= LIFEFORCE =

For over thirty years, Henry Mancini has written countless songs and scores covering the entire spectrum of film genres. Born in Cleveland on April 16, 1924, Mancini grew up in the steel-town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Despite Mancini's melodic gifts, he was not interested in pursuing a musical career as a youngster. But his parents, who inmigrated from Italy, encouraged Mancini to pursue a musical background. Before long, Mancini inherited his parents'love for music, and enrolled at Julliard in 1942. Unfortunately, the war interrupted his studies for three years. Mancini began his professional music as an arranger and pianist with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. He became acquainted with the techniques of film scoring through a six-year apprenticeship at Universal Pictures between 1952 and 1958, an opportunity that is unheard of today. Working under the supervision of music director Joseph Gershenson, Mancini developed his craft while arranging and composing for a myriad of diverse films such as The Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954), The Gleen Miller Story (1954), and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).

Mancini's jazz-driven music for Welles'classic brought him to the attention of Blake Edwards, who was searching for a composer to work on his new television series Peter Gunn (1958). His popular theme for the show signaled the start of one of the lenghtiest and most productive composer-director relationships in American film history (26 films in 33 years). Some of their more famous collaborations include Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961, an Oscar winner for Mancini's much recorded song "Moon River"), Experiment In Terror (1962), Days Of Wine And Roses (1962, another Oscar for the title song), and The Pink Panther (1964), which spawned a string of six sequels starting with A Shot In The Dark (1964). More recently, Mancini has scored Edwards'10 (1979), Victor/Victoria (1982, another Oscar winner for Mancini and his personal favorite), That's Life (1986), and Switch (1991).

Of course, his film work is not limited to the movies of Blake Edwards. In fact, Mancini has worked for many other well-known directors such as Howard Hawks (Hatari!, 1962), Stanley Donen (Two For The Road, 1967), Terence Young (Wait Until Dark, 1967), Vittorio DeSica (Sunflower, 1970), and Stanley Kramer (Oklahoma Crude, 1973). At the same time, he has continued to work in television, as evidenced by the theme for the popular series Newhart and his eloquent score for ABC's ten-hour mini-series The Thorn Birds (1983). Through all of these projects Mancini has proven himself to be composer of remarkable versatility. For example, compare the poignant mood of Days Of Wine And Roses with the rich textures of The Molly Maguires (1970), or the eerie sonorities of Night Visitor (1971) with the quirky orchestrations of Switch (1991). Although Mancini is most famous for his melodic, popular music, he is capable of scoring for any kind of musical ensemble or dramatic situation. Consequently, it should not be surprising that he was enlisted to compose the score for the Tri-Star production of Lifeforce (1985), a terminally strange yet fascinatingly implausible hybrid of science-fiction, apocalypse, and horror.

Lifeforce was the creative product of a team of sci-fi/horror veterans. Directed by Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Lifeforce was written by Dan O'Bannon (Alien, Total Recall) and Don Jakoby, based on the novel "Space Vampires" by Colin Wilson. The cast features Steve Railsback (The Stunt-Man), Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May (in her screen debut), and Patrick Stewart (Star Trek-The Next Generation). Lifeforce received mixed critical reviews, but one's reaction to his flamboyant film will ultimately depend upon one's tolerance for the explicit visual approach (the impressive special effects were supervised by John Dykstra of "Star Wars" fame) and the audacious combination of genres. Lifeforce begins as an outer space mystery, turns into a vampire story (the machinations of the plot are the product of a nude space vampiress), and concludes with an "end of the world" saga when London is infiltrated with zombies.

Despite these disparate plot elements, Henry Mancini's musical score provides Lifeforce with an underlying sense of dramatic cohesion. Composed for a large orchestra, the score is is full of symphonic drama and bears the identity of a unique musical author. "The Lifeforce theme." one of Mancini's most exciting, is a propulsive, robust composition in which sweeping fanfares (performed with energy by the brass choir) are wrapped around a lyrical, quasi-romantic bridge. Imbued with a classical sensibility and set in an energetic three-quarter meter, Mancini's theme establishes the larger-than-life tone of this fantastical adventure. The first part of the film is an outer space saga in which a team of explorers encounter an alien vessel. The original cut of the picture called for a lenghty series of sequences to be filmed without dialogue.

The intention was to have the music carry the picture, a practice which has become increasingly rare in films. As a result, Mancini welcomed the opportunity: "I don't know who started this theory of the best film music being that which you don't notice, but it isn't true. You have to be felt at certain points. When there is no dialogue, no sounds, just the visual-you'd better say something interesting." Unfortunately, this idea was eventually dropped, along with much of the score. Mancini was understandably disappointed with this decision, but the music was survived in a recorded suite called "The Discovery."

Divided into four parts, the suite conveys and appropiate sense of mystery, adventure and space through the use of expansive musical lines and an etherial chorus. Much of the Lifeforce score is quasi romantic yet brooding in temperament, highlighted by shifting orchestral timbres. For "Evil Visitation," the composer created an insatiable building of tension through relentless chromaticism. Melodic and harmonic variety are used to good effect in "Carlson's Story" and "The Girl In The Raincoat." The score concludes in grand fashion with a three-part suite titled "The Web Of Destiny," bringing the film's bizarre narrative to an exciting finish. All in all, Mancini's music for Lifeforce is justly considered to be one of his most distinctive and compelling scores, performed with precision and power by the London Symphony Orchestra under Mancini's confident baton.

Although Mancini is best known for his original music, his contributions to the art of film music go beyond the mastery of his craft. In the 1960s, he labored to improve the sound quality of audio tracks by elevating the technical standards of studio recording methods. At the time, Hollywood did not employ multiple microphones when recording albums-they still used a single mike suspended over the orchestra. Hollywood's conservative attitude towards sound recording meant that little time or money was invested in the development of recording technology. According to Mancini, "the quality of the recordings in the film studios was way behind the quality in the studios of the various recording companies in Hollywood."

Mancini's use of multiple mikes was treated suspiciously at first, but the effect of Mancini's insistence was to irrefutably prove that his technique improved the musical detail in sound recordings. Summing up this aspect of his career. Mancini suggests that "if it can be said that I had any influence, I think it was using good musicians to give personality to the music and having those musicians well recorded." In the process, he was the first composer to constructively adapt his scores to profitable recordings. Indeed, his extensive catalog of recordings for RCA helped make Mancini a household name, while his pops concerts broadened his public appeal even further.

More recently, Mancini has replaced his baton with a word processor: his autobiography, titled "Did Anyone Mention The Music?," is an entertaining account of his life and a valuable addition to the literature. He is also the author of a book on orchestration named "Sounds And Scores," which is still used extensively by music instructors. At the same time, Mancini has historically expressed concern about music education through the establishment of generous music at UCLA and Julliard. Mancini himself has received honorary doctorates from four American universities. Despite his enormous success in all aspects of the film scoring profession, the soft-spoken but articulate Mancini is quick to point out that film composers are not miracle workers: "Good music can improve a bad film, but it can never make a bad film good. We're not magicians. But when it works, and we feel we've made a contribution, it's a great source of satisfaction." The score for Lifeforce proves again that Mancini's music is a reservoir of satisfaction for audiences all over the world.

— Kevin Mulhall