April 2006
Remembering Gene Pitney, 1941-2006

by Warren M. Sherk

Olivia Tiomkin Douglas with Gene Pitney backstage after a concert in Salisbury, March 2006.

Singer-songwriter Gene Pitney, the former teen idol who performed Dimitri Tiomkin’s title song for the film Town Without Pity, died unexpectedly on April 5 in Wales. Just the night before, he had performed in concert in Cardiff.

Pitney regularly concertized in England, Europe, and Australia, where his fan base remained loyal and strong for more than forty years. Born Gene Francis Allan Pitney in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1941, his Top 40 recording of “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away” in 1961 jump-started his pop music career. The tenor, affectionately known as “