Forgotten Movie Songs #27: "Drifting and Dreaming of You" from WHITE LINE FEVER

I finally got to watch Jonathan Kaplan's 1975 film White Line Fever again, for the first time since I was a kid watching it at the drive-in. It's an exacting, often exciting blue-collar drama from a terrific director who's made one of my top films of all time, 1979's Over The Edge. At the end of Over the Edge, we're treated to an unusually gentle tune--a cover of The Five Stairsteps' "Ooh Child,"

Forgotten Movie Songs #25: "Little April Shower" from BAMBI

Walt Disney's Bambi is, officially, the only movie I ever saw alone with my father. It must have been re-released the theaters when I was ten or eleven. Even though my parents had been taking me to adult movies--rated PG, or M, or R--for years, I found myself drawn to the G-rated Bambi, probably due to TV commercials for the re-release. Back then, my family used to go to the drive-in a lot. We

Forgotten Movie Songs #24: "My Rifle, My Pony and Me" from RIO BRAVO

The first time I ever saw Howard Hawks' exciting, funny and wholly entertaining 1959 western Rio Bravo, I was immediately enchanted by the relationships between almost everyone in the picture. John Wayne is a staunch town sheriff trying to enforce the rule of law on to a murderous gang member (Claude Akins) who's about to be transported to another city for trial. Dean Martin is his drunken

Forgotten Movie Songs #23: "Nights Are Forever" from TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE

1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie was, like most anthology movies, a hit-and-miss affair. The first two segments, from John Landis and Steven Spielberg, didn't really make a mark. But the Dan Ackroyd/Albert Brooks wraparound (by Landis), and the final segments from Joe Dante and George Miller were real fun (especially the latter, an adaptation of Richard Matheson's "Horror at 37,000 Feet," with

Forgotten Movie Songs #22: "Hooked On Your Love" from SPARKLE

I've never seen the 1976 film Sparkle, directed by longtime Mike Nichols editor Sam O'Steen. But I just read that it's about to be remade, and I came across this great clip that instantly makes me wanna see it. It basically tells the same story as Dreamgirls--a barely disguised quasi-bio of the Supremes. This can be predictable stuff, I have to admit. But I've always been a Lonnette McKee

Forgotten Movie Songs #21: "I'm Picking Out A Thermos For You" from THE JERK

Carl Reiner's THE JERK is a brilliant movie. And it's even more brilliant as Steve Martin's (truly) debut film. But I'm not going to sing its praises here. I only wanna point out the song "I'm Picking Out A Thermos For You," which is staunchly hilarious. I couldn't find a clip of Steve Martin's Navin singing this in his soapy bathtub, to his flighty girlfriend (Bernadette Peters), so I'm

Forgotten Movie Songs #19: "The sun whose rays" from TOPSY-TURVY

This is, of course, not a song that was written for the movies, though it IS one of the cinema's most moving songs. Originally, it is the premier piece set smack dab in the middle of British librettist William S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan's magnum opus The Mikado, which opened in London in 1885 to astounding applause and then became the team's signature work. Mike Leigh's majestic,

Forgotten Movie Songs #18: "Benson, Arizona" from DARK STAR

Recently I watched a nifty little fan film called Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star. Though its obviously dedicated maker, Daniel Griffith, couldn't get on-screen interviews with the key figures behind this history-making 1974 cult movie, he still managed to construct a detailed and dramatic saga of Dark Star's history by talking to nearly everybody else connected with the movie (and

Forgotten Movie Songs #17: "My Name is Tallulah" from BUGSY MALONE

Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone is one of the few films from my childhood that I still look at with the same adoration I first felt for it. Its melding of the adult and juvenile worlds seems now seamless. It stands as perfection, in its own odd way. When, as children, we all play at the grown-up games of rampant violence--whether it be cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, superheroes and

Forgotten Movie Songs #16: "Da Butt" from SCHOOL DAZE

I felt like hopping up the pace of the songs featured in this series, so I thought of this wild number from Spike Lee's 1988 quasi-musical School Daze. Filmed partially at Atlanta's Morehouse College, the oldest black university in the nation (where Lee attended before moving on to NYU's film school), this free-wheeling picture charts a few days in the lives of students pledging fraternities,

