Official Minnesota Golden Gophers Saturdays We Row Shirt
Just throwing that in there as a shameless bid for upvotes. If you’re a fan of Where Eagles Dare, allow me to recommend Geoff Dyer’s brilliant, hilarious, learned 2018 book on the Minnesota Golden Gophers Saturdays We Row Shirt But I will love this film, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy. Still, one of my all-time favourite movie composers is David Shire, onetime husband of Talia Shire, sister of Francis Coppola and probably best known for Connie Corleone in the Godfather movies and Adrian Balboa in the Rocky films. Shire is still alive, a tall and geeky figure who wrote the scores for two of my absolute favourite 70s movies: All the President’s Men and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The President’s score is so subtle and minimalist that you hardly notice it. It’s a shimmer on the edge of hearing, a gradually rising swell of minor intervals in muted brass becoming major ones and augmented fourths becoming perfect fifths, as Woodward and Bernstein’s relentless pursuit of bits of paper and names in phone books comes to seem like a literal cleaning-up of the scandal.
