It’s hard to fathom, but in 1966 alone Lalo Schifrin (1932-2025) composed the music for at least five theatrical films, including “Murderers Row” (which yielded a soundtrack album at the time), two TV movies, four TV documentaries, and four TV series, including “T.H.E. Cat” and, most memorably, “Mission: Impossible.” He also recorded the masterful Marquis de Sade (Verve) that year, a superb program of Baroque jazz originals.
Added to all of that, Schifrin also provided the score to “The Venetian Affair,” a long-forgotten film that doesn’t really deserve the classy score the composer brought to it.
I have always been dazzled by the film’s main theme, “Venice After Dark,” a beautifully evocative, yet thoroughly engaging piece that perfectly suggests contemporary European intrigue. It is a terrific Schifrin theme in a particularly notable year of terrific Schifrin themes. Its pure simplicity (of sound and structure) promises a much better adventure than we get.
In my zeal to catch up with films whose most memorable aspect is their Schifrin score, I finally picked up a DVD copy of “The Venetian Affair” to see just what prompted such a fascinating theme.
I.
Based on the 1963 novel by Helen MacInnes of the same name – and not one of those ersatz Man from U.N.C.L.E film releases assembled from the TV shows (all of which were titled “The [Something] Affair”), “The Venetian Affair” is certainly an affair set in Venice. But why that is is hard to say. It could have been anywhere. Notably, too, 1963 was the same year that the filmic James Bond sort of went to Venice in “From Russia with Love”…at least as far as rear-projection is concerned (the real thing would come in 1979’s “Moonraker” and, more spectacularly, in the 2006 version of “Casino Royale”).
“The Venetian Affair” stars U.N.C.L.E.’s very own Napoleon Solo, Robert Vaughn. Here, though, Vaughn is hardly the suave, well-tailored Solo. He’s more like one of those rumpled detectives from a grungy B-film, disheveled, unshaven and always pouring himself a drink, no matter what the occasion – like say, getting an unwanted assignment to Venice (apparently he has a bad history there).
Vaughn stars as Bill Fenner, an ex-CIA agent – and now, however implausibly, a photojournalist – recruited back in to the fold to determine who is trying to undermine talks for global nuclear disarmament. Ed Asner is Frank “Rosey” Rosenfeld, the CIA agent supervising Fenner, and Elke Sommer plays Fenner’s ex-wife Sandra Fane, who may or may not be a KGB agent.
Karl Boehm plays the charming, though menacing baddie Robert Wahl (all the suggestive surnames are numbing) and, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her moment is Bond girl Luciana Puluzzi, positively wasted as a hot-headed secretary! Many U.N.C.L.E. veterans – behind the camera and in front – join Vaughn here, including such guest stars from the TV show as Paluzzi, Boris Karloff and Roger C. Carmel.
To get this all on film, veteran TV writer and producer, E. Jack Neuman, wisely cut out much of the writerly coincidence in the novel, but throws in a perfectly inane and, to my mind, dated and silly mind-control twist right out of “The Manchurian Candidate.” If Cold War audiences were still afraid of such things at the time, however, they certainly got their money’s worth out of the scene with the cat and the rat…if it wasn’t ultimately undone by Vaughn’s hammy scene in the padded room.
“The Venetian Affair” was directed – with one major exception – in a mostly flat TV style by TV director Jerry Thorpe (“Kung Fu,” “Harry O,” among many others) in the first of only two of his feature-film credits. The exceptional scene worthy of note is that remarkable opening sequence, shot in the Piazza San Marco. As for the acting, the action, the visuals and the plot, it’s all downhill from there.
Considering all of these straight-faced shenanigans were supposed to take place in the most scenic of venues, it seems like a more visually-oriented director would have been chosen. The budget, which was never disclosed, was likely a factor. But they could have milked the locale for a bit more substance, context and beauty (again, the exception is that wonderful opening).
Still, it’s more colorful than master filmmaker Sidney Lumet’s concurrent and altogether bland and washed-out all-star take on John Le Carre’s “The Deadly Affair” (lushly scored in bossa-nova style by Quincy Jones)– released around the same time as “The Venetian Affair.” All these affairs!
It seems, though, that “The Venetian Affair” was set for release in December 1966, just in time for Christmas that year. But, for unknown reasons, the film was either delayed or held up and not released until several weeks after that.
There is a sense that MGM sniffed out the bomb it had on its hands beforehand: an action adventure with little action and no adventure, a drama with not much drama, and a travelogue that often feels like much of it was filmed on the studio’s backlot (much, to these eyes, like TV detective Joe Mannix’s Paseo Verde address).
“The Venetian Affair” opened in chilly theaters in January 1967 to mixed and mostly negative reviews, with the New York Times’ ever-bitchy Bosley Crowther panning it as “a totally inane and posy picture.” It’s an autopsy, however, that’s pretty hard to dispute.
II.
At about the same time, the MGM label issued a promotional single of Schifrin’s “Venice After Dark” – the film’s main-titles music, but re-recorded (with a slightly different drum pattern) for release – backed with “Our Venetian Affair” (sung by a studio choir). The film’s lack of popularity likely prevented a wider release of the single and subsequent soundtrack album. “Venice After Dark” eventually made its LP debut as part of the 1970 Schifrin compilation ‘Medical Center’ and Other Great Themes.
“Venice After Dark” has subsequently appeared on such Schifrin compilations as Mission: Impossible…And More! [1996], My Life in Music [2012], My Life in Movies [2017] and the massive 16-CD box set The Sound of Lalo Schifrin [2024], the last of which also includes the film cue “Next of Kin/The Back Door,” where Vaughn’s Fenner first encounters Felicia Farr’s Claire Connor character.
