Phase 2: Critical Discourse Analysis

simi-lar: the composer would be contractually barred from using the “James Bond Theme” and would need to fi nd a fresh way to illustrate the action and illumi-nate the characters.

Plotwise, it was close to Thunderball: an older, more seasoned Bond (Con-nery) is called back into service when SPECTRE, still headed by Blofeld (Max von Sydow), masterminds the theft of American nuclear warheads and holds NATO for ransom. Mad corporate magnate Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer)

15

“. . . though I know there’s danger there, I don’t care . . .”

Never Say Never Again

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165 supervises the operation; Bond recruits Largo’s lover Domino (Kim Basinger)

for help and tangles with his evil associate Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera) in both the Bahamas and the south of France.

No one seems to have given any thought to music during production of the fi lm, despite the inclusion of an elaborate tango performed by Connery and Basinger in a Monte Carlo casino. Producer Schwartzman, director Irvin Kersh-ner and star-producer ConKersh-nery were all involved in the choice of composer during post-production in the late spring of 1983.

James Horner, then an up-and-coming young American composer who had already scored the hit fi lms 48 Hrs. and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, was high on both Schwartzman and Kershner’s lists. He was in London for much of the year, working on such fi lms as Krull, Brainstorm, The Dresser and Un-common Valor. According to Kershner, a schedule confl ict precluded him from doing the Bond fi lm. Schwartzman later claimed that Connery rejected Horner, although (if true) why is not clear.

One of cinema’s leading composers happened to be in London in June 1983. Frenchman Michel Legrand was completing work on Yentl, one of his most complex projects (for which he would win his third Academy Award) in that it involved nine original songs as well as the dramatic underscore, for the notoriously demanding producer-director-star Barbra Streisand. He had al-ready won Oscars for writing “The Windmills of Your Mind” for The Thomas Crown Affair and for the score of Summer of ’42, and he was responsible for some of the most enduring songs of the 1960s and 1970s, among them “I Will Wait for You,” “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” and “Pieces of Dreams.” He had also scored Play Dirty, the Michael Caine World War II movie, for ex-Bond producer Harry Saltzman in 1968. But he was better known for his romantic fi lms; Ice Station Zebra was one of his few big-action-movie credits.

Kershner and Streisand were friends; he had directed her a decade earlier in Up the Sandbox. And since both their fi lms happened to be in postproduc-tion, “We used to meet and have dinner all the time,” Kershner recalled. She suggested Legrand for the job.

Legrand, however, was burned out after a particularly intense year-long assignment. “I had promised myself that I would take a vacation at the com-pletion of Yentl,” Legrand said. “I had arrived at the end of a long adventure.

I was completely exhausted.” He was mixing Yentl at Olympic Studios, his favorite recording facility, when Connery himself telephoned, asked for his services and invited him to a screening of the fi lm the next day.

“Sean’s warmth and his enthusiasm persuaded me,” Legrand said. “And I told myself, to attach a Bond to my fi lmography, it’s not something to pass up!”

Connery attended the screening with Kershner and Schwartzman but was oth-erwise absent during the weeks to follow. Something else occurred to Legrand at the time: “We were connected by the adventure of Robin and Marian, where [director Richard] Lester threw out my score.” (Legrand’s daring, classically

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styled music for the 1976 fi lm, which starred Connery and Audrey Hepburn, was ultimately replaced by a John Barry score.)

“Sean knew it and, for me in a certain manner, it was a way of taking re-venge on Lester’s fi lm. Robin and Marian and Never Say Never Again fi nally deal with the same subject: Can myths age?” It was a fascinating way to look at the new 007 fi lm, which focused on a mature, possibly over-the-hill Bond, just as Robin and Marian dealt with the older Robin Hood and Maid Marian, who fi nd each other again after many years.

Legrand wrote the score in Paris during June and July 1983. Well aware of the Barry imprint on the Connery years, Legrand had no intention of revisiting that. “It would have been artifi cial for me to re-create the Bond sound of the

’60s,” he said. “The idea of Never Say Never Again was to bring a distance, an irony, a second layer of connection to the offi cial series, in relation to Con-nery’s age. Immediately there was a distinction.”

