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MARRIED TO IT =
Three married couples with nothing
in common... and everything to share. That was the poster tag line and it pretty
well sums up this comedy/drama from director Arthur Hiller. Even though it came
out in 1991, Married To It was very much a
1980s film in its attitudes and style. The movie is about three New York married
couples who become friends (their children’s school being the unifying factor
for two of the couples – the third couple’s wife is a teacher there). Each
couple goes through trials and tribulations, which are handled dramatically and
with humor, all leading up to a school pageant, where all plot strands are
neatly tied up, while the students sing Joni Mitchell’s "The Circle Game." Even
though the film wasn’t a hit with critics or audiences, one could not have asked
for a better cast – Mary Stuart Masterson, Ron Silver, Stockard Channing, Beau
Bridges, Robert Sean Leonard and Cybill Shepherd, all of whom turn in stellar
performances as friends who help each other through the good, the bad, and the
ugly. The direction by Arthur Hiller is simple and to the point. And more to the
point, Mr. Hiller also had the good taste to hire Henry Mancini to do the score.
By this point in his career, Mancini was a legend, having scored an amazing
number of great films, films to which his music added immeasurably –
Breakfast
At Tiffany’s, Touch Of Evil,
Charade, Hatari,
Arabesque, Two For The Road,
Experiment In Terror,
Days Of Wine and Roses, the
Pink Panther series, The Great
Race, Soldier In The Rain,
Wait Until Dark, Victor/Victoria, and on and on. His
style of scoring in the 1960s was extremely influential, and few film composers
have ever enjoyed the kind of popular success Mancini had.
His gift formelody was unsurpassed, and many of his themes became charttoppers,
none more so than his brilliant song from Breakfast At Tiffany’s, "Moon River"
(with a lyric by the great Johnny Mercer). For Married To It, which was one of
his last films, Mancini was most likely asked to use Mitchell’s "The Circle
Game" as the main and end title, given the importance Hiller
places on it in the film. But the rest of the score is pure Mancini, but a
Mancini with a good deal more synth work than was usual for him, although he
does employ a full orchestra for several of the cues. Still, the melodies are
glorious and the dramatic cues work beautifully – plus Mancini’s gorgeous
orchestration and arrangement of "The Circle Game" is wonderful.
Hiller would end up not using a lot of score – the cues in the film itself are
quite short, but hearing them in their entirety is a joy and a delight. For this
CD, we used Mancini’s master mixes and we present every note he wrote for the
film. For the CD’s end title, we used an alternate arrangement of "The Circle
Game" since the film simply reuses the main title. We also include several bonus
tracks, which include yet another arrangement of "The Circle Game," an alternate
main title with music by Mancini, and two source cues that play under party
scenes – both are classic Mancini tunes – "(I Love You And) Don’t You Forget It"
and "Mr. Lucky."
Henry Mancini passed away in 1996 and film music lost one of its most unique
voices. But his music lives on and we’re very happy to be able to finally
release this missing Mancini score.
- Bruce Kimmel
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