Gutbrain Records

Friday, 22 July 2005

I was listening to Led Zeppelin's How the West Was Won the other day. Isn't it kind of cruel that they don't play "Livin' Lovin' Maid" after "Heartbreaker"? Did they ever play that song live? Anyway, in Jimmy Page's guitar solo in "Heartbreaker" he quotes the first section of BWV 996, the Bourrée from Bach's Suite No. 1 for lute.

I'm somewhat familiar with that particular Bach piece because for years I've thought it has an uncanny similarity to Luiz Bonfá's "Manhã de Carnaval". It's almost as if the first few bars of the Bourée had been extracted and mutated to create the famous bossa nova tune.

To change the subject, I think William Shatner is a really good actor. People laugh at his acting, but didn't people used to put down Monk's piano playing? (I'm not trying to compare Shatner and Monk, but Shatner deserves a critical reappraisal.)

A couple of days ago I watched this movie, The Intruder (1961), in which Shatner plays a sleazy, bigoted hatemonger who comes to a small Southern town on the eve of integration and jumpstarts a lynch mob. Shatner is great and the movie, which was produced and directed by Roger Corman, is well made and has an impressive visual style. I would guess it was made for peanuts, and could be an inspiration to anybody trying to make an independent, low-budget feature.

Another movie which has a startling performance by an actor who will never shed an association with a popular TV show is Murder, Inc. (1960), in which Peter Falk delivers a devastating performance as a ruthless mafia hitman. (It got him an Academy Award nomination.) Falk's nuanced and riveting performance is like the original manuscript of a legendary text: the blueprint for Marlon Brando in The Godfather and Robert DeNiro in Goodfellas and other Scorsese movies.

The movie itself, however, is not very good and is only exciting when Falk — or Sarah Vaughan, in a nightclub scene — is on screen. Fans of old TV shows will be startled by the scene in which Peter Falk kills Morey Amsterdam with an ice pick.