![]() ![]() There are plots and subplots here (Portman is gay his wife, played by Giovanna Ralli, has an affair with Caine Forbes' wife Nanette Newman plays a beautiful woman who flirts with Caine, etc.) and the results are not especially compelling or satisfying. It's still amazing to watch, and the highlight of Deadfall, a film that was not well-received and not commercially successful at the time. The handsome Barry made his first appearance before the cameras in the sequence, which begins at about 39 minutes into the film. Forbes filmed the performance from various angles, then intercut the performance with the scenes of Caine and Portman in action. The owner is attending an orchestra concert when they scale the walls, drug the guard dogs and break into the house.īarry, having read the script and discussed the dramatic needs of the sequence with Forbes, wrote a two-movement piece that he called a "Romance for Guitar and Orchestra." One of Europe's top guitarists, Renata Tarrago, was engaged as soloist, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra was booked to perform the piece, with Barry conducting. In the film, shot mostly on the Spanish island of Majorca, Michael Caine plays a master burglar and jewel thief Eric Portman plays an aging safecracker who convinces Caine to join him in an audacious robbery of a nearly impregnable mansion. Séance and Whisperers were wonderfully moody, atmospheric pieces, while King Rat was a major dramatic score and The Wrong Box offered a rare foray into comedy.īut for Deadfall, Forbes provided Barry with his greatest scoring challenge to date: Write a guitar concerto to accompany, and in effect underscore, a 15-minute robbery sequence that was without dialogue and, for the most part, sound effects. One of John Barry's greatest, yet least-known, scores is celebrated at length in the new, just-released Fox DVD of Deadfall (1968).ĭeadfall was the last of six collaborations between the composer and director Bryan Forbes, whose dramatic films of the 1960s provided Barry with an entirely different canvas than the James Bond films that had brought him to prominence and which, at the time, were still his claim to fame.įorbes had first asked Barry for a pair of jazz pieces for The L-Shaped Room (1962) and was so impressed that he retained the composer for full scores for Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), King Rat (1965), The Wrong Box (1966) and The Whisperers (1967).
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