RE: Mandel bakes with a bit 'O Barry

I am currently shopping around for feedback from any insightful folk on a current item of interest: Maybe I am only the first to have noticed, but on his fine score for THE VERDICT (Intrada Vol.47) Johnny Mandel has borrowed rather directly from John Barry's masterpiece THE LION IN WINTER. Track 11 of the new Intrada release, called The Bottom (first cue of THE VERDICT), becomes, after the first minute and few seconds, a doppelganger of Barry's How Beautiful You Make Me from THE LION IN WINTER (track 10 on the 1995 Sony CD). The arrangement is only moderately altered, and Mandel even maintains Barry's employment of a chorus (but all male where Barry's is mixed). I am a big fan of both artists and I will not disparage Mandel's appropriation, for one thing it makes a lot sense! Barry's grim atmospheric cue fits the intentions of The Bottom perfectly: Newman's character in THE VERDICT, Frank Galvin, has brutally hit, professionally and psychologically, the rock-hard surface that the track title poetically refers to. And I find it mildly amusing that, typically, Barry's somber music is diametrically titled using the adjective "Beautiful" for LION, while it takes Mandel to put these wonderfully foreboding sounds to the unarguably appropriate title/use, especially considering that Barry has been accused in print of being creatively misanthropic and cynical (other's imputation, not mine). - John Bender


bipcress, August 11, 2007; 5:39 PM