Connery’s call to Legrand wasn’t the only one the actor would make about the music. He also called lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman, who, like Legrand, were in London fi nishing their work on Yentl (which would earn them Oscars

(left to right) Alan Bergman, Michel Legrand and Marilyn Bergman in the early 1980s (photo by Spike Nannarello;

courtesy of the Bergmans)

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN

167 too). “We had known him for years,” Alan Bergman recalled. They had met in

Connery’s pre-007 days, while working on singer Jo Stafford’s television series in London in 1961. Connery asked them to pen the words to the title song, and as longtime collaborators with Legrand they immediately agreed.

“They had a title, the title of the movie,” Alan Bergman said. “Usually we don’t use [the title of the fi lm], but they wanted a title song. That was a given.”

The Bergmans added lyrics to Legrand’s sensual, jazzy melody, written about Bond from a woman’s point of view: “You walk in a room / a woman can feel the heat / One look is a guarantee / nights could be long and sweet. . . .”

Legrand thought of his main theme, especially “the slow version, for piano/

guitar or piano/vibraphone, [as] a little disillusioned, like a portrait of an older Bond.”

The composer called the fi lm a series of “luxurious and shimmering ad-ventures, where everything was pulled toward the improbable and the spec-tacular.” He was especially fond of the tango, which appeared in Lorenzo Semple, Jr.’s, original script (“a tango is being played by a small orchestra . . . music intensifi es . . .”). Legrand pointed out that this was the fi rst time a tango had been heard in a Bond fi lm. Connery and Basinger danced to a temporary playback track on the set, Legrand said, “after which I composed ‘Tango to Death’ to correspond to the movements of the choreography, and to the or-chestra on the screen. I would have oror-chestrated my tango for a small [en-semble], with solo bandoneón, but I was a prisoner of the image.”

He also recalled writing the motorcycle chase scene, which included

“a theme for big band, with a very fast tempo, curt and agitated, with horn punches that sound like razor blades.” He also referred to the “suspense se-quences for symphonic orchestra, in the neo-Stravinskian style, which corre-spond to SPECTRE’s universe, with the atomic conspiracy.”

Legrand recorded at Olympic Studios during the fi rst week of August 1983. He usually composed and orchestrated all his own music, but in this case, music contractor Nat Peck recalled, he didn’t orchestrate everything (occasional collaborator Armand Migiani did some cues). “Maybe he was ex-hausted after the tremendous effort of the Streisand fi lm,” Peck said. “He was just too tired to take on anything with the enthusiasm he usually could gener-ate for any project he was working on. Unfortungener-ately, it seeped through to the higher-ups and they weren’t too thrilled with Michel’s music.”

Legrand conducted the London Symphony Orchestra one day, then free-lance orchestras ranging from 88 to 93 players over three more days. “Michel is incredibly quick and English musicians are the fastest sight-readers in the world,” engineer Keith Grant said, referring to musicians who can glance at a piece of music they’ve never seen before and play it from start to fi nish ex-tremely well.

Actress Talia Shire, who was married to Schwartzman and attended some of the sessions, said: “When you have someone of the caliber of Michel Le-grand, he brings an elegant score with something that sounds new, and very appropriate, for our Sean Connery. I thought he did a great job.”

Kim Basinger and Sean Connery tango in Never Say Never Again

S C O R E H I G H L I G H T S

Michel Legrand’s score for Never Say Never Again was criticized by the fi lmmakers and Bond fans alike; yet as a fundamentally jazz-based score, it has many fun moments and offers a very different slant on music for 007 even though it was far from what Connery fans were expecting.

Lani Hall’s performance of the title song plays incongruously under the opening action sequence, as Bond fi ghts his way through a Latin American jungle to rescue a kidnapped girl (which we soon learn was a training exercise). The opening phrase of the title theme recurs throughout the fi lm, usually in short jazzy cues for Bond (the fi lm’s offi cial cue sheet refers to these as “Bond Theme”).

Legrand introduces SPECTRE assassin Fatima Blush with a stealthy-sounding string passage (7½

short

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN

169 In the weeks after recording was fi nished, both Schwartzman and

Kersh-ner had concerns about what they had heard. “It wasn’t the true James Bond score that I had envisioned,” Kershner later said. “It just didn’t work for me, and of course we couldn’t redo the music, so I moved a lot of the music around.

Something that was in one scene I moved to another scene.” Schwartzman went so far as to cable Legrand in Paris on August 12, stating “there are seri-ous problems with the score” and demanding that he return to London “for a solid period of at least two weeks to rewrite and/or remake the music score.”

