In Memory of Lalo Schifrin
A from-the-vaults essay on the most badass of film composers
(This piece originally appeared in Film Comment in 2003)
Strauss had his Vienna woods, Respighi had his Roman pines, and so has Lalo Schifrin claimed his own bygone pastoral. It is a vast imperium of flared trousers and bushy sideburns, hill-vaulting car chases and gaga zoom-ins, ensemble kung fu, and the most powerful handgun in the world, able to blow your head clean off.
Such is the lot of a composer who emerged in the macho rat pack of late-Sixties Hollywood, going on to score an entire epoch of superfly dystopia: Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Enter the Dragon, “Mannix,” “Starsky and Hutch” — these and other car-hood-jumping capers that drove Schifrin's mix of twitching Latin percussion, synth-borne exotica, and big-band rock riffs so deeply into our unconscious that today it sits on the brink between supreme cheese and pop genius. And Schifrin now boasts the sort of only-in-Hollywood career that includes both a TV-pilot-spawned single called "Ape Shuffle" and the most famous 5/4 theme in Western music. For Mission: Impossible alone, he will live forever as the premier bard of action film.
Obviously there's a lot more to a world-class jazz pianist and arranger than a tune most recently recorded by Limp Bizkit. Schifrin's scores are still among the handful that often outshine the movie (see: Rush Hour 2) and frequently stand alone as examples of development and orchestration. The blue-chip citation is probably Cool Hand Luke, with its gentle acoustic guitar theme rendering the inner melancholy of Newman's laconic rebel.
But the Schifrin mythos is more meretricious, full of priapic jazz, gimmicky funk, the epochal Action sounds that made him a Latin answer to John Barry. The Bullitt soundtrack is paradigmatic: Echt-copshow, with low-register flute stealth and bongo chase mambos, but centered around a slyly effective jazz theme for the film's tight-wound hero (who, as played by Steve McQueen, probably benefited from all the emotional nuance he could get). Three years later, this kind of subtle characterization reached its apogee in Schifrin's jazz-funk Wozzeck: Dirty Harry.
In retrospect, a good third of Clint Eastwood's errant cop character derives from the sound of funky, Watergate-era decadence that accompanied him through the windblown city streets. Without that wah-wah guitar and fuzz bass this Harry wouldn't be nearly as dirty. And while the film's psycho-killer has one of the most distinctive leitmotifs in the entire Schifrin canon — a swooning miasma of buzzing cicada and whispery female vocals — Harry's own musical treatment is in a sense more striking.
Following his journey from cop to vigilante, the score actually paints a portrait several shades darker than what’s in the script — moving from the simmering, In A Silent Way-era Miles Davis panther walk that greets his entrance to the crystallization of this ethos into something much chillier. When Harry wounds the villain in an empty football stadium, harsh zings across piano strings match the glare of floodlights, atonal pizzicato bass follows his walk towards fallen prey, and a shivery free-jazz crescendo charts the deliquescence of Harry's mind. This, as the camera pulls back on one of the more indelible tableaux in American law and order films: cop torturing suspect on the 50-yard line.
Bruce Lee received no such complex characterizations. But that was probably a low priority when he hired Schifrin, whose Mission: Impossible theme had been his preferred workout music for years. Instead, the Argentine jazz pianist and Chinese kung-fu emissary ended up producing a triumph of ersatz pop multiculturalism. With its boogaloo bass and wah-wah guitar, Schifrin's Enter the Dragon score explicates the fact that Lee's crossover bid was fundamentally blaxploitation with Chinese people in it.
Yet even deliriously pre-P.C. touches like ‘40s-newsreel gongs and black-key piano plinks can't gainsay the momentum that Schifrin's sinister funk lent these fight scenes (his earlier scores had already been widely pirated onto chopsocky films in China). "I just make the changes that are already there," he shrugged to an interviewer recently, going on to say that action soundtracks should state their themes in under four seconds — either the quips of a contented functionary or a Zen-like art-philosophy worthy of Bruce Lee, who called his martial art the "style of no style.”
Or maybe both. Somehow, Schifrin's absorption in enabling thrills was deep enough to sustain him through years of impossible missions like Doctor Detroit and The Cat from Outer Space, all the while retaining a respect for crash, flash, and spectacle.
In Bullitt, right before the chase scene, the horns and telegraphic bass line build an unbearable tension as cop and crooks spot each other, weaving steadily through afternoon traffic. But right at the crooks' tire-squealing left turn into flight, the music simply stops. It yields to the Sturm and Drang of carburetor and brake pad, a three-minute duet for Charger and Mustang played out on the San Francisco hills. It was a bold choice but very true to Schifrin's oeuvre, a celebration of two bad-ass American vehicles, lowbrow, high-octane, and very, very fast.