick to droll sophistication.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Smith argues for Mancini’s multithematicism (1998, p. 78), which may apply when one considers all of the one-time cues he wrote for dances, stage performances, and club scenes, but closer analysis of the scores reveals that a good deal of that which sounds like new thematic material is actually derived from the title song.

  2. 2.

    See for example Scheurer’s detailed discussion of the rooftop fight scene in Charade, which fails to take into account the taunting quips of Cary Grant that offset the visual and musical drama (Scheurer 1996, p. 39).

  3. 3.

    Although the slapstick and mickey-mousing music characterised his 1950s work for Universal, they would re-surface in such an unexpected context as the fight scene in Charade (1963), while the chromaticism could be said to mark his later, mature style as heard in the climax of Silver Streak (1976), for example.

  4. 4.

    Mancini did have Broadway aspirations, but neither plan for a musical based on Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince nor for one on George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara came to fruition because of licensing issues. He and lyricist Leslie Bricusse were in the process of preparing Victor/Victoria for Broadway when Mancini died. See Caps, pp. 224–237, for a detailed discussion of Mancini’s stage ambitions and the eventual fate of Victor/Victoria on stage.

  5. 5.

    This oft-cited description dates back to the first reviews of the film, which typically made reference to its Hitchcockian features. Thus Richard Mallett writes in Punch that Charade ‘is in the Hitchcock tradition’ (1964, p. 356).

  6. 6.

    Donen undercuts the gravity of the moment by having Peter make wise cracks up to the moment of the actual fisticuffs.

  7. 7.

    The album The Pink Panther & Other Hits by Henry Mancini (BMG 1992) essentially reproduces this list, with other songs from these movies as filler.

  8. 8.

    The eighth song was ‘Lujon’ from his work for the television series Mr. Lucky (1961). See https://www.thisismyjam.com/artist/Henry+Mancini for a listing of ‘Henry Mancini’s Best Songs as Picked by the Jam Community, 2011–2015’, hosted by the website This Is My Jam.

  9. 9.

    He never was able to shake that pigeonhole, not least because of the very popularity of the scores from the early 1960s.

  10. 10.

    The studio recording made under Mancini’s direction was later released.

  11. 11.

    In reality the experimentation confined itself largely to the first half of the 1970s.

  12. 12.

    This was his first experience with rejection, which left its mark upon him (Mancini and Lees 1989, p. 156).

  13. 13.

    Leslie Bricusse (1931–2021) was a gifted lyricist and composer for musical theatre, working frequently with Anthony Newley. After Johnny Mercer’s passing in 1976, Mancini turned to Bricusse as a favoured collaborator on song lyrics.

  14. 14.

    Edwards attempted to bring Victor/Victoria to Broadway in the early 1990s, with Mancini playing a major role in the necessary revisions; however he died before the project came to completion.

  15. 15.

    This particular interaction of animated and live characters is clearly indebted to the photorealistic effects displayed in the release Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988. Dir. Robert Zemeckis).

  16. 16.

    One reason why the titles music for the Pink Panther did not appear in these tributes may reside in the fact that it is an instrumentally conceived theme that did not spawn a charting popular song.

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Deaville, J. (2023). Taking Mancini’s Comedy Scores Seriously. In: Audissino, E., Wennekes, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33422-1_38

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