Legrand returned for one more day of recording, on August 20. In the meantime, questions arose about who would sing the title song. Schwartzman told Legrand in his August 12 cable: “I think we have Bonnie Tyler for the title song.” But that didn’t last long, because Tyler, whose “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was a number 1 hit that spring in the U.K., turned it down. “I was really, wow, a James Bond theme,” she said in 2006. “I was so excited to be a part of this. And then I listened to it and I was really defl ated. There wasn’t anything you could do with that song. I really didn’t like it.”

Marilyn and Alan Bergman suggested Lani Hall for the song. Hall had once been part of Brasil ’66 (singing “The Look of Love” at the Oscars) but embarked on a solo career in the 1970s; she was married to trumpeter Herb Alpert, another Bond veteran, having turned the Casino Royale theme into a 1967 hit. “She’s a really great singer,” Alan Bergman said, “and it was an-other way of making it different than what had preceded.” Marilyn Bergman liked “the contrast between Lani and Shirley Bassey, who had been associ-ated with these Bond movies.”

Alpert produced the song with Hall’s old Brasil ’66 partner Sergio Mendes.

“That was the fi rst time that we had actually worked together since I had left the group in 1971,” Hall said. “It was a lot of fun to be in the studio with Herb

minutes into the fi lm), although considerably trun-cated (but it appears in its entirety as “Fatima Blush”

on the LP); then it resurfaces (13 minutes) as Blush beats Jack Petachi in a room near Bond’s, and it is heard again (16 minutes) when she spots Bond spy-ing on them.

Bond’s long fi ght with a health-club thug goes entirely unscored, while Petachi’s replacement of dummy warheads with nuclear devices (24 minutes) receives a grim, chugging-strings and angry-brass treatment (the oddly titled “Plunder a Cruise Missile”

on the LP). The fi rst of several fun source pieces is a big-band chart on Blush’s car radio as she pre-pares to murder Petachi (27 minutes, “Death of Jack Petachi” on the LP). A portion of Legrand’s dramatic

“Cruise Missile” music is heard again (30 minutes) as SPECTRE retrieves the nuclear missiles.

Another source cue, a jazz-rock piece, accom-panies Largo watching Domino go through her dance routine (37 minutes, “Jealousy,” although the LP has a different take); Bond’s arrival in Nassau is greeted with authentic-sounding steel-band music (at 43 minutes, “Bahama Island” on the LP). The lon-gest cue in the score, nearly fi ve minutes, begins with a sexy saxophone for Bond’s tryst with Blush (48 minutes) and then turns ominous with a dra-matic drumbeat and suspenseful strings as she takes him scuba diving, leaving him to be devoured by electronically guided sharks. Legrand adds word-less voices for unusual colors, although the orches-tra dominates in the fi lm mix (“Fight to the Death with Tigersharks” on the LP).

Bond’s arrival in Nice (56 minutes) is accompa-nied by a lovely French-fl avored tune (the

instrumen-short

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Lani Hall as she appeared in the video for “Never Say Never Again” (courtesy of The Film Music Society)

tal midsection of “Une Chanson d’Amour” on the LP). Another jazzy source cue is the music heard on Largo’s boat while Bond watches Domino dance (59 minutes, “Bond and Domino” on the CD). “Une Chanson d’Amour” recurs a minute later when Domino arrives on land and then, in a vocal version (1 hour) while Bond, posing as a masseur, works on Domino at the spa.

Largo’s sadistic video game is also unscored, although his initial victory and Bond’s determination to play one more game is acknowledged with a brass allusion to the “Never” theme (1 hour, 14 min-utes, “Video Duel/Victory” on the CD). What fol-lows is one of the fi lm’s musical highlights, as Bond and Domino tango on the casino dance fl oor (1 hour, 17 minutes, “Tango to Death” on the LP) and Blush prances down the long staircase. Bond discovers

Nicole’s body, spots Blush leaving the villa and gives chase to a fast-tempo, brassy, bongo-driven jazz piece (1 hour, 22 minutes; “Chaser” on the LP). With the exception of a brief reprise at the end, the chase itself is not scored.

Bond and Domino talk over more of her funky dance music (1 hour, 35 minutes); Largo says good-bye to the chained Domino by playing a cassette recording of the tango (1 hour, 43 minutes). Then Bond rescues Domino on horseback (1 hour, 47 minutes) to a dancelike piece that once again fea-tures the brass section (strangely, Kershner de-clined to use Legrand’s original music for this sec-tion, called “Escape from Palmyra” on the LP, which is fi lled with appropriate ethnic percussion touches for the North African setting and would have proven more effective).

