= NIGHTWING =

     "Anybody who writes music has a certain inner core," composer Henry Mancini once explained. "Harmonically, melodically or instrumentally, they kind of give you a style. Though a lot of pictures I've done, you wouldn't know it was my writing because it doesn't have the trademarks."

     Good case in point is 1979's Nightwing, the legendary composer's fourth collaboration with veteran Canadian director Arthur Hiller. Fueled by a detached, contemporary jazz cool and modernist harmonic instincts that occasionally verge on the atonal, it would be easy to confuse Mancini's masterfully understated work here for some contemporary Euro-thriller soundtrack by Morricone. Such a notion may have even pleased the legendary musician his contemporaries usually referred to as "Hank."

     Hiller's Nightwing offered Mancini not only an opportunity to veer a little farther from his romantic comedy roots than most projects offered him at the time, but returned him successfully - if without much contemporary acclaim - to the genre where he'd cut his scoring teeth at Universal 25 years before. ...

... Indeed, Mancini's fine work on the film received little fanfare at the time - and even less public documentation. While the studio's own production notes for Nightwing provide numerous details about the film's breathtaking New Mexico and Nevada locales and a virtual mini-encyclopedia on the background and behavior of the vampire bats that drive the film's plot, Henry Mancini's rich musical contributions to the project go virtually unmentioned.

     Mancini's Nightwing score was a stark contrast to the sleek, jazz-inflected instrumental pop that had long since associated with him in the public mind - a patent, wildly successful sound that could also be frustrating caricature.

     "I have a lot of (musical) baggage," the composer once mulled, "a trademark - romance and light comedy - that people associate with me. And it's brought me everything I have. But then it's also worked against me with (filmmakers) who figure that's what I am, and don't want to entrust me with a dramatic picture, not knowing what I can really do."

     But Hiller and Ransohoff clearly didn't have that problem. Nightwing's flute-driven main theme becomes not only a skillful simulacrum of the film's Native American milieu, but also evokes the composer's musical roots - it was one of the first instruments the Cleveland-born Mancini gravitated to growing up in the Pennsylvania steel town of West Aliquippa.

     "I didn't know any better," said the composer of his relatively unusual choice of instrument in such a blue-collar town. "I knew that I was a little different, because I played the piccolo and the flute in the band, started playing the piano and started playing all these local (ethnic) weddings. I don't want to forget my roots."

     From a genre standpoint, Nightwing also had its links to the raft of horror and sci-fi pictures Mancini worked on during his journeyman years at Universal, toiling alongside Hans Salter and others. "I was happy to be doing it," Mancini said of those 9-to-5 studio days. "It was a steady income for six years. We had Francis (The Talking Mule), Bonzo, Ma & Pa Kettle and all the Creature pictures." Such was the Universal period's enduring influence on him that decades later Mancini would record a popular orchestral suite that included his work on It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

     "I still fall back on all those basics," Mancini said of his work during the era. "My work habits were formed in those days."

     Yet despite his rich film heritage and familiar pop music successes, one of Mancini's most skillful gambits on Nightwing was knowing when not to impose musically. "You can compose in what style you like," Mancini once advised, "but the biggest lesson a composer can learn is when to stop - because silence is also a tool of the score writer."

     Mancini's spare, moody cues for Nightwing are a good example of that musical zen, serving almost exclusively to gently heighten mood and tension - and of course, vamp the terror. Yet there are moments when he instinctively knows that nothing could be more chilling than the sound of wind, sweeping across the night desert landscape.

     "I'm convinced that not every scene has to be commented on musically," he explained during the Nightwing era. "Every time someone isn't speaking on screen doesn't mean the composer should fit in a bit of music. But then I'm a nut about detail - about the performance and the writing and the music and how it all comes together in a movie."

- Jerry McCulley