A good half of Lalo Schifrin’s film music has found its way to some sort of a release outside of the original film, including the composer’s most memorable scores for such films as Bullitt, Enter the Dragon. and after a whopping four decades later, Dirty Harry,
But apart from his TV work on “Mission: Impossible” (1966-73) and, possibly, “Mannix” (1967-75), very little of Schifrin’s television music has ever seen the light of day.
In his lengthy half-century career, Schifrin scored many episodic television series (the marvelous, though short-lived “T.H.E. Cat,” “Medical Center,” “Petrocelli,” and “Danger Theater”), mini-series (“Hollywood Wives,” “Out on a Limb,” and “A Woman Named Jackie”) and such TV movies as Earth II (1971), Victims (1982), Beverly Hills Madam (1986) and The Neon Empire (1989).
The specialty label Dragon’s Domain has recently – and surprisingly – rescued one of these obscure, and largely forgotten soundtracks: Schifrin’s entire score to the 1970 TV movie The Mask of Sheba. The soundtrack, not released at the time, isn’t so much a revelation as it is a pleasure to hear.
Originally intended as a pilot for an action-adventure series called “Quest,” The Mask of Sheba (also known as “Quest: Mask of Sheba”) starred Eric Braeden, now best known for playing Victor Newman on “The Young and the Restless,” the lovely Inger Stevens, who died only one month after The Mask of Sheba aired, Joseph (“Dr. No”) Wiseman and Hollywood’s Golden Age veteran Walter Pidgeon.
The film was shot in Mexico in late 1969 and aired as NBC’s Monday night movie on March 9, 1970. Sheba was directed by veteran journeyman David Lowell Rich (1920-2001), who also directed such Schifrin-scored films as See How They Run (1964), Eye of the Cat (1969) and The Concorde…Airport ’79 (1979).
Millions watched the program. But the reviews were terrible. The show was compared, unfavorably, to the serial adventure films of decades before and, by 1970, was considered, at best, campy and, at worst, just plain “bad.” Little wonder that NBC did not end up picking up the series. Years later, though, wildly successful adventure films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels, as well as Romancing the Stone (1984) briefly revived the genre for a whole new generation.
Lalo Schifrin was brought in to score the film by producer Sam Rolfe, who had hired the composer five years earlier to score “The Fiddlesticks Affair,” a musically-memorable episode from Rolfe’s successful series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (Schifrin also rescored Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for that show’s second season). Nothing Schifrin provides here is as memorable as that U.N.C.L.E. episode, but it is a solid score that shimmers with Schifrinesque verve.
Released for the first time, just days before Schifrin died of pneumonia on June 26, 2025, only five days after turning 93, The Mask of Sheba soundtrack sports a cover that likely comes from the film’s animated opening-credits sequence.* Even the most devoted of Schifrin’s fans are not likely to know much about this music or the film it accompanies. But, as always, Variety film and TV music writer Jon Burlingame provides a thorough accounting of the movie and the music in his superb liner notes.
Schifrin composed a whopping 55 minutes of music for the film, with very little overlap or repeated motifs. The Main Title, here as “The Mask of Sheba Opening Titles,” has the zeal of one of those old-time Hollywood adventure epics.
The idea was probably to hook the older viewers who admired those films – after all, that was probably the network’s intended demographic in the first place. But hip or cool, as Schifrin was known to be at the time, it is not. The theme, though, provides an anthemic motif Schifrin would repurpose the following year to pretty cool effect on the “Introit” from Rock Requiem (1971).
(Sheba‘s Main Title first appeared on the five-disc collection The Cincinnati Kid: Lalo Schifrin Film Scores, Vol. 1 [1965-68], issued in 2010.)
Two source cues (or, music that the film’s characters are meant to hear), “Opus Parts 1 &2,” are tacked on at the end, out of score order. Both are brief, jazzy dance themes that suggest either that the film takes place in the past or that the characters have travelled to a place that’s out of time, or still a few years behind contemporary society.
The remainder of the score, however, is an attractive journey through Schifrin’s jungle exotica that feels a bit more contemporaneous. Throughout, the composer employs various units of a 40-part orchestra to create the film’s adventure moods.
Things pick up considerably in the film’s final act with the cymbalom, tabla and percussion-infused “The Monks,” “Through the Underwater Passage,” “The Unmasking” and “An Amphibious Woman.” The climax comes in the misleadingly-titled “The Big Chase,” a string-driven theme that seems like the classical equivalent of Bullitt‘s (1968) “Shifting Gears.”
After these engaging third-act themes, “Finale and Closing Credits” (eventually reprising the main theme) feels like it belongs to an altogether different film. It’s as though “a Hollywood ending” was deliberately tacked on. In fairness, though, a lot of American TV ended like this back in the day. The film’s ending was likely as corny as the music that ends it all. Today, it’s just eyeroll-inducing.
While The Mask of Sheba is a welcome addition to Lalo Schifrin’s extensive film and TV discography, it doesn’t have the usual grit of, say, Schifrin’s spy or action music or the guile of a John Williams adventure saga. It does, however, boast plenty of Schifrin’s characteristic musical charms.
* I should note that I have not seen The Mask of Sheba. I was only six years old when the program aired and the film does not appear to be currently available for viewing on YouTube or any other platform.