(SCORE HIGHLIGHTS, CONT.)

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Off Eritrea, Bond determines where the missing nuclear warhead is hidden and his military col-leagues launch an underwater expedition from their submarine (1 hour, 52 minutes, “Tears of Allah” on the LP); Legrand’s music is fi lled with dramatic por-tent. He applies stealthy music for Bond and Leiter in the underground cave (1 hour, 59 minutes, drawn from “A Last Blow to Largo” on the LP but trun-cated). The gun battle goes unscored, but Bond’s

climactic underwater fi ght with Largo (2 hours, 5 min-utes, “Fight to the Death” on the CD) merits a big, often dissonant, orchestral treatment.

Herb Alpert’s mellow trumpet is featured play-ing the title tune for a relaxplay-ing Domino and Bond (2 hours, 8 minutes); Lani Hall’s vocal returns for the end titles, and Alpert’s trumpet solo concludes the last minute and 20 seconds of the fi lm.

and Sergio again. I remember Marilyn and Alan being there as well. It’s a complicated song, melodically. It’s not the kind of song that you could really walk away humming.”

Legrand was not present at the August 19 and 23 sessions at A&M Rec-ords in Los Angeles. Veteran arranger-keyboardist Robbie Buchanan ar-ranged the song, and for the end-title version Alpert added his distinctive solo trumpet. “Nobody asked me to play,” Alpert said. “I kinda got inspired by that ending, and I wanted to see if I could have some fun fooling around with the trumpet. It was their choice to use it or not [in the fi lm].” They did.

Hall also shot a video in which, attired in a classy black tuxedo, she sings in front of a giant blowup of Sean Connery as he appears in the fi lm (intercut, of course, with scenes from the fi lm). Hall and the Bergmans received equal treatment with the composer in newspaper ads for the fi lm.

Legrand wrote a second song for the fi lm, “Une Chanson d’Amour,” with famed French lyricist Jean Drejac, the co-writer of “Sous le ciel de Paris (Under the Paris Sky),” which Edith Piaf made famous nearly 30 years earlier.

Bulgarian singer Sophie Della auditioned in Paris with a Piaf song (“Non, je ne regrette rien”) and won the job on condition that she sing the French lyric without an accent; she worked for a week with Drejac to perfect her pronun-ciation. The London recording was done in a single take. “I was living a dream,” Della later recalled.

Never Say Never Again premiered in Los Angeles on October 7, 1983, but also enjoyed a lavish European premiere in Monte Carlo on November 17, with Monaco’s entire royal family (Princes Rainier and Albert, Princesses Caro-line and Stephanie) in attendance. Hall even sang the song live at the post-screening dinner. “I didn’t really think about the glamour attached to the Bond fi lms,” she said. “I felt the excitement, getting caught up in all that energy,

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when the fi lm premiered in Monte Carlo. It was a big gala event, and that’s when I went, ‘Wow!’”

The reviews were mixed on the music. “A full-throated score by Michel Legrand,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter; “title song is unimpressive, as is Michel Legrand’s rather thin score,” declared Variety. “Michel Legrand’s French-accented ersatz jazz falls far short,” added the Hartford Courant;

“rarely supports the action properly and only distracts and clashes,” com-plained a critic for the fi lm-music quarterly Soundtrack!

Never Say Never became the fi rst Bond fi lm without a soundtrack album in the States or Europe. Alpert’s A&M label issued the title-song single, which didn’t quite make Billboard’s top 100 singles; it reached number 103 on Oc-tober 22. Japan’s Seven Seas label issued a 42-minute LP of highlights in 1983, but it wasn’t until 1995 that England’s Silva Screen issued a 62-minute CD containing several tracks not heard in the fi nal cut of the fi lm. The song did not chart in the U.K.

“I wrote this score,” Legrand later said, “without taking into account the worldwide attention the return of Connery in the role of Bond would bring. It was only later that . . . I became aware of the passion, the aspiration that Never Say Never Again revived.” In 2006 the composer added a symphonic

“I wrote this score,” Legrand later said, “without taking into account the worldwide attention the return of Connery in the role of Bond would bring. It was only later that . . . I became aware of the passion, the aspiration that Never Say Never Again revived.” In 2006 the composer added a symphonic