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NOT WITH MY WIFE YOU DON'T
and ANY WEDNESDAY
Dated pair of scores for "riotous" adult comedies
A review by JAMES SOUTHALL
Not With My Wife composed by
JOHN WILLIAMS
Any Wednesday composed by
GEORGE DUNING
Rating
* *
Performed
by
UNNAMED ORCHESTRA
conducted by
JOHN WILLIAMS
GEORGE DUNING
Produced
by
LUKAS KENDALL
Album running time
56:22
Released by
FILM SCORE MONTHLY
Catalog number
FSM VOL 9 NO 3
Album cover copyright (c) 1966 Warner Bros. Inc.; review copyright (c) 2006 James Southall
This review originally appeared at Film Music on the Web edited by Michael McLennan.
A pair of films released in 1966 by Warner Bros., Not With My Wife You Don’t and Any Wednesday
have much in common, not only that they were both
“outrageous” sex comedies which were so popular at the time
(bizarrely so) but also musically. Scored by John
(“Johnny”) Williams and George Duning, both composers
echoed the style of Henry Mancini, who scored a few of these films
himself; and now they are both available on one CD, from Film Score
Monthly, who have released a few Duning scores recently.
Williams spent seemingly a lot of his early film career scoring daft
comedies, usually evoking Mancini in the process. In the context
of his wider body of work, these scores (A Guide for the Married Man, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home
etc) barely merit a mention. They are so lightweight that one
might be tempted to say they are almost disposable. With melodies
that simply aren’t as memorable as Mancini’s, and lacking
the orchestrational splendour which so defines what makes
Williams’s later music so popular, it is difficult to imagine
much pleasure being derived from Not With My Wife, You Don’t except from those of, shall we say, a certain age, for whom the music will remind them of happier times.
The positives are that there is a sweet sense of naïveté
running through the music (which seems at odds with the
“adult-themed comedy” described in the liner notes); and
there are a trio of original songs Williams wrote with the great Johnny
Mercer, “Big Beautiful Ball” being of particular note, but
even those remove themselves from the memory as soon as they are
over. (A quick note about the film: I can’t imagine a less
likely actor than George C. Scott to be in one of these projects, but
there he is, alongside Tony Curtis; needless to say, I can’t
imagine a more likely actor than Curtis to be present!) The music
tries to be nice, tries to be friendly, but honestly ends up just being
irritating.
Duning’s Any Wednesday is
by far the more accomplished piece of work (though it’s all
relative). George Duning is not a composer well-represented on
CD, nor even very well-known by many film music aficionados, but he had
a hand in literally hundreds of films and (mostly) tv shows in a career
spanning over forty years. He even amassed five Oscar nominations
in the 1950s (though he never won). He was coming towards the end
of his film career when Any Wednesday came about in 1966, before embarking on a long and successful stint in television.
Like Williams, he scored several comedies in the 1960s, but his
approach here isn’t quite as madcap as the younger
composer’s. With a catchy main theme and overall a slightly
more mature approach (benefiting, ironically, from using a much
smaller, jazz/pop-based ensemble), Any Wednesday
is really quite good fun. It’s still very slight and
unlikely to hang around for long in the memory, but satisfies for half
an hour.
As with most releases from Film Score Monthly, the packaging is
excellent, with fine liner notes from Lukas Kendall and Jeff Eldridge,
and amusing reproductions of the notes from the original LPs.
It’s mastered from the original album masters and sounds
great. People who grew up with film music like this will probably
have a blast, but I suspect that for the wider audience, it will be a
much harder sell (even with Williams’s name on the cover).
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Not with My Wife tracks
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Any Wednesday tracks
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