Saturday, January 12, 2013

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)


Though there have been some great scores from composers late in their careers, one thinks of Dimitri Tiomkin’s Guns of Navarone or Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver, perhaps no composer had such a fruitful later career as Miklós Rózsa, who scored films like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Time After Time and Eye of the Needle at the end of his career. But the score of his that is perhaps most impressive is his last, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid in 1982.

Several years ago the European company Prometheus released, among numerous others, two volumes of film music by Miklós Rózsa, the first being suites from Ben-Hur, King of Kings, and other of his later scores for Biblical epics. But, wonderfully, their second volume is the entire score of the Steve Martin/Carl Reiner masterpiece Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. The film is a comedy in which Martin is filmed in black and white as the detective Rigby Reardon, interacting with starts of the film noir era in clips from the classic films. The film also stars Rachel Ward and is easily one of the highlights of Martin’s career. For me, it’s the pinnacle.

It’s difficult to think of another composer more associated with film noir than Rózsa, writing for such classics as Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, The Killers, Spellbound, Brute Force, The Asphalt Jungle and a dozen others. It was natural then that Martin and Reiner would approach the master to see if he would score their film. Initially he turned them down flat, saying “I don’t do comedy.” Reiner told him it wouldn’t be like that, then asked to show him a scene from the film with Alan Ladd that had already been cut. When Rózsa saw the screening he agreed, and lovers of film music have been grateful ever since.

Rózsa wrote a beautiful main theme for the film that is the equal of any he wrote in the forties and fifties. In terms of the film itself, there were many clips that had existing music (much of it his) on it and he was forced to change keys and compose melodic bridges to integrate the existing scores. Because of this, he said it was one of his most challenging scores to write. He was no doubt inspired, though, by Martin’s antics onscreen as he also wrote a couple of cues that fully support the comedic undertone of the film. Ultimately, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is an incredibly satisfying score, complete with an extended Universal Theme at the beginning, and one of Miklós Rózsa’s best and comes highly recommended.