Alto saxophonist Bud Shank, a frequent Schifrin collaborator – notably on the 1968 Bullitt score – covered “Venice After Dark,” and Schifrin’s “The Pin” from “Murderers’ Row,” also with another frequent Schifrin collaborator, bassist Ray Brown, on his 1967 album Bud Shank Plays Music from Today’s Movies.
Julius LaRosa, who sung film’s the much-lambasted theme song “Our Venetian Affair” over the closing credits, issued a version of the song, in an arrangement by Don Costa, on his 1967 album “Hey, Look Me Over.” Like the Schifrin single, La Rosa’s Costa-arranged version of “Our Venetian Affair” was issued as a promotional single, but it, too, never garnered a wider release in the U.S.
Lalo Schifrin’s entire score to “The Venetian Affair” – as well as the two songs issued on that 1967 Schifrin single – finally made its first appearance in 2001 as part of the impressive, and, to my mind, essential five-disc box set The Cincinnati Kid: Lalo Schifrin Film Scores Vol 1 (1964-1969).
The set was curated by the amazing Lukas Kendall, and featured the as-always incisive, informative and beautifully-written notes of journalist and author Jon Burlingame, a Variety correspondent, Schifrin authority and author of such books as “Dreamsville: Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn and Music for TV Noir,” “The Music of James Bond,” and “Music for Prime Time.”
Schifrin’s theme – and much of the resulting underscore – is dominated by the Eastern European cimbalom (also spelled as cymbalom), a hammered dulcimer that conveys an appropriate air of foreign – specifically, in this case, Communist – menace. Composer John Barry (1933-2011) had previously put the cimbalom to similarly-useful effect in his exquisite theme (and score) to the anti-Bond film “The Ipcress File” (1965), based on writer Len Deighton’s first spy novel.
The cimbalom is something Schifrin would return to in later years, in such scores as “Sky Riders” (1976), “Love and Bullets” (1979), and, most notably, “The Eagle Has Landed” (1977). That sound has an instantly mysterious and covert suggestiveness – like the ring of a bell that sounds a bit off, broken or, appropriately, in this case, bent – although it is a traditional instrument (of Hungarian origin) that animates much European folk music, as is so beautifully heard on jazz bassist George Mraz’s lovely 2001 disc Morava.
But, in the movies, it has the distinct ring of a Cold War-era foreign intrigue.
Like Barry, Schifrin’s theme uses flutes as a counterpoint to the cimbalom (Schifrin’s go low, while Barry’s are higher). But where Barry’s theme suggests the air of mystery, tinged with a certain threat, Schifrin’s theme hints more towards the menace of the action and adventure variety.
Schifrin also adds more depth and nuance to this particular score, as Jon Burlingame so beautifully points out in his extensively-sourced notes, by “[imbuing] the score with a rich palette of other plucked and struck instruments, including the zither, salterio (an Italian dulcimer), the Indian sitar and tamboura, harpsichord, two harps and the more ‘traditionally Italian’ mandolin.” That command of instrumentation is staggering to consider, marking Schifrin as a master craftsman of musical colors.
Burlingame goes on to note that the score was recorded using 22 musicians – notably omitting any strings or brass – over two days in late July 1966, featuring, what he aptly calls “a who’s-who of guitar, including Laurindo Almeida,1 Tommy Tedesco, Bob Bain, Barney Kessel, Howard Roberts, Al Hendrickson and Bill Plummer.”
Other musicians here include ethnomusicologists Sam Chianis on the cimbalom and Elisabeth Waldo on the salterio, with Mike Lang and Artie Kane on keyboards and harpsichord, Carl Fortina on accordion, Red Mitchell on bass (who, factoring prominently throughout, solos on “Narco”) and legendary percussionists Emil Richards and Shelly Manne. Unless I missed something, the harpists were not identified.
Despite the film’s two main themes, there’s not much here to suggest that Schifrin could have put together a full album of “songs from the movie.” In addition to the two songs on the 1967 Schifrin 45 (which differ from their score counterparts), only “Clare’s Blues” and the instrumental versions of “Our Venetian Affair” (“Sandra,” “As Long As We’re Together” and “The Affair is Over”) would have likely made worthy songs.
The beguiling “Venice After Dark” – like “The Ipcress File” theme from that score – gets a number variations throughout, including “Venetian Dialogue/The Credentials,” “The Back Door,” “Venetian Affair,” “Around the Corner,” “Fenner” and “A Lonely Silhouette.” Several tracks, like “Main Titles (Piazza San Marco),” are merely bits of cimbalom improvisation, while other tracks, notably “Hypodermic Persuasion” and “Subliminal Horror,” tend to border on freeform jazz.
The score surely boosts the film…from, well, a TV-like potboiler to something much more attention-worthy – something Quincy Jones did for his own score for “The Deadly Affair.” There is a sense here that Schifrin knew this all along. It’s not necessarily a case of putting lipstick on a pig, but, rather (to continue the animal metaphor), grooming the dog.
If this was the first time Schifrin was charged with such a mission, it certainly would not the be last. Bravo, Maestro Schifrin!
Special thanks to Jon Burlingame for his extensive research and his typically beautifully-presented notes and to my friend Mark Cathcart for his always much-appreciated research capabilities.
Endnote:
- On August 11, 1966, a mere couple of weeks after “The Venetian Affair” scoring sessions, Schifrin guest conducted Almeida with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a performance of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’ “Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra” (1951) at the Hollywood Bowl. It was also on this occasion that Schifrin premiered his third-stream work “Three Pieces for Percussion and Orchestra,” with drummer Louis Bellson as the featured percussionist. The performance – and the program – garnered only mixed reviews. ↩︎