In Like Flint Blu-ray Review
Pure Gold(smith).
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 15, 2013
Note: This review will depart from our usual practice and focus fairly exclusively on only one element of this
particular film, namely the wonderful score by Jerry Goldsmith, which has long been a personal favorite of mine.
Do you believe in astrology? I've joked for years that the fact that Stephen Sondheim (whom I consider to be the
preeminent genius of contemporary musical theater composers) and Andrew Lloyd Webber (whom I consider to be—
well,
not the preeminent genius of contemporary musical theater composers) were born on the same day is
"proof positive" that astrology is a bunch of hokum. Now of course proponents of this so-called "Mystical Art" will no
doubt point out that Sondheim and Webber were born in different years and different places, making their "star charts"
completely disparate, but this sharing of birthdays at least might put the lie to the "cut and paste" horoscopes that
"seers" like Sydney Omarr used to post in daily newspapers, forecasts that seemingly took six or seven
interchangeable phrases and simply distributed them among the zodiacal signs in varying orders from day to day. (This
also brings to mind a favorite family anecdote from when our boys were quite young. We had taken our youngest son
out to buy him clothes for either kindergarten or first grade, and then we all went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.
We got our attendant fortune cookies, and my youngest son opened his to read, "You will soon have new clothes". He
looked up at us and without the slightest bit of irony asked, "Hey, what kind of a crappy fortune is
this?") I am
off on this perhaps blathering tangent for one salient reason: years ago when I was still in college I had my horoscope
done by a professional astrologer, and while a lot of what he told me that day turned out to be, well, tangential
blather, one interesting element from my chart turned out to be absolutely correct. I can't tell those of you who know a
lot about astrology the pertinent "technical" details, but my chart is very unusual in that I have all but one of my planets
crowded together in just a couple of houses. A solitary planet is in the tenth house, the house of career, and it is
evidently retrograde (whatever that means) in some sign that indicates, in the words of this astrologer, "Zowie—are
you going to have an unusual career!" That turned out to manifestly be the case, for aside from doing penance
in a variety of fairly boring office jobs early in my professional life, I've had the unusual situation of making my living
both from music and writing for the bulk of the past couple of decades. And so without further ado, I'd like to talk just a
bit about Jerry Goldsmith and his fantabulous work on the
Flint films, drawing perhaps as much from my musical
background as my film analysis one.
It's perhaps indicative of
another "mystical art", namely synchronicity, that my long ago astrologer had said
"zowie" when assessing my prospects for making my living, for Z.O.W.I.E. is the acronym for the supersecret
international spy agency for whom superspy Derek Flint
(James Coburn) works in both of the
Flint films. (The first
Flint outing,
Our Man Flint, was released by Twilight Time last month).
Jerry Goldsmith and lyricist Leslie Bricusse decided to utilize that
unusual word in their theme song for this
second
Flint feature, a charming tune called "Your Zowie Face" which (not to be overly technical) utilizes a nice ii-V
motive which ascends by minor thirds, giving the song an undeniable forward momentum. Now Leslie Bricusse is a
writer who (in my
estimation at least) comes in for some unfair brickbats a lot of the time (I've felt for years that his scores for the musical
films
Goodbye, Mr. Chips and most especially
Scrooge have been unfairly maligned), but even his staunchest defenders might admit that his
lyric for "Your Zowie Face" strains to incorporate ideas from the film into its ostensible "love story". But Goldsmith's
music? That's another matter entirely.
The mid-sixties were awash in all sorts of musical adventurism, with The Beatles having introduced all sorts of new
vocabulary to pop music writing, and everything from soul to quasi-big band formulations beginning to appear on the
charts courtesy of everyone from Aretha Franklin to Blood, Sweat & Tears. But one of the more interesting things that
had unexpectedly found some second wind was the Bossa Nova phenomenon, which had begun in the late fifties with
the release of
Black Orpheus,
and then gone on to worldwide obsession status with recordings by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto (and Joao's then-wife,
Astrud, who found herself rather suddenly thrust into the pop culture spotlight simply because she had accompanied
her husband to a recording session and ending up singing "The Girl from Ipanema", resulting in a huge global hit). But
the Bossa Nova craze had already shown signs of dissipating by as early as 1964 or so, until pianist Sergio Mendes
regrouped what had been called Brasil '65 into his new formulation Brasil '66. Mendes had the good luck to partner
musically with Herb Alpert, who was then arguably the biggest name in domestic music (outselling even The Beatles),
and under Alpert's aegis, Mendes took off on a multi-year success story that saw his unique blend of Bossa Nova, pop
and rock elements resulting in five gold albums in a row and a number of huge hit singles. Suddenly Brazilian rhythms
were all the rage again, and they became a staple of both films and television for the remainder of the sixties, including
a lot of work by Mendes' most frequent orchestrator, Dave Grusin.
It was in this environment that Goldsmith did something quite remarkable in terms of his score for
In Like Flint.
He took the basic Bossa Nova syncopations and sinuous rhythms, but he set "Your Zowie Face" (which also provides
the source elements for the vast bulk of Goldsmith's underscore) not in the standard Bossa Nova time signature of 4/4,
but 3/4, more typically the time signature for waltzes (and jazz waltzes). Goldsmith in fact tends to walk a rather
delicate tightrope between jazz waltz and Bossa Nova idioms throughout his score for
In Like Flint, and his
contributions are one of the film's most lasting pleasures. (Interestingly, Mendes himself would flirt with 3/4 just a bit
later in his career, with one of his biggest singles, his version of The Beatles' "The Fool On the Hill", which Mendes
rethought in
alternating 3/4 and 4/4 sequences. A year or so later Mendes recorded the charming jazz waltz "Some Time Ago" and
invested it with much the same Bossa Nova charm as informs Goldsmith's
In Like Flint score.)
Now some of you may be thinking, "
Who cares?", but I would respond to those folks that the music of
any film, while perhaps often (intentionally) subliminal, affects the overall experience as much as more obvious
elements like the actors or direction. And in the case of
In Like Flint, Goldsmith's contributions are inestimable,
creating both an exotic undercurrent as well as both a romantic and a more traditional "Bond-ian" influence that
beautifully supports and actually
improves this tongue in cheek second
Flint film. The multilayered use of
percussion throughout the film exerts an undeniably propulsive element that in some ways is reminiscent of
another great film and television writer who tended to utilize Latin (if not exclusively Bossa Nova) elements in
his writing, the great Lalo Schifrin (
Mission: Impossible, Mannix).
In terms of its
non-musical elements,
In Like Flint is at least somewhat of a more mixed bag than the
first
Flint outing, and in fact may strike some as more outrageously sexist than even the
first
Playboy-esque
Flint film, a rather ironic fact considering the fact that the baddies in this film are a
bunch of proto-feminists intent on world domination. This second
Flint film doesn't
quite have the
breeziness of
Our Man Flint, and seems a trifle more forced, especially with regard to its comedic aspects.
There's still fun to be had in
In Like Flint, though few might end up agreeing with erstwhile superspy Austin
Powers that it's their favorite film. But for those who pay attention to supposedly "ignorable" elements like a film's
score,
In Like Flint will always have a
lot to recommend it.
