Offscreen Notes
RIP: Lalo Schifrin (1932- June 26, 2025)
The great Argentine-born composer Lalo Schifrin passed away at the age of 93 on June 25, 2025. Oddly the night before I had watched Cool Hand Luke, the wonderful 1967 Paul Newman-George Kennedy prison drama that was one of the marque scores by Schifrin in his mega-productive 1960s. Schifrin score featured a main theme played on acoustic guitar that establshed a wistful mood of a time and place passed that echoed the Newman character's own state of mind. Someone with a partially disclosed but eventful past that seems to have marked him for a tragic future. Luke is arrested for a senseless crime of cutting the heads off parking meters, then charts a course of self-destruction while unwittingly becoming a leader for his motely group of prison inmates. I had first heard of Schifrin from his tumultuous relationship with William Freidkin over his score for The Exorcist, which was ultimately discarded by Friedkin as being deemed a tad too bizarre. The score has since been made available and I can see what Friedkin meant, with its broad range of brassy, orchestral and ambient sonics. It would have made for a different film. But on its own the score remains a bold, experimental attempt at pushing the limits of genre. As Schifrin did in the past with Bullit, Coogan's Bluff, THX 1138, Dirty Harry, Amityville Horror, Mission Impossible and dozens of other films.
