R.I.P.: defunciones y fallecimientos

Por cierto, se ha muerto un grande de la música de cine: LUIS BACALOV

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ROMA.- Luis Bacalov , el famoso pianista y compositor argentino que vivía en Italia desde 1959 y se consagró ganador del premio Oscar por la inolvidable música de El cartero, murió hoy a los 84 años. Fue su hijo Daniel quien anunció su fallecimiento en el hospital San Filippo Neri de esta capital, donde se encontraba internado tras haber sufrido un ACV.


Nacido en San Martín, Buenos Aires, el 30 de agosto de 1933, Bacalov comenzó a tocar piano a los cinco años. Dejó la Argentina a los veinte para buscar suerte en Europa. Vivió primero en España, luego en Francia, hasta que a fines de los años '50 recaló en Italia, país que lo recibió con los brazos abiertos. Sus dotes de compositor y realizador de arreglos enseguida fueron apreciadas. Y comenzó en la península, donde luego se naturalizó, una exitosa carrera, trabajando con grandes nombres de la canción italiana como Claudio Villa, Milva, Rita Pavone, Sergio Endrigo, Claudio Baglioni, Mia Martini y Gianni Morandi, entre otros. Se convirtió, así, en un personaje fundamental para el panorama musical italiano.

"Bacalov fue protagonista esencial de la regeneración de la canción italiana", escribió en el diario La Repubblica Ernesto Assante, que destacó que era "original, apasionado, curioso y ecléctico". "Llevaba consigo su alma argentina, la herencia del tango, la tradición clásica que había estudiado a fondo, que injertaba en una renovación de la que fue uno de los motores esenciales", agregó.

"Creativo e inteligente como pocos otros Bacalov, a diferencia de muchos colegas suyo, comprendió hasta el fondo la fuerza de la música progresiva italiana y colaboró con algunas de las mejores bandas de rock italianas de la década de 1970", también recordó.

Al mismo tiempo, con el seudónimo de Luis Enriquez, realizaba innumerables bandas musicales como autor, poniendo su música al servicio de directores de la talla de Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ettore Scola y Francesco Rosi. En 1996 ganó el premio Oscar por las músicas de Il Postino -la película de Massimo Troisi basada en El cartero de Neruda, del chileno Antonio Skarmeta- premió que después se vio obligado a compartir con Sergio Endrigo, que lo llevó a juicio por la similitud de la banda sonora con un tema suyo. Ese juicio concluyó hace pocos años con un acuerdo entre los herederos de Endrigo.

Siguió trabajando como autor, compositor y director de orquesta en los últimos años, con gran éxito. Y hasta vio cómo su música fue utilizada por Quentin Tarantino, además de ganar muchos premios.

 
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Muere la actriz Dorothy Malone, la última reina del Technicolor


Dorothy Malone, la librera de El sueño eterno, ganadora del Óscar por Escrito sobre el viento (también con Sirk en Ángeles sin brillo) y westerniana de pro en un buen puñado de clásicos del género entre ellos Juntos hasta la muerte, Al Sur de San Luis, The Nevadan, At Gunpoint, Pillars of the Sky, Quantez, Tall Man Riding, The Lone Gun, Tension at Table Rock y especialmente en El hombre de las pistolas de oro y El último atardecer.

También trabajó con Siegel (Private Hell 36), Walsh (Más allá de las lágrimas), Curtiz (Noche y Día), Gordon Douglas (Young at Heart, Sincerely Yours), Frank Tashlin o Verhoeven (Instinto Básico).

El Señor la acoja en su seno.
 
En esa y en un montón más. Era de las que radiaba sensualidad en cuanto salía...
 
Murió John Morris, excelente e infravaloradisimo compositor


John Morris, a composer who had a long list of movie, theater and television credits but was best known for a long association with Mel Brooks that earned him Academy Award nominations for “Blazing Saddles” and “The Elephant Man,” died on Thursday at his home in Red Hook, N.Y. He was 91.

His daughter, Bronwen Morris, said the cause was a respiratory infection.

Mr. Morris, a genial son of British parents, and Mr. Brooks, a boisterous comedy director from Brooklyn, had worked on two short-lived Broadway musicals (“Shinbone Alley,” in 1957, and “All-American,” in 1962), when Mr. Brooks asked him to write the film score for “The Producers” (1967). It was Mr. Morris’s first movie score — the music that accompanies a film — and Mr. Brooks’s first feature.

Over the next 24 years, they would collaborate on 10 more films.

“He was my emotional right arm,” Mr. Brooks said in a telephone interview. “Music tells you what to feel and he knew what I wanted you to feel. He composed it and made it happen.”

“The Producers” is Mr. Brooks’s story of a has-been producer (Zero Mostel) and his neurotic accountant (Gene Wilder), who swindle their investors in a tasteless musical about Nazis — ”Springtime for Hitler,” also the title song — that they are certain will flop instantly.

