Alas, they and M Carné soon parted company, and it fell to Yves Montand to introduce Kosma and Prévert's greatest song to the world. Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich were signed to star, which meant they'd have been the ones to introduce "Les feuilles mortes". So did he, and by the time it went into production in 1945 Les Portes de la Nuit was being ballyhooed as the most expensive film ever made in France. So what next for the trio? Well, Prévert and Kosma had an opera, Le Rendez-vous, and they thought it might make rather a good movie for Carné. With the director Marcel Carné, Prévert and Kosma made the classic Les Enfants du Paradis. Nonetheless, Prévert discreetly arranged some movie work for his friend, with suitably non-Semitic composers fronting for the forbidden Jew. Then came the war and the Nazi occupation, and Kosma found himself under house arrest and banned from composition. Prévert introduced Kosma to Jean Renoir and the composer wound up scoring, among other pictures, La Grande Illusion and Les Règles du Jeu. Somewhere along the way, he ran into Joseph Kosma, a Hungarian émigré who'd washed up in France in 1933 as part of the great tide of European Jews trying to stay one step ahead of the Third Reich. But he was too talented to be confined to fads and fashions, and his best poetry stands on its own. Born in 1900, raised in Paris, he flirted in early life with surrealism, with the rue du Château group and Marcel Duchamp. Jacques Prévert wrote those words, in French, as a poem. Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelleĭead leaves are collected by the shovelful Autumn leaves are a reminder of mortality, and decline, and loss: It's an image that reminds you of the cruel remorselessness of time, even in my part of the world - northern New England - where the foliage blazes brightest, red and gold and orange, just before it falls and dies. You don't have to be moonstruck or in love at all to feel a certain melancholy when autumn nips the air, as it does this very week: Yet there is one great seasonal signifier that almost everyone responds to. Of course, if you're not a young man in love, spring fever may pass you by, and, if you're in late middle age, the summer may be no more likelier a prompter of romance than mid-November. Song for song, Where Are You? may bear a slightly lighter feel than 1955's epochal In the Wee Small Hours, but then, so does anything short of Apocalypse Now.A truly great song for the season isn't about the calendar, or the weather. On "I'm a Fool to Want You," Sinatra plumbs the emotional depths of obsession and desire. "Laura" is a standard that was written more than a decade earlier by Johnny Mercer for a film of the same name, but it was defined forevermore by this recording. Nevertheless, the songs themselves include some of the most haunting in Sinatra's catalog. Where Nelson dramatically offset Sinatra's voice with almost pointillist orchestral applications, Jenkins puts a plush pillow under the singer, letting Sinatra luxuriate in the sonic surroundings. 1957's Where Are You? was the first of those to go without the angular, artful arrangements of Nelson Riddle, instead putting Gordon Jenkins in the arranger's chair. Frank Sinatra's reputation as a masterfully melancholy "saloon singer" rests largely on the torch song concept albums he made for Capitol Records in the '50s.
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