= THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN =

we all love mancini

The first meeting of director Blake Edwards and composer Henry Mancini is something of a Hollywood legend - though renowned Los Angeles Times film columnist Charles Champlin, a fan and friend of both men, insists there's nothing apocryphal about it. Blake Edwards, then a producer of little consequence at Universal, bumps into Mancini, a studio staff composer of equally modest stature, on his way out of the studio commissary.

"Been thinking about you, Henry," Edwards says, "What are you doing these days?"
"Not much," admits Mancini.
"How'd you like to do the music for a TV series," Edwards offers.
"Great!," says the journeyman composer, who could use the work.
"I'll be in touch," Edwards says in leaving,. "The series is called Peter Gunn."
Mancini continues on into the commissary thinking to himself, "Yeah. It might be fun to do a Western..."

Within a year the pop music success of Mancini's Peter Gunn theme made him a household name. Bolstered by the pioneering private eye series' three season run, Edwards stepped up into feature film directing, with Mancini in tow. Their first feature together was High Time, a modest Bing Crosby vehicle. Their second, Breakfast at Tiffany's, receives five Academy Award nominations, for which Mancini wins Oscars for Best Score and Song, his epochal collaboration with Johnny Mercer, "Moon River," which also scores him a Grammy.

Two decades later, with triumphs like The Days Of Wine And Roses, The Great Race and the Pink Panther franchise behind them, the Edwards/Mancini team is working in a refined, if no less comic, emotional milieu via 10, S.O.B. and Victor/Victoria. Their 20th collaboration would capitalize on the artistic freedom secured by the latest Pink Panther sequels, allowing them to remake Francois Truffaut's acclaimed The Man Who Loved Women, a sexy, yet introspectively bittersweet 1977 comedy about a man so consumed by his passion for the opposite sex that it eventually spells his doom.
 

...(webmaster: continues talking about Reynolds, Edwards and the movie. Those parts are not included here)...

Musically, the film's unusual mix of psychoanalysis, melancholy romance and sexually-charged comedy presented Henry Mancini with an intriguing challenge. While the decades-long collaboration between Edwards and Mancini had netted a handful of Oscars and yielded a rich trove of melodic riches of which the themes for Peter Gunn and The Pink Panther were but the tip of the proverbial iceberg, they'd also developed a creatively simpatico musical mindset that instinctively understood that sometimes less is more. Such was the case with the composer's work for The Man Who Loved Women, where long stretches of the film played out entirely sans underscore. Anchored by an evocative main title whose melancholy also serves as the leitmotif for Burt Reynold's romantically obsessed sculptor, Mancini's task was often to set the mood or place for a scene, be they landscapes emotional or geographical, then push the faders down and move on to the next cue.

"It's critical that you have a good rapport with the producer and the director," Mancini said in an interview just before resuming his partnership with Edwards on The Man Who Loved Women. "You have to have a meeting of the minds. With Blake, it's almost a dream situation where everything I do is OK with him. In the most recent picture (their 19th collaboration and latest in the lucrative Inspector Closeau franchise, The Curse Of The Pink Panther), there were a couple sequences I scored where something rubbed me the wrong way about the particular scene. Blake felt the same way, so I said why fight it? Don't leave the music in just because it was written. If we left everything in that I that I wrote, people wouldn't have time to talk!"

Working in minor keys and glistening with electronic keyboards flourishes, Mancini's romantic cues here are often spare, gently melancholic evocations of contemporary '80s jazz-pop textures with a European sheen that wouldn't have sounded at all out of place on Truffaut's original '77 French production. The women in the film inspired Hank to some decidedly delicate and subtle writing, as showcased in his Meeting Agnes theme and an unused alternate guitar arrangement that's included here as a bonus track. Even when Mancini is called upon only to sonically embroider a workout class (F Minor Stretch), add a little Texas two-step twang to a few locations (Welcome to Houston, Texas Barbeque) or color the character of Kim Bassinger's Lone Star nymph (Louise, Little Doggy Waltz), his mastery of idiom never seems merely perfunctory.

On Blackie's Tune, the composer indulges his considerably jazz sensibility via a quartet that's credited onscreen as Shelly Manne/Don Mezna/Jimmy Rowles/Andrew Simpkins, while the end titles ballad Little Boys reunites Mancini with Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the songwriters with whom he shared an Oscar nomination for Sometimes a Great Notion. The song is heard here in its original Helen Reddy-sung version. Also included is a trailer version of the main theme in an upbeat arrangement that leans heavily on the project's French origins.

"Writing for television or films isn't great art, but it may imply great craftsmanship," Mancini said in an interview a few months before he began scoring The Man Who Loved Women. "You have to have a common denominator. It's up to the composer to make the common denominator memorable. And for every assignment I've ever gotten, the first thing I was told was, 'And listen, Hank, we need it by yesterday.'"

"I've written musical scores in hotel rooms from London to Rome to New York to Kansas City. It doesn't matter where you are. You have to bring your head with you wherever you go, and then wait for inspiration. And then, after a while, you quit waiting for inspiration and you get down to work."

-- Jerry McCulley