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Springtime For Hitler The ProducersVIDEO BY DCR14
Mr. Brooks wrote the lyrics for “Springtime” (“We’re marching to a faster pace/Look out, here comes the master race!”) and Mr. Morris impressed Mr. Brooks early on by suggesting that the melody be used as a continuing motif throughout the film.

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“He’d turn it into something funny or soft or upbeat,” Mr. Brooks said.

Together they also wrote the title song for “Blazing Saddles” (1974), Mr. Brooks’s hit western parody about a black sheriff who saves a town full of racists under siege from moronic outlaws. Their song — an ode to the quick-witted sheriff (Cleavon Little) who “conquered fear and he conquered hate” — brought Mr. Morris and Mr. Brooks an Academy Award nomination for best original song. (The winner was “We May Never Love Like This Again” from “The Towering Inferno.”)

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Blazing Saddles Opening TitleVIDEO BY GLOBALWAHRMAN
That year Mr. Morris also wrote the score to Mr. Brooks’s horror-film satire, “Young Frankenstein,” whose main theme, “Transylvanian Lullaby,”featured a heart-wrenching violin solo.

Mr. Brooks cautioned Mr. Morris against writing scary music for a film about a vulnerable, if terrifying, monster (Peter Boyle) animated by Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Mr. Wilder), the grandson of Victor Frankenstein.

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“Mel told me to write the most beautiful Eastern European lullaby that you can,” Mr. Morris told the online magazine Film Score Monthly in 1997. “That would be the heart of the monster. It would be his childhood.”

Mr. Morris continued to compose for Mr. Brooks’s comedies, among them “Silent Movie” (1976) and “High Anxiety” (1977), but took a detour with him into drama with “The Elephant Man” (1980), about a severely disfigured man (John Hurt) who is saved by a surgeon from a freak show in late-19th-century London. Mr. Brooks’s company produced the film, which David Lynch directed.

Mr. Morris working on the score of the Gene Wilder film “The World’s Greatest Lover” in 1977.THE FILM MUSIC SOCIETY
Writing that film’s main theme required several weeks, Mr. Morris said. “The theme had to convey someone who worked on the edges of the circus, and the melody had to be poignant,” Mr. Morris said in the Film Score Monthly interview. “It has two layers. It has the tune and then it has the over-layer, which is the circus. It took me a long time to arrive at that point.”

John Leonard Morris was born on Oct 18, 1926, in Elizabeth, N.J. His father, Thomas, was an engineer who designed the revolving doors at the Tiffany & Company flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. His mother, the former Helen Sherratt, was a homemaker.

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When John was about 3, he and his parents visited friends in the Bronx who owned a piano, and he immediately became fascinated with the instrument, and eventually, his parents bought him one of his own.

The Morrises moved to Independence, Kan., when John was young, and he began taking piano lessons before returning east to study piano at the Juilliard School in the late 1940s. He also attended the University of Washington and the New School for Social Research.

Mr. Morris was too shy for the public life of a concert pianist, so he worked as an accompanist (for Judy Garland, among others), dance arranger, conductor and composer. He worked for Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, where he wrote music for Shakespeare in the Park and was musical director for the pre-Broadway production of “Hair.” And he helped create “A Time for Singing” (1966), a Broadway musical inspired by the novel “How Green Was My Valley,” for which he wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics and book with Gerald Freedman.

For the next 40 years, he composed music for numerous movies, including those directed by Mr. Wilder and Marty Feldman, as well as the comedy “The In-Laws” (1979) and the stark drama “Ironweed” (1987), and for television shows including the sitcom “Coach” and the mini-series “The Adams Chronicles” (1976) and “Scarlett” (1994), a sequel to “Gone With the Wind.”

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“I know how to write tunes,” he said in an interview he recorded in 2009 with one of his granddaughters, Hayley Morris. “All I have to do is think Johannes Brahms. And I know what Brahms does. I know how he wrote, and you just do what he does and you’re in business.”

But Mr. Morris was not part of the Broadway production of “The Producers,” a musical that opened in 2001 and won 12 Tony Awards, including one for Mr. Brooks’s score. While Mr. Brooks said that he solicited Mr. Morris’s opinions on some of the show’s songs, Bronwen Morris said that she was unaware of her father communicating with Mr. Brooks about the musical.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Morris is survived by his wife, the former Francesca Bosetti; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. A son, Evan, died in 2014.

Although he received an Oscar nomination for “The Elephant Man,” Mr. Morris remained frustrated that Mr. Lynch had mandated that he use Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” a popular 20th-century orchestral work, in a segment of the film rather than stay with the original score.

“I told Lynch what’s going to happen is this piece is going to be used over and over and over again in the future,” Mr. Morris told Film Score Monthly. “And every time it’s used in a movie it’s going to diminish the effect of the scene. Now, when people see ‘The Elephant Man,’ they go … ah, that’s the music from ‘Platoon.’ ”

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