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A big city,
big cars, big crime and big criminals demand a big sound. And there's no
bigger sound in all of Germany than the Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra. By
the mid 1960s, Peter Thomas had become Germany's pre-eminent film
composer, having scored the
Edgar Wallace "krimi"
films, the epitome of German cinema at the time. Thomas went on to score
the way-out hit German TV series
Space Patrol
(1966) and such international films
as Jack of Diamonds
(1967), Andrew V. McLaglen’s
Steiner 2 – Breakthrough
(1979) and, most notably, the cult classic,
Chariots of the Gods?
(1970).
When the producers of the first
Jerry Cotton film needed to give their American hero his musical
identity, there was only one guy for the job.
Peter Thomas
always had a special way with a tune and, despite his knowledge of
classic European structures, he was a huge fan of American jazz. "All my
musicians came from jazz then," remembers the maestro, "playing the
music with a jazz feeling.”
Music is a major part of what
makes the Cotton rollercoaster such a giddy, fun-filled ride. It's wild.
It's crazy. It zigs. It zags. It's all over the map and at times over
the top - like the hustle and bustle or the good and the bad of New York
City life, or probably more accurately, a European's impression of the
American way. Jerry Cotton lives, works and fights crime in one of the
most stylized versions of New York imaginable. There's the rear-screen
projection (sometimes oversized or at odd angles), the occasional West
Coast inset and anomalies like American cars fitted with European
rear-view mirrors, two-door police cars, European trucks, winding
European roads and the crazy mix of pre-Columbus and post-Mies van der
Rohe architecture that New York City's never known. But each of the
Cotton films get much more right than wrong. Jerry's cherry red Jaguar
really cruises through Times Square, American George Nader speaks his
own lines in the English dubs and a (mercifully small) picture of
(probably) President Lyndon Johnson, and in later films, J. Edgar
Hoover, adorn the Mabuse-meets-U.N.C.L.E. office of Jerry's boss, Mr.
High.
Peter Thomas
re-configured American jazz the way the filmmakers reconfigured New York
City, mixing it up with sounds that appropriately call to mind the
military, the lounge, the chase (of course) and even the circus. Despite
the pervasive influence of James Bond at the time, the musical - and
even filmic - precedents of Jerry Cotton can be found in American
television from the 1950s, notably Dragnet (Walter Schumann), and most
especially, Peter Gunn (Henry Mancini). That's due in no small measure
to the films' adaptation of the hugely popular
G-Man Jerry Cotton
series of German pulp novels that began back in the Fifties. The suits
and skinny ties are straight out of the button-down Fifties. Everybody
drinks but nobody swears. And friendships are the only relationships
that are tested or on display. In Jerry Cotton's world, only the music
swings.
Thomas goes for the jazz jugular
and spices up the proceedings with his own brand of ephemera: gunshots,
screams, scat singing and wild improvisation that must have made
participating musicians happy as hell.
His Sound Orchestra even gets more sound time in the Jerry Cotton films
than George Nader gets screen time.
The films are overflowing
with music, it's as if there are eight million stories in the naked city
and Peter Thomas has a song for each one.
This collection captures the very
best of the Jerry Cotton music, plus extras that have never seen the
light of day on the too-few records, singles and CDs that have covered
Jerry Cotton's musical universe. The main theme, of course, is the
"Jerry Cotton March," heard throughout each of the eight films, either
'as is' or as a variant that matches the mood of the heroic crime
fighter's exploits.
It's a particularly odd theme that has more of a sense
of humor than a super-serious hero usually gets.
One can also easily detect a slight hint or recollection of Elmer
Bernstein's theme to The Great Escape (1963), the John Sturges film
which also featured Jerry Cotton's Heinz Weiss (Phil Decker).
But enough for the words. Any
jazz guy will tell you that it's all about the music. I'm sure Peter
Thomas would agree. He certainly gives you plenty to dig here. Thomas
covers more ground in the Jerry Cotton films than many other composers
manage throughout an entire career. When one imagines the millions of
musical miles that Peter Thomas has traversed throughout his half
century in music, it's nothing less than astounding. But the sheer
volume of music created for the Jerry Cotton films - which may not be
possible to ever document in full - is even more mind boggling. Peter
Thomas, like the Jerry Cotton films themselves, delivers more thrills,
chills and frills with more swing, zing and bling than anyone else could
deliver or imagine. DOUGLAS PAYNE |
| www.dougpayne.com |