Forgotten Movie Songs #15: "Is It Okay If I Call You Mine?" from FAME

It's a tiny little scene in a sort of great big movie. It stars only one character--not the scads of kids we remember pouring out of the front of New York's High School for the Performing Arts during the performance of its #1 Oscar-winning title song. And, yet, Paul McCrane's single solo musical performance seen in 1980's Fame remains a fan favorite in a picture filled with great music. The

Forgotten Movie Songs #14: "Tell Me" from ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE

The ending to James William Guercio's Arizona highwayman cop film Electra Glide in Blue has cinematographer Conrad Hall's camera performing an awe-inspiring pull-back from the final image, thus dwarfing our film's hero, Robert Blake, by having the valley's buttes swallow him up with their majesty. When paired with the epic ode to a lost America, called "Tell Me," the shot--in spite of its

Forgotten Movie Songs #13: "Truck Turner" from TRUCK TURNER

Isaac Hayes wanted desperately to play John Shaft in Gordon Parks' landmark 1971 actioner Shaft. But Parks went another way. Instead he tapped Hayes to write the songs and score for Shaft, and for that effort, Hayes became one of the first black artists to ever win the coveted Academy Award, for his blazing title song (which went on to also win a Golden Globe and four Grammies).


It would be

Forgotten Movie Songs #12: "I Will Always Be With You" from VOICES

Jimmy Webb deserves a medal for being one of America's great songwriters. Though he's a musician and performer, he's not someone you can recall seeing play live. He's mainly become famous for his radically dramatic songs alone. You know his smash hits, even if you think you don't. Here's a sample:

**"MacArthur Park" (performed by Richard Harris and Donna Summer)
**"By The Time I Get To

Forgotten Movie Songs #11: "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" from A BOY NAMED CHARLIE BROWN

I've always been a fan of Charles Schulz's barely-veiled version of himself, Charlie Brown. Of course, Charlie first came to life on television in 1965, via the holiday perennial A Charlie Brown Christmas. But it took four years for this success to hit the big screen. In 1969's A Boy Named Charlie Brown, our hero dares to take on the challenges of the school spelling bee, making it all the way

Forgotten Movie Songs #10: "A Friend" from W.W. AND THE DIXIE DANCEKINGS

I haven't seen John G. Avildsen's W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings since it played on cable back in the early 1980s. Before that, it made an impression on me as a fun, very Southern-flavored musical romp. I watched it first at the Southeast Expressway Drive-In in Atlanta, GA, in 1975, probably on a double bill with another Burt Reynolds movie (my recollection is the second feature was Reynolds'

Forgotten Movie Songs #9: "O Willow Waly" from THE INNOCENTS

At the beginning of Jack Clayton's elegant but shocking 1961 horror film The Innocents, the audience sits in a darkened theater, listening as a song sings out, seeming as old as the film's central location--a maddening, decrepit manor isolated on the rainy English countryside. This macabre ditty is delivered a capella by a little girl--presumably Pamela Franklin, who stars along with Martin

Forgotten Movie Songs #8: "Moondust" from MEATBALLS

In the late 70s and way into the 80s, composer Elmer Bernstein was the comedy filmmaker's go-to guy. The legendary composer had been providing music for movies and television since the early 50s, and most of the titles were serious affairs like The Tin Star, Sweet Smell of Success, Walk on the Wild Side, The Magnificent Seven, To Kill A Mockingbird, Summer and Smoke, Hud, Birdman of Alcatraz

Forgotten Movie Songs #7: "Long, Long Day" from ONE TRICK PONY

Robert M. Young is an unsung director who contributed many near perfect yet certainly idiosyncratic films to cinema in the late 70s/early 80s, including the odd prison picture Short Eyes, the Robert Altman-produced latchkey kid dramady Rich Kids, the culturally detailed Edward James Olmos vehicle The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, the Farrah Fawcett rape thriller Extremities, and the moving Dominick

Forgotten Movie Songs #6: "In My Own Way" from SHOCK TREATMENT

In 1981, I was just discovering pop music, having been a classical music fan up until I was about 12. I was about to reach my 15th birthday when I was thumbing through LPs at my local Turtle's Music and heard this rocking, magnificent song playing over the store's PA. As we are all likely to do when we hear music we love, I asked for the tune's source. And I found it was being sung by