Fred Karlin's Sweet and Folksy Scores for "The Sterile Cuckoo" and "Up the Down Staircase"

Growing up on 60's movies, I tended to notice the music in them. Bernard Herrmann was finishing his run with Hitchcock(Vertigo and North by Northwest in the late 50's yielding to the immortal Psycho and some lesser Hitchcock films in the 60s) and was making magic with Ray Harryhausen's monster movies(Sinbad from the 50's led into Mysterious Island and the immortal Jason and the Argonauts.)

The Big Man of the 60s was Henry Mancini, who kicked off the decade with Peter Gunn(TV) and Moon River(Breakfast at Tiffanys) and ruled the decade with music for thrillers(Experiment in Terror, Charade), romance(Breakfast at Tiffanys', Dear Heart) comedy(The Pink Panther, The Great Race) and drama (Days of Wine and Roses.) Many a Mancini score yield a hit vocal on the radio.

Elmer Bernstein was there to do Westerns(The Magnificent Seven, The Sons of Katie Elder) and drama(To Kill a Mockingbird).

And "coming up fast" was Jerry Goldsmith, for Westerns(Rio Conchos, Lonely are the Brave) and spy movies(Our Man Flint) and even spy TV(The Man From UNCLE.) Goldsmith would rule for decades to come, the muscular go-to guy for sweeping emotional scores(like The Sand Pebbles, Oscar bait) and genre movies alike.

And don't forget Neal Hefti, kind of trailing Mancini as a "lush jazz" composer in films like Harlow and How to Murder Your Wife --not to mention Batman on TV -- before climaxing at the end of the decade with Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple(his "greatest hit" theme song of movies and TV).

Which brings me to...Fred Karlin.

Who? Well, I was thinking of Fred Karlin when I watched "The Sterile Cuckoo" again the other night, for the first time in a long time.

The movie cadged a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Liza Minnelli(in her second film) but also had a theme song by the Sandpipers called "Come Saturday Morning" that saturated 1969-1970 radio as a soft rock hit and was also nominated for an Oscar (Best Song...lost to Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head.)

"Come Saturday Morning" is played a lot in The Sterile Cuckoo. Over the opening credits(which are over a freeze frame of Minnelli's college-bound Pookie Adams sitting at a bus stop with her father), and many times during the film to illustrate what Roger Ebert called "The Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude" of the young lovers cavorting in flowery meadows and seaside at the beach.

Its an effective song that envelops The Sterile Cuckoo in a weirdlly feel good tone that does NOT fit the sad and rather creepy story we are actually watching.

But even more than the song, there is the instrumental score that , in the opening credits, leads up TO Come Saturday Morning, then away FROM Come Saturday Morning and finds its way across the remainder of the movie as well, to the same effect as the song: giving the movie an upbeat, whimsical feeling that will be destroyed by what's really going to happen.

Fred Karlin did the score for The Sterile Cuckoo and the music for Come Saturday Morning, so that movie is "his baby" musically.

I looked up Karlin's credits and found one for a movie of 1967 called "Up the Down Staircase." As with "The Sterile Cuckoo" THAT one doesn't get shown much anymore either(Turner Classic Movies , maybe?)

As it turns out, Alan J. Pakula...who debuted as a director on The Sterile Cuckoo..had been the PRODUCER of "Up the Down Staircase," so I suppose you could credit him with hiring Fred Karlin to do the scores for both movies and...

...they are kind of similar. A matched pair of one-of-a-kind musical experiences designed, I would say, to get the audience in a good mood and yet...not quite. There is a sadness to both the story of Up the Down Staircase(about a white female teacher trying to make a difference in a tough inner city NYC school) and The Sterile Cuckoo(about a shy young man's doomed college romance with a DEEPLY troubled young woman)..and the scores for both movies are very emotional behind their upbeat surfaces.

There is a fair amount of folksy flute to both scores; The Sterile Cuckoo plays in more soft and private musical notes(befitting its isolated country college atmosphere) while Up the Down Staircase is more jaunty and open and circus-like(befitting its crowded NYC high school atmosphere.)

The team of Alan J. Pakula(producer) and Robert Mulligan(director) put together a lot of movies together and their most famous -- To Kill a Mockingbird -- sported a beautiful nostalgic score by Elmer Bernstein that rather prepares for the Fred Karlin music to come later. Its interesting that when Pakula finally broke away from his partner to direct on his own, he took Fred Karlin -- and not Elmer Bernstein, with him.

Fred Karlin's themes to "The Sterile Cuckoo" and "Up the Down Staircase" are available on Youtube, interesting to listen to, side by side.