This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s the equivalent of a cinematic shell game. We’ll have musical selections from films about confidence games, charlatans and hucksters.
In “The Magician” (1958), also known as “The Face,” Igmar Bergman explores the idea of theatre as both confidence game and beautiful mystery. Max von Sydow stars as a traveling illusionist whose troupe of strolling entertainers, The Magnetic Healing Theatre, is put to test before being granted permission to perform at the royal court. The score, by Erik Nordgren, is sparse, made up of a dozen very short pieces for harp and two guitars, some movements for brass band, and in the main title, the addition of percussion.
George C. Scott plays Mordecai Jones, a confidence man who defrauds the populace of the American South through various means, with a specialty in rigged punchboards, in “The Flim-Flam Man” (1967). The film, shot on location in Kentucky by director Irvin Kershner, features a gallery of colorful character actors, including Jack Albertson, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin and Harry Morgan. The happy-go-lucky score, by Jerry Goldsmith, makes use of harmonica, banjo, and freewheeling honky-tonk piano.
Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” (2002) is based on the real-life exploits of the chameleonic Frank Abagnale, who, before his 19th birthday, managed to successfully pull a series of cons worth millions of dollars. Along the way, he posed convincingly as a lawyer, a doctor, and a pilot. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Abagnale, and Tom Hanks, the bank fraud agent who develops an unusual relationship with him, as the light-hearted cat-and-mouse thriller unfolds. John Williams wrote the intimate and jazzy score, a throw-back to the musical syntax of caper films of the 1960s, but also to the composer’s own jazz roots (when he still went by “Johnny Williams”).
Finally, we’ll hear music from that classic of religious hucksterism, “Elmer Gantry” (1960). Burt Lancaster plays the hard-drinking, fast-talking salesman-turned-revivalist, in one of the great movie performances. Lancaster was recognized with a much-deserved Academy Award for Best Actor. Shirley Jones, of “The Partridge Family” fame, won Best Supporting Actress for playing one of Gantry’s shady ladies. The film’s brilliant score was by none other than André Previn.
Listen with “confidence” to WWFM – The Classical Network, this Friday evening at 6 EDT, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or enjoy the show later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
