Movie-Title

1964

LP: 20th Century Fox TFM 3128

1. Chicken Delhi Cold (3:05)
2. Kate's Blues (5:20)
3. Barney's Blues (3:07)

The Movie

After all these years, I finally got to see this thing start-to-finish. Robert Mitchum is forced to defend a disturbed american GI (Keenan Wynn) in a court martial. The point of the movie was that, for the good of Anglo-US relations during World War II, Keenan Wynn had to hang; anything less would look like an acquittal. Wynn was crazy, but nobody wanted him to be declared insane because then he wouldn't hang.

It was interesting because most courtroom dramas have sympathetic defendants, but Keenan Wynn was just a prick; and a lesser man than Mitchum (of course) would let him hang just to rid the world of him. But then you wouldn't have a movie.

Trevor Howard steals it, but the acting was good all around. I think the story itself was pretty good but not great—it covers some of the same ground as The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Plus it has the feel of being a 1-hour story that was padded heavily into feature-film length.

The Music

This appears to be a similar deal to From Russia with Love, where Lionel Bart wrote the title song and Barry conducted it; and Barry composed, arranged and conducted the rest. "Chicken Delhi Cold" is reminiscent of Barry's King Rat work to my mind. The other two Barry pieces are big-band jazz.

Within the movie itself, most of the music (what there was of it) was standard military stuff and sounded as if it had been lifted from the studio library. It just didn't sound like Barry at all.

Release Notes

This got an LP release an promptly disappeared. It is hard to find and pricey. Note that the track listing numbers aren't right—my copy of the LP is in storage. I'll correct the track numbers when I can. As far as I know, the music is not available anywhere else.