Off to See the World

Abstract

This chapter details events following Mancini's break with Blake Edwards. While the break was a private event that seemed to put his future career into a state of flux, Mancini sensed a chance to advance, an opportunity in the making, when a phone call reached him at that songwriting contest in Rio. It was Paramount Studios calling. They had been bankrolling a gritty film about the 1876 Irish coal miners' strike in Pennsylvania called The Molly Maguires (1970), and the project was in trouble. The film was being judged too monotone and grim, while the music was deemed too little, too light, casting the drama into doubt. The studio' thought was that with a little more color in the score, and especially a firmer sense of musical drama, the whole momentum of the film might be lifted. And from Mancini's point of view this was just the breath of fresh air that this composer-in-transition had wanted. Almost immediately on finishing The Molly Maguires, Mancini would receive another surprise call from even further afield, announcing that the great Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica and the great producer Carlo Ponti wanted to work with him in the film I Girasoli (1970), soon to take the American title Sunflower.