The Beautiful, Nostalgic and Relaxing "Morning in America" Opening Credits
Charley Varrick was director Don Siegel's first movie after the rough and tough "Dirty Harry," and is, in a number of ways, just as rough and tough. And violent. (Its PG versus the R for Dirty Harry may well have been more about the lack of nudity than violence.)
Both movies also have scores by the hip and jazzy Lalo Schifrin, who got famous with his "Mission:Impossible" theme for TV and who was soon in demand for action thriller scores. He did Bullitt, he did Dirty Harry, he did Magnum Force. (And he got fired off The Exorcist by director William Friedkin.)
Most of Schifrin's score for Charley Varrick is in the "Dirty Harry" tradition: tough, swift, jazzy with a touch of menace. Its crime movie music.
Except at the beginning. In one of the great "counterpoint" openings in movie history, Charley Varrick's tale of a bank robber versus the Mafia opens up with images and music that can only be characterized as: sweet, warm, reassuring, (and beautiful, nostalgic and relaxing.)
Why, its "morning in America" -- literally, as Siegel's cameraman Michael Chapman captures a series of images of dawn yielding to morning over the sleepy rural backwaters of New Mexico(well, Nevada is filling in, not far from Reno and Lake Tahoe, but we are soon TOLD we are in New Mexico.)
We get a sun dappled valley. A dairy farmer tending to his cows. A young boy trying to get a saddle on a small horse. An old man raising the American flag at the post office. Little girls playing in sprinklers. A sexy young teenage lass(Siegel's own daughter, in 1973 shag and halter top), mowing the lawn. Kids playing, boys riding mini-bikes, boys wolf-whistling a teenage girl in the town square.
The images are great, but Lalo Schifrin's music is even better. It tends to keep shifting tone, from poignant to whimsical to amused(the boy trying to get the saddle on the horse) to a trace of...sad. Specific images get specific music -- the sprinklers coming on for the little girls to play in come to life like magical fountains, in the music. The sexy lass mowing the lawn(how obedient -- doing her chores), gets a snatch of rock n' roll...perhaps from the radio she's playing while she mows.
And then, imperceptibly, the sweet and warm "morning in America" music gives way to just a trace of Schifrin's trademark thriller-type music. The music starts to signal a warning. Things aren't as nice as they seem. Something's going to happen. The thriller is about to begin.
The music cues out and shuts down just as the car carrying bank robber Charley Varrick and his getaway driver wife, Nadine, up to the porch of the Tres Cruces bank.
Its as great a match of image and music as has ever started a movie.
And it is reminiscent of a couple of Hitchcock movies.
In Frenzy(1972), Hitchcock requested that composer Ron Goodwin open the modern-London based tale with ebullant, regal-type pomp so as to suggest that the movie ahead was a celebration of Ye Olde England today -- when it would really turn into his most sexually violent shocker ever. I don't think Goodwin and Hitchcock, however, got nearly the sweet counterpoint that Schifrin and Siegel got in Charley Varrick.
No, what Charley Varrick's opening visuals and music most conjure up -- to me -- is the opening of Hitchcock's twee tale about a corpse in the countryside called "The Trouble With Harry" (1955), in which Hitchcock fills the screen with images of the beautiful Vermont countryside in autumn with beautiful, pastoral music by Bernard Herrmann(usually a thrill and chill composer.)
The linkage is this: sometimes, when I want to feel better about my day, when I want to relax, when I want to feel better about the WORLD, I will either put in Charley Varrick OR The Trouble With Harry on the DVD player -- and watch and listen only to the opening credits(in Varrick) and opening scene(in Harry.)
Try it. You'll feel great!
Meanwhile: The Trouble With Harry never turns into an exciting thriller after its sweet opening scene. Charley Varrick most assuredly DOES.