You might think everyone would be happy now that the latest DVD release of Touch of Evil contains both the originally released theatrical cut and the version restored to the dictates of the famous Orson Welles memo a decade ago. But no! Apparently there are some aspect ratio issues to contend with. At his eponymous blog, Dave Kehr writes, “the sentiment of the group seems to be that we all want to vent about the Touch of Evil 50th anniversary edition, with its highly controversial 1.85 aspect ratio. There’s clearly no cut and dried answer here, in the absence of any documentary evidence, but my eye tells me that it’s too tight. The shot above shows some obvious trimming at the upper frame line, but for the most part the 1.85 version that Universal has released seems to give preference to head room while cutting out the less conspicuous compositional elements at the bottom of the frame. It all feels a bit tenuous and unstable to me, like a chord that hasn’t quite been allowed to resolve itself.”

At Parallax View, Sean Axmaker isn’t so sure about that.

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We've discussed a few great pairings between director and composer in this space before:  the energetic, dynamic films of Sergio Leone, accompanied by the postmodernist, propulsive music of Ennio Morricone; the accomplished, thrilling work of Alfred Hitchcock, paired with the inventive, restless music of Bernard Herrmann; and others.  Today we're going to look at one of the great film partnerships at its very inception:  the mystefying, surreal films of David Lynch and the eerily gorgeous music of Angelo Badalamenti that frequently accompanies them.  Blue Velvet was the first of a creative partnership that would last for two decades (and arguably reach its zenith in the Twin Peaks soundtrack) but this is where it all began in 1986.

Like a lot of the best collaborations, the one between David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti (who, despite the florid name, hails from the Mediterranean clime of Brooklyn) almost didn't happen.  Mixing as it did a great deal of original score, all written by Badalamenti, and rights-managed classic rock and pop songs, the soundtrack to Blue Velvet was almost scuttled early on by clearance issues.  In particular, the title track, as sung by Bobby Vinton, proved costlier to license than the studio would allow, so Badalamenti recorded his own sound-alike version -- before getting news that Vinton himself was willing to re-record it (albeit two registers lower, thanks to age's effect on his pipes).  That didn't quite work out either, and they were faced with the legal and aesthetic problems of going with the copycat, until, finally, the studio decided to finally pony up for the original.  Roy Orbison likewise held out permissions for "In Dreams" until the last moment, and Lynch, who'd been trying for months to secure the rights to This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren", eventually had to give up when the band wouldn't budge on giving him the licence.  (Ironically, Balalamenti's replacement song turned out to be one of the most moving and effective pieces in the score.)

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Sergio Leone had to be talked into making Once Upon a Time in the West.  He'd moved on; he wanted to make movies in America, and he'd already begun pre-production on a gangster epic he hoped would do to the golden age of crime pictures what he'd been doing to the golden age of westerns for a decade.  But a lot of producers had made a lot of money off of his so-called 'spaghetti westerns', and they wanted to make more.  So they dangled such a big paycheck in front of him that, in 1968, he agreed to go back to the well one more time.  He was going to finally fulfill his threat to totally dismantle the western and rebuild it from the ground up; and he wasn't going to do it without Ennio Morricone.

Though he scored a number of Leone's best films and came to be associated with the 'sound of spaghetti', Morricone is largely still known to American audiences as the author of the memorable main theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  And while that's a pretty strange piece of music in terms of traditional film scores, it doesn't even begin to give you an idea of what a truly wierd musician Morricone really is.  Capable at any given moment of unleashing nearly cacaphonous serial music, floods of distorted, ultra-loud guitars, haunting minimalist refrains, bizarre and atonal free-jazz sounds, shrieking electronic tones, or simple and elegant variations on traditional folk music.  Such wide and varied sounds are in ample evidence in the composer's vast catalogue; many of his best (and strangest) pieces of music were composed as soundtrack music for long-forgotten Italian movies, but put all together in one pot, a service performed by American avant-garde aficionado and punk vocalist Mike Patton on his indispensable Crime and Dissonance series, they represent one of the most restless imaginations of any contemporary musician.  With Ennio Morricone, you knew you'd be getting something of quality, but you might not have any idea whatsoever what it was going to be.  Such was the case with Once Upon a Time in the West.

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Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)



Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

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With all the comic book movies coming out in the next few months you'd think it would be too early to start looking ahead to 2009's offerings. However, you would be wrong.

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THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS (1966)



The great Ennio Morricone has contributed to some of the greatest opening credit sequences of all time, but the opening to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows holds a special place in the hearts of anyone who has seen and heard it. Here, in tune with Pasolini’s conception of the film as “a comic opera,” the credits are actually sung, in a boisterous vocal performance (courtesy of the great Domenico Modugno) that ranges from cackling laughter to pronounced wail to gentle whisper. Reminiscent of both the rhythmic Spaghetti Western scores Morricone was becoming famous for and the more wacked-out electronic experimentation he was beginning to dabble in, it also displays a weirdo playfulness that is pure Pasolini. Indeed, try to imagine what’s going through the head of this fellow, as he performs this strangest of compositions in concert with Morricone, decades later.

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