So This Is Paris

Continuing our long-running series of obscure and semi-obscure musicals, here is the soundtrack from the 1955 sailors-on-leave epic So This Is Paris.

Musicals focusing on the antics of American military personnel at their leisure date back at least to the 1944 opening of On the Town on Broadway. I am not even sure this was the first musical that set sailors loose in Paris to pursue love and adventure. So there is nothing new here in that regard.

But we're concerned with the soundtrack and it is pleasant, if (like the story) hardly original. The songs are the handiwork of Phil Moody and Pony Sherrell.

A few words about this relatively unfamiliar team might be helpful. Phil Moody was a British-born composer and Doris (Pony) Sherrell was a lyricist and singer. They met when Moody became the music director for the act that Pony formed with her sister Grace. Phil and Grace married while Pony, who was then married to singer Gene ("My Blue Heaven") Austin, became Phil's musical partner.

In the mid-50s, Moody and Sherrell were assigned to a few low-powered musicals besides this one - including Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt and, in the 60s, The Second Greatest Sex. They also did songs for Paris Follies of 1956 and Fresh from Paris (I am detecting a theme here). Their two songs from those latter films were recorded by Margaret Whiting and can be found here on this blog. (Caveat: I called "All There Is and Then Some" an awful song when I posted that collection.)

Unusually, So This Is Paris starred Tony Curtis in a singing role. Of course I can't be sure that Curtis isn't dubbed; if so, the vocal double isn't that great a singer. Otherwise, we have Gloria De Haven, who can sing (she was a band vocalist), and Gene Nelson, who also can sing, although he was primarily known as a dancer.

The soundtrack was issued as a 10-inch LP and a double EP. The cover of my copy of the EP set is very worn but the records are in good shape, so the sound is pleasing.

Sweet Smell of Success

In a small tribute to the actor Tony Curtis, who died last week, I thought I might upload the soundtrack to one of his films. For some reason, Curtis appeared in a great number of movies that had notable scores, including Trapeze, The Vikings, Kings Go Forth, Spartacus, Taras Bulba, Paris - When It Sizzles, and others. Here is 1957's Sweet Smell of Success, which featured Curtis in his first "serious" role, and composer Elmer Bernstein in his best swaggering jazz mode.

Life Magazine ad

The ironically titled Sweet Smell was actually a particularly poisonous film noir tale of power and corruption - a genre that flourished in the supposedly placid and conformist 50s.

Whether you think Curtis was effective in such dramas or not, there is no doubt that he had a gift for farce, most notably in Billy Wilder's 1959 classic-in-drag, Some Like It Hot, in which Tony ends up with Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon gets Joe E. Brown.

I think Elmer Bernstein is making his first appearance on this blog, unless my fallible memory and labelling system are both failing me. Bernstein has an enormous reputation among film music aficionados, although among the general public he doesn't have 1/100 of the reputation of his namesake Lenny - no relation. This is a relatively early score, and a particularly strong one.

I should point out that some of the music on the soundtrack was composed by jazz musicians Chico Hamilton and Fred Katz, who appeared in the film as part of Hamilton's quintet. Decca also released an LP of music from the film as performed by this group. The Hamilton quintet does not appear on this album, which features a studio group conducted by Bernstein. The back cover below has more information.