Word: mancini
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...again, it may be simply lazy schmalz, dressed to the airy glamour of Breakfast at Tiffany's. Whatever the secret of its appeal, Moon River is the most successful melody to come from a film score since the classic Picnic theme six years ago. And its composer, Henry Mancini, has become Hollywood's hottest musicman. Says the modest Mancini: "I don't know how it happened, but there it is." Home in the Movies. Mancini, 38, spent six years as a back-lot scorer and arranger until an impulsive producer invited him to try his hand...
...Mancini soon switched from television to the movies. After copping two Oscars last month (for Moon River and the Tiffany score), Mancini has producers stacked up at his door pleading for his services - and with cause. For they have discovered that Mancini's unorthodox orchestration can give quality to routine episodes, add drama to stock situations...
...John Wayne's forthcoming African epic, Hatari, Heroine Elsa Martinelli leads three baby elephants, trunk to tail, to a jungle water hole, then back up a hill to a camp. It is a nice scene, but hardly vital to the film. What makes it indispensable is Mancini's music - a calliope, then a bass clarinet noodling a theme suggested by the old boogie-woogie tune, Down the Road a Piece. For the current Experiment in Terror, Mancini uses an autoharp; each appearance of the villain is marked by its dissonant and eerie chords...
...sets off his melodies with a walking bass, extends them with choral and string variations, varies them with the brisk sounds of combo jazz. Moon River is sobbed by a plaintive harmonica, repeated by strings, hummed and then sung by the chorus, finally resolved with the harmonica again. Says Mancini: "It took me a long time to figure out what Holly Golightly was all about. One night after midnight I was still trying. I don't drink much, but I was sipping. And it came to me. I wrote the song in half an hour...
Winifred Wells, Lady Falmouth, the Countess of Kildare, Frances Stuart, Lou ise de Keroualle, Hortense Mancini and Nell Gwynn. "God would not damn a man for a little irregular pleasure," Charles said happily to a friend. Dignity sometimes demanded that he send John Wilmot, the licentious second Earl of Rochester, to the Tower of London for writing obscene satires. But the King always...