The Mancini Touch

Touch of Evil is an early entry in the composer’s career, but that modest intention would become a trademark. Mancini probably would never have cosigned Stephen Sondheim’s dictum that “content dictates form,” not only because he was so accommodating a collaborator but also because, in his slippery way, he was a formalist. Consider one of his next notable films, Days of Wine and Roses. A cautionary fable about the perils of alcohol addiction, nudged out of stolid moralism by director Blake Edwards and by its principal star, a phenomenal Jack Lemmon, the film was released in 1962—on the heels of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a defining success for both Edwards and Mancini. Just as the wafting melody of “Moon River” had served as a leitmotif in that movie—“I’m crossing you in style someday,” per the pledge in Johnny Mercer’s lyrics—another graceful new ballad emerged out of this one.

“Days of Wine and Roses,” composed by Mancini and also furnished with lyrics by Mercer, is one of a handful of songs from its era that sit comfortably within the Great American Songbook; perhaps you’ve heard it sung by Tony Bennett or Ella Fitzgerald, or played as an instrumental by the likes of Wes Montgomery. Starting out in F major but soon easing into a minor key via a jazzy drift of seventh chords, it’s a ballad that gently mirrors the bittersweet qualities of the tale and its doomed love affair. Mancini deploys his theme in myriad forms throughout the film: first as a choral overture during the opening credits, and later in instrumental arrangements ranging from solo guitar to a dramatic upwelling of strings. At its most despondent, the score incorporates a version of the melody stoically played by a French horn soloist, Vincent De Rosa (whom Mancini specifically envisioned for the part). In this way, the song is a flowing constant whose shape conforms to the arc of the characters. This was far from a coincidence, as Mancini later told John Caps, author of the indispensable 2012 biography Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music: “For this film a song was important because it was not an issue-oriented story; it was at the bottom about a relationship.”

That insight, which could have been easy to miss, speaks to Mancini’s knack for ferreting out intention. Even in the rare instances where he initially misread the assignment, the end result exceeded expectations. In his book, Caps details how Mancini’s first attempt to score Two for the Road, an acerbic marital saga starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, was rejected by director Stanley Donen for being too forlorn. Going back to the drawing board, Mancini composed a theme that cycles efficiently through a series of harmonic changes, with a yearning for resolution that keeps slipping just out of reach. “In sum,” Caps observes, “Mancini understood what Donen had wanted was not a love song, but a road song.” To emphasize the continental sophistication of the setting, and to add a touch of melancholy, Mancini lobbied for a star soloist, French violin ace Stéphane Grappelli. Lyrics came from Leslie Bricusse. And in the end, it’s impossible to disentangle the song’s grown-up enchantment from the crumbling love story at the center of the film—the song achieves its effect partly through the same theme-and-variations approach used on Days of Wine and Roses, but also through sheer charm. It is, as Caps suggests, “the voice of the picture.”

There are, of course, more conventionally incidental scores in the Mancini canon, though “conventional” might not be the right word exactly. For the Blake Edwards thriller Experiment in Terror, he found a signature sound in the autoharp, which was ubiquitous on the era’s folk revival scene. Unlike the jaunty zither score of a precursor like The Third Man, his theme otherized the instrument by having his autoharp players use a metal pick, to chilling effect.

For Mancini, this marked an outlying high point in an era during which his relevance in Hollywood waned. John Williams, who had begun his film career as the piano player in Mancini’s Peter Gunn combo, was settling into his early imperial phase. Morricone, branching out beyond the westerns that forged his legend, was a reigning eminence. Among the other maestros at work were veterans like Jerry Goldsmith and Howard Shore, and up-and-comers like Alan Silvestri and Danny Elfman. The suave postwar signature of Mancini’s film music had become unfashionable, or at least outmoded. His filmography over the next decade included some self-aware rehashes—Trail of the Pink Panther in 1982, Curse of the Pink Panther in 1983, Son of the Pink Panther in 1993—along with fare like Santa Claus: The Movie, Tom and Jerry: The Movie, and the misbegotten Sidney Poitier–directed Bill Cosby vehicle Ghost Dad.

Mancini must have felt some disappointment over his changing place in the industry, but he surely understood his stature as a luminary—not just as an esteemed film composer but also as a symphonic concert artist and a mentor to emerging talent. He was ailing, with pancreatic cancer, during the development of a Broadway musical version of Victor/Victoria in the mid-’90s. For his seventieth birthday, on April 16, 1994, he presided over a grand party of a few thousand guests, with performances by Andrews, Luciano Pavarotti, and others. John Williams conducted the orchestra. 

As Caps describes the scene, it was a fitting curtain call: glamorous, heartfelt, and bittersweet. Bricusse, writing later in The Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse Songbook, recalled it this way: “Henry made a quiet but moving speech and took his final bows like the modest man he was. As it says in his most beloved song, he crossed in style.”