William N. Law Blog: Spy in From the Cold

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Spy in From the Cold

In the mid-1960s, the cinematic characterization of secret agents and spies fell into two categories. There was the glamorous world of James Bond that included space-age gadgets, chilled vodka and casino chips. And then there also was the grim world of threats posed by double agents from the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe, illustrated in films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), The Ipcress File (1965) and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965).

Scores for these two Cold War espionage genres were quite different. Bond films had a swinging brassy sound thanks largely to arranger John Barry. Scores for the others type of spy films were more psychological, gloomy or classical in tone. David Amram's monumental score for The Manchurian Candidate is a blend of jazz and pastoral classical, Barry's score for the Ipcress File is nerve-wracking and haunting, and Sol Kaplan's score for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is dourly classical and obsessively worried. [Photo above of Sol Kaplan]

But the latter score does have three brilliant exceptions—the Main Theme, The Pussy Willow Club and Pussy Willow Girl. While Kaplan employed a sullen pallet of grim incidental music for the bulk of the film's score, these three tracks stand out as bright upbeat jazz numbers that swing powerfully. As Jeff Bond writes in the CD's liner notes, "the Main Title was marked for use 'in trailers only'—where it would suggest, perhaps, more excitement and suspense than the quite subtle film itself had to offer." Pussy Willow Girl and, to a lesser extent, The Pussy Willow Club, are motifs played during scenes at a night spot.

Kaplan was a classically trained pianist and performed at Carnegie Hall as a concert pianist before his film scoring days began. Among his early films were Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Marilyn Monroe's Niagara (1953) and Titanic (1953). But his film career was halted for 10 years by the Hollywood blacklist for refusing to answer Congressional questions. He returned to movie scoring in 1963, with the soundtrack for The Victors, one of my favorite World War II movies. In the years ahead, Kaplan would write the scores for a series of films and TV, including two episodes of Star Trek. Kaplan died in 1990.