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chapter 5 Blake Edwards and the High Times T he rising star of Mancini was also bringing Blake Edwards up in the world. Edwards’s success in television more or less assured he could return to the movies with a lot more clout than he had known just a few years before at Universal. Of course, he had begun as an actor (see him in Strangler of the Swamp [1946]) and after that as a successful radio writer; then film writing, then TV. He first directed film in 1955, Bring Your Smile Along, while the aforementioned Mister Cory was his first professional contact with Henry Mancini. Personally, they were a study in contrasts; on the one side, Mancini was curious and disciplined at work, deferential and ingenuous in person, and on the other, Edwards was conceptual and uncompromising in his profession, friendly and explosive and inscrutable in private. That natural clash is almost completely masked in the work they eventually did together, but we will see later some problems it raised in regard to Mancini’s output. Mostly, though, the presence of Blake Edwards in Mancini’s career had a wildly positive and prosperous effect. Now, at Twentieth Century Fox Bing Crosby’s production company was planning a new comedy set on a college campus starring the old crooner himself as self-made millionaire Harvey Howard, CEO of a burger chain, who, now that his kids are grown, decides to go back to school and earn his degree. In High Time (1960) Crosby as Harvey chooses to live on campus, pledge to a fraternity, and revel in the undergraduate culture. So the ongoing i-xii_1-286_Caps.indd 62 2/10/12 2:46 PM Blake Edwards and the High Times 63 joke of the film is how this fifty-one-year-old tycoon (Crosby was fifty-four at the time) fits in with the college kids. Mancini responded with easygoing big band swing and, as a recurring theme, “The High Time March,” the most joyous high-stepper he ever wrote. Capitalizing on the prestige of just having directed King Crosby, Edwards was now quickly able to talk his way into landing a major A-level theatrical feature for his next project, this one to star Audrey Hepburn. It would be based on an old Truman Capote story about a country girl who comes to the big, bad city of New York to reinvent herself as a swinger, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Hepburn was well past her best actress Oscar for Roman Holiday (1953) but had proven durable and charismatic in several films since, including Funny Face and The Nun’s Story. Edwards’s personal frankness and likability had won Hepburn’s confidence, so the deal was going ahead, to be produced by Marty Jurow and Richard Shepherd from a screenplay by George Axelrod. There was never any question about who would do the music score, but with such a multilayered story line there would have to be some detailed discussions between director and composer this time, not just the tacit approval that had covered High Time’s jazz-pop. Their talk began with how best to evoke the film’s Manhattan setting in music. Where so many past soundtracks had tried to quickly embody New York in music, composers were prone to invoke Gershwin clichés, usually those urbane 1920s chords out of his “Rhapsody in Blue,” or those busy metropolitan syncopations in his “An American in Paris.” Alfred Newman paraphrased Gershwin in Street Scene (1931), Steiner did it in Four Daughters (1938), and almost everyone in movies and television has succumbed at least once since. Mancini saw the rousing, striving city of the 1960s—all glass and steel and plastic; all vertical space, as though the whole city were one big building with the streets as corridors, the alleys as breezeways, the populace as one big, youthful, jostling workforce—and made his theme for New York a piece of cool jazz-pop. Vibes, warm strings, a cocktail sax, and a wordless chorus teach us Mancini’s city theme, which has both the sophisticated awareness of the party culture and a bit of yearning as unresolved phrases remain suspended at the end of each line (on a B♭min7 chord, for instance). At first the chorus articulates the theme in a scat style, singing “do-doot-do-doo” like the cheapest kind of television commercial singers. It was a jazzy and sophisticated approach for that middle-class cultural moment...

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