In the context of Bacharach\u2019s career to that point, it\u2019s easy to understand the appeal of a film like Forever My Love<\/em>. He\u2019d spent several years as Marlene Dietrich\u2019s music director, and he\u2019d come to appreciate the string players in European countries like Austria and Bavaria. The violin-heavy score for Forever My Love <\/em>gave him the opportunity to arrange for string quartets and experiment with Regency-era composition. The score just ends up cuing the audience to big emotional moments, and director Ernst Marischka leans on it so much that after a while it fails to register. Only the characteristically regal opening title song establishes itself from the spun sugar that surrounds it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Forever My Love <\/em>was a modest success on its release, and Bacharach would go on to score and write title themes for films like What\u2019s New Pussycat<\/em>, Casino Royale<\/em>, and Alfie<\/em>, which further established his sweet spot as witty, urbane, and subtly seductive. His work on the groundbreaking 1969 buddy comedy Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid <\/em>allowed him to build on his skills as a songwriter and composer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In his LA Times <\/em>obituary, director George Roy Hill is quoted as saying \u201cthe picture was designed for a contemporary feel,\u201d which comes through in the sly, loose-limbed performances of Robert Redford and Paul Newman, the naturalistic visual style of the film\u2014which relied on long takes and wide shots to establish Butch and Sundance\u2019s rapport\u2014and, yes, the use of music. Unlike the aural wallpaper in Forever My Love<\/em>, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid <\/em>goes for long stretches with no music to tell viewers how to react, and Bacharach\u2019s cues ground the film in time and place while creating implicit parallels between its era and the music of the late 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hill uses anachronistic techniques such as undercranking the camera and shooting in overexposed black and white that resemble tintypes and early films like The Great Train<\/em> <\/em>Robbery <\/em>to anchor his story and characters in the Old West, and Bacharach\u2019s use of early jazz techniques and tack piano-centric arrangements match the throwback mood of these scenes. Later montages, like a scene where Butch and Sundance attempt to rob banks during an extended sojourn in Bolivia, are cut to an instrumental bed with a wordless scat vocal that wouldn\u2019t have sounded out of place on an easy listening radio station. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film\u2019s other concession to modernity came in a famous early scene, when Butch (Paul Newman) goes on a bicycle ride with Sundance\u2019s girl, Etta (Katharine Ross). As the pair ride through a patchy garden behind the saloon where they\u2019re staying, BJ Thomas\u2019s rendition of \u201cRaindrops Keep Falling on My Head\u201d perambulates on the soundtrack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Before Bacharach got involved with the film, Hill and his editing crew had cut the scene to Simon & Garfunkel\u2019s \u201cFifty-Ninth Street Bridge Song (Feelin\u2019 Groovy)\u201d. When Bacharach viewed the scene, the phrase \u201craindrops keep falling on my head\u201d came to mind, followed by old-timey instrumentation: “I knew this song was going to start with a ukulele, and that there would be a tack piano on it to get a honky-tonk kind of feeling,” he wrote in his autobiography, Anyone Who Had a Heart<\/em>. “What I would do back then was come up with words that had no meaning but just sounded good to me on the notes I was writing.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid <\/em>received a mixed critical reception on its 1969 release, and many critics complained that the \u201cRaindrops\u201d scene slowed down the film and had nothing to do with the plot. Seen from a contemporary perspective, the scene serves the film better than its detractors initially claimed. Hal David\u2019s dryly funny lyrics paralleled the futile crush Butch had on Etta, and the combination of a contemporary-sounding pop song and a vintage arrangement balances the film\u2019s late 19th century aesthetic and Paul Newman\u2019s aspirational cool and relatable heartache. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While Bacharach and David had a reliable brand throughout the 1960s, the popularity of Butch<\/em> <\/em>and Sundance <\/em>boosted their profile and allowed them to explore some more ambitious ground. Their next project, a musical remake of the 1937 film Lost Horizon<\/em>, ended their partnership and almost ended Bacharach\u2019s composing career. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It opens with four travelers\u2014a photojournalist (Sally Kellerman), a comedian (Bobby Van), a UN peace negotiator (Peter Finch), and his brother (Michael York)\u2014attempting to leave a war-torn South Asian country. Their DC3 crashes in the Himalayas, where they are rescued by a spiritual leader (Charles Boyer) and brought back to Shangri-La. While Shangri-La is a utopian society, each of the travelers feels differently about it, but their plans to escape are complicated when one of the men falls in love with one of the residents of the village. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film is a notorious flop from the end of the studio era that looks worse from a contemporary perspective. The depiction of South Asian people and use of yellowface and prosthetics are cringe-inducingly offensive to 21st century audiences, the screenplay is clunky and confusing, and the leaden pacing kills its few assets. While it was billed as a musical, Columbia cut many of the songs after an unsuccessful roadshow run.