Lovely review for Ode to Billy Joe:
Among movies based on country-fied hit songs like “The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia” and “Take This Job and Shove It,” one of the most unexpected cinematic treatments given to a Red State ballad came from 1976’s “Ode To Billy Joe.” With it’s folksy guitar and plunging string line, Bobbie Gentry spun the story in 1967 of how Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and how the narrator’s family tries to make sense of his suicide. It was fairly daring in the way that “Beverly Hillbillies” star-turned-director Max Baer Jr. revealed the reason as gay panic, putting a tragic spin onto the re-teaming of attractive young stars Robby Benson and Glynnis O’Connor from the previous big city bonding for “Jeremy.” With their love now significantly more tormented in “Ode’s” unaccepting, period setting of 1950’s Mississippi, there was no better composer to call in than Frenchman Michel Legrand. In a film scoring culture used to lushly playing tragedy, Legrand had a remarkably thematic talent for tearing romance asunder in such as scores as “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “The Happy Ending,” “Wuthering Heights” and his Oscar-winning “Summer of ’42.” As with many of his memorable orchestral works, Legrand’s “Ode” is mainly comprised of a melody equally capable of swooning affection and heart-rending doom, his string-laden emotions spinning from delicate strokes of the piano into a full orchestra. For even if the finally manic Billy Joe thinks that no one can understand the unspeakable urges his girlfriend can’t comprehend, leave it to Legrand to fully express them. It’s the kind of sweepingly tempestuous, symphonic music for young lovers that instantly grabs the heart, keyboard, flute, harp and strings aflutter with all of the unbridled emotion that comes from raging hormones that don’t go the way its doomed hero desperately hopes for. Gentry’s vibe becomes the stuff of Shakespearean lyricism in Legrand’s passionately melodic hands with a score that stands tall with his best dramatic work, which remains just as vibrant four decades later with Kritzerland’s sumptuous premiere CD release of the original LP, whose first side as such contains the Gentry classic and Legrand’s score, with the remaining soundtrack given over to the far more indigenous country pickin’, fiddlin’ and harmonica blowin’ source music that’s a contrasting hoedown to a kid born in the wrong place, and wrong time, even if that song never hinted at first to the reason for his jump into lush, symphonic and oh-so French waters of the Tallahatchie.
Daniel Schweiger
