By Ray Bennett
In the 1950s, Duane Eddy, who died on April 30 aged 86, was one of the American rock stars most popular in the United Kingdom. With his band the Rebels, his hit singles ‘Rebel Rouser’, ‘Peter Gunn’, ‘Ramrod’, ‘Because They’re Young’ and ‘Forty Miles of Bad Road’ made him red-hot with teenagers along with hits of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers.
Little more than a decade later, it was a different story. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
Oscar-winning American composer Elliot Goldenthal, who turns 70 today, said that the first time he saw the sheet music for Krzysztof Penderecki’s ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 Strings’ when he was 17, he turned pale and started to tremble. ‘It was a deep moment. I realised that I had seen my first real film score.’
Speaking at the 2018 Krakow Film Music Festival, with the venerable late Polish composer sitting next to him on a speaker’s panel, he described spending an afternoon at Penderecki’s home with its bucolic surroundings. ‘We didn’t exchange many words but the silences – in music we call them rests – the rests were more poignant,’ Goldenthal said. ‘He has the ability to inspire. His music goes out, he doesn’t know where the wind will take it. For me, it took it to Brooklyn when I was growing up.’ Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
American songwriter and composer Steve Dorff, who turns 75 today, has a huge number of screen credits including TV series such as ‘Murphy Brown’, Spenser for Hire’ and ‘Major Dad’. In a Q&A for The Hollywood Reporter, he told me his big break came in 1979 when Clint Eastwood and music supervisor Snuffy Garrett asked him and collaborator Milton Brown to contribute a song to the film ‘Every Which Way But Loose’. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
A memory of the great film composer Henry Mancini, who was born 100 years ago today:
London’s Soho strip clubs in the Sixties (so I’m told) were shabby and sleazy, compared to which the long-gone Raymond Revuebar on Walker’s Court, run by local mogul Paul Raymond, was classy and good fun. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
In 1981 when he was 62, Howard Keel’s days as the star of great Hollywood musicals were long gone. He was living in Oklahoma with his third wife Judy when he received a phone call. ‘I was pretty much washed up in Hollywood by the late Seventies,’ he told me. ‘We were packed ready to head off to retirement in Colorado.’ Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
The Ringwood Music and Dramatic Society production of the hit Broadway musical ‘The Addams Family’ this week is the latest in a long run of versions of the original one-panel cartoon series created by cartoonist Charles Addams that first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1938 and ran for years.
The tales of a wealthy family who are not aware that their macabre tastes are unusual spawned a hit 1960s television series that has remained a cult favourite, sequels and specials, two feature films and the successful Broadway musical that will be staged by the RMDS at The Barn, Ringwood School, April 10-13. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Lauren Bacall was wrapping up the pre-Broadway run of ‘Applause’, the stage musical based on the feature film ‘All About Eve’, at Detroit’s Fisher Theatre in February 1970.
After the final curtain in a nearby club rented for the night, my Windsor Star colleague Ron Base and I sat in a booth enjoying the free food and booze waiting for our promised interview with Bacall for a freelance story in The Toronto Telegram and another for our own paper. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Lesley-Anne Down, who turns 70 today, was a stark contrast to Patrick Swayze, her co-star in the hit 1985 U.S. Civil War miniseries ‘North and South’. In interviews for Canadian TV Guide, the enormously likeable but very intense young American actor told me back then, ‘The only thing that will make my career last is if I always deliver one hundred percent.’ The English actress, famous for the 1970s British series ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, confirmed the actor’s high energy and drive drily: ‘Oh, very, yes.’ Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – ‘Hill Street Blues’, the American cop show that was a hit for most of the Eighties, had one of the best casts in television. Of them, James B. Sikking had probably the toughest job playing jut-jawed, pipe-smokimg Howard Hunter, commander of Hill Street’s Emergency Action Team.
Sikking, who turns 90 today, understood that Hunter was a cardboard character used mostly on the show to seque from one scene to another. ‘He’s what I call a coat holder,’ he told me. ‘He’s holding somebody else’s coat while they’re doing the scene. He’s mad as a hatter but from his point of view he’s absolutely correct.’ Continue reading
Marlon Brando: the man behind the myth
LONDON – The myth surrounding Marlon Brando, who was born 100 years ago today, has centred not only on his brilliant acting in films such as ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (with Vivien Leigh above), ‘On the Waterfront’, ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ but also his eccentric ways and latterly immense girth.
It’s instructive to recall what he was like as a young man when he burst into worldwide fame on stage and screen. When he made his first movie – ‘The Men’ (below left) in 1950, a story about disabled war veterans – Brando spent six weeks living in a hospital ward of paraplegic soldiers. Determined to recreate their reality on film, he shared their lives and won their confidence. Continue reading →