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The way director Charles Jarrott presents musical numbers, from the orientalist instrumentation to the clunky staging, makes the songs sound worse than they were. While Bacharach\u2019s melodies sounded crisp and catchy on his solo album Living Together<\/em>, David\u2019s kludgy lyrics\u2014culled from the contradictory snatches of Eastern philosophy found in Larry Kramer\u2019s screenplay\u2014and the frequent rewrites and re-edits weighted down these versions of the songs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The failure of Lost Horizon <\/em>strained Bacharach and David\u2019s working relationship; they split after its release and Bacharach maintained a lower public profile in the second half of the 1970s. He returned to film composing in the next decade, scoring a pair of low-budget features: the melancholy slapstick Arthur <\/em>and the buddy comedy Night Shift<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n High-strung morgue attendant Chuck (Henry Winkler) is moved to overnights at his job and has to work with rambunctious new hire Bill (Michael Keaton). When Chuck finds out that his neighbor, the streetwalker Belinda (Shelley Long), has lost her pimp, Bill steps in with a plan to take over his business and run it out of the morgue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bacharach\u2019s score serves as a kind of narrative ligament, connecting scenes between Chuck\u2019s attempt at a respectable life with his fiancee and his seedier experiences at the morgue. The composer dabbles with trendy instrumentation, like synthesizers and full-on, Tim Capello-style 1980s sax, which grounds Night Shift <\/em>in the sleazy excesses of late 20th century Times Square. The soundtrack also marked one of the first times Bacharach worked with a rock band, as Quarterflash performed the title theme during their brief reign on MTV. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Night Shift <\/em>did reasonably well at the box office, but its tacky subject matter and cheesy production values weren\u2019t what anyone would call Oscar bait. A few years after the film\u2019s release, however, Dionne Warwick re-recorded the end credits song, \u201cThat\u2019s What Friends Are For\u201d with Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder as a benefit for AIDS research. The recording made it to the top of the Billboard <\/em>Hot 100 and won two Grammys for Song of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bacharach continued scoring mid-budget ensemble pieces and romantic comedies well into the 1990s, and \u201cGod Give Me Strength,\u201d which he wrote with Elvis Costello for Grace of My Heart<\/em>, led to a series of collaborations with the singer\/songwriter. Sixteen years after scoring the<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jacqueline Susann biopic Isn\u2019t She Great<\/em>, Bacharach recorded his final film score for the intimate family drama A Boy Called Po<\/em>. The film depicts the challenging, but ultimately loving, relationship between widowed father David (Christopher Gorham) and his 11-year-old son, Po (Julian Feder), who has autism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The subject matter is a sharp contrast with the sophisticated comedies and character studies where Bacharach honed his skills as a film composer. The subject matter of A Boy Called Po<\/em> <\/em>was personal for him; his daughter Nikki struggled with Asperger\u2019s for much of her life. \u201cIt touched me very much,\u201d he told Variety <\/em>in 2017. \u201cSometimes you do things that make you feel. It\u2019s not about money or rewards.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n A<\/em> Boy Called Po <\/em>is so well-intentioned that finding fault with it feels like kicking a puppy. The relationship between David and Po holds the film together, and Gorham and Feder\u2019s performances make some of the less plausible plot contrivances seem real. Unfortunately, Colin Goldman and Steve C. Roberts\u2019 screenplay hinges on positive, but unfortunate, stereotypes of people with autism (like Po\u2019s preternatural skills at math and reading the stocks), and some aspects of the happy ending don\u2019t quite land. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bacharach\u2019s score feels a bit like a retrospective that touches on some of his best-loved work. The film\u2019s opening titles play over a stripped-down, minor-key cover of his song \u201cClose to You,\u201d and at some points the melodic motifs of the score sound like off-the-cuff improvisations on one of his most popular songs. His use of piano underscores David\u2019s introspective moments as he tries to understand Po, while Po\u2019s escapes into fantasy are accompanied by harp and string quartets that call to mind some of his finest 1960s singles. Burt Bacharach will be remembered as a first-rate songwriter, one who brought sophistication to the pop charts and who crafted some of the finest singles for first-rate vocalists. He was also able to tell a story through just a melody and bridge the time between past and present through the juxtaposition of musical instruments. His work on film revealed another facet of his talent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The recently departed composer’s ability to set a mood through memorable melodies and canny vocal arrangements added to the timelessness and relatability of beloved feature films, while elevating some of the tackier basic-cable fare of the 1980s and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":19806,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-19804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Night-Shift-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
On paper, one could draw parallels between Night Shift <\/em>and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid<\/em>. Both films focused on a pair of opposites who find themselves on the wrong side of the law, and who develop a rapport with sympathetically depicted sex workers. Both films also feature an award-winning love theme from Bacharach. Where Butch and Sundance <\/em>was thoughtfully made and had a sense of subtlety about it, Night Shift <\/em>had a broader, coarser style. This is the kind of film that\u2019s best watched surreptitiously over a freeview weekend in 1985 while your mom is at the grocery store.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n