Michel Legrand/Morton Stevens: Slapstick of Another Kind OST (Varese Sarabande)
Purchased in the $2 room at Preserving Record Shop, New Kensington
The only Kurt Vonnegut I read in high school was his book Slapstick. It definitely wasn't the best introduction to his work. I read years later he rated his own novels, and he gave this one a D. I only recall some parts of it from reading a Wikipedia page about it yesterday. The page also mentioned the book received poor reviews from a variety of periodicals.
I remember seeing Siskel & Ebert talk about this movie on their weekly program, probably At the Movies at the time. They lambasted it, calling it appalling, cruel, unfunny, cheaply made and shockingly bad. I don't remember it playing any local theater near me (I could be wrong), and I've never in the past encountered it even on late night cable TV.
Having read the book and being generally interested in misguided celluloid atrocities (a term I'm borrowing from John Waters, who knows what he's talking about in that respect), I've always had a nagging curiosity about the movie. As of this writing, I still haven't seen it. Seeing the soundtrack in the $2 room during my first visit to the New Kensington store, I figured it was all the money.
The book generally had to do with a weird pair of fraternal twins, who together were hyper-intelligent, but to the outside world appeared to be severely mentally disabled. Reading a summation online, each is effectively a hemisphere of one super brain; the sister the right brain, the brother the left.
In the film adaptation, they're supposed to have been implanted by aliens (kind of like Village of the Damned), are weirdly hideous, and their purpose is to save the planet. Not terribly faithful to the source material. It is said to be, based on comments I read on the film's Wikipedia page, a terrible and crass adaption of what I can confirm is one of Vonnegut's worst books.
The cast, oh the cast. Playing both the twins and their parents were Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn, with Marty Feldman, Jim Backus, Sam Fuller (!), Merv Griffin, and Pat Morita included in the cast. Jerry received a Razzie nomination for Worst Actor, to be beaten out by Sylvester Stallone for Rhinestone. Sly most likely won out due to the huge bomb that film was, compared to this film just being farted out.
The title is exploitative if you hadn't noticed: it's meant to play on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which probably had multiple theatrical runs and would have still been known in the public sphere. Even the font on the cover of this album suggests the Spielberg classic. Now that's exploitation!
The music adds to the wonder of this critical and financial bomb-of-bombs. The music on the B side of the LP (Legrand) was from the original cut and release of the film. Another edit with new music (Stevens) was subsequently made, and who in the world knows why. I mean, the music itself is perfectly serviceable but unremarkable instrumental soundtrack music. Library music would have sufficed just as well. Legrand's take is a little wackier and more jazz-tinged; Stevens tries to sound something like John Williams (I suppose) but with more Moog solos.
Why recut this dog? Why commission a new score? Why release any of it as an LP? Why why why?
I see on discogs.com that the Milan issue of this LP added a sticker to the front cover reading, "The last picture of Marty Feldman." How ignoble.
I nonetheless wonder if it's streaming anywhere. I refuse to pay a penny for it though. But then, having just seen the documentary From Darkness to Light, I am very curious and hopeful to one day see Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried, knowing full well how hideous it must be. Celluloid atrocity, indeed.
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