Roger Ryan wrote:
pointless wrote:
...Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex*...*But were afraid to ask (Woody Allen, 1972)...
Special Features:
Isolated Music Track...
This is one "isolated music track" that is going to be mighty underwhelming - the film has very little score and only a small number of songs (IMDb lists three, and a quick check of an on-line version reveals only three or four short sequences accompanied by music). I'm not certain if Allen was attempting to emulate the dryness of public information films, but I always felt the sparseness of the soundtrack hampered the effectiveness of the film.
The film's composer, Mundell Lowe, wrote some material for the film that went unused, including an original Main and End Title that were replaced by the song "Let's Misbehave." My guess is that, as with a lot of their isolated scores, Twilight Time have restored where the original music was so we can see/hear how it played before cues were deleted/shortened/replaced.
Without specifically naming Mundell Lowe, Allen has referenced this collaboration in interviews. Allen felt terrible about not using a lot of the music Lowe wrote, and this was part of the driving force of Allen's - for many years after, at least - never wanting to hire a composer to score a film of his again.
Years ago, the music for
Everything... was released on CD by Kritzerland (coupled with Marvin Hamlisch's
Bananas), now out of print. This release featured the aforementioned unused Main and End Title as well as additional music that wasn't used. It's all good music, some of it very "Golden Age" sounding, and it would've fit the film just fine. Twilight Time's track is likely derived from the same source, and presumably with composer notes and cue sheets Twilight Time have re-tracked these cues as originally intended by the composer. This is what they have done with other scores that were largely or completely rejected, and in the case with
Used Cars, there are two isolated tracks, one from a completely rejected score by Golden Age composer Ernest Gold (
Exodus).
I'd say more than anything else that the way the
Everything... score plays in the film now is the earliest indication that Allen was becoming less and less at ease with having a composer write original scores for his films. The music is indeed very sparsely used, almost as if (and indeed it seems this was the case) Allen tried to drop as much as possible. Marvin Hamlisch did a really great job with Allen's first two films, with none of his cues being deleted or moved around, but I think Hamlisch was on those films largely because of their producers, and Allen was probably still getting his feet wet and wasn't as concerned about the music. By the time we get to
Everything... Allen has more control and his willingness/interest in working with a composer on original music was going out the door. Although
The Purple Rose of Cairo has some original score music, it's all rather light and the music everybody remembers from that film is the song "Cheek to Cheek." It really isn't until
Cassandra's Dream in 2007 that Allen would have a large-scale original orchestral score for a film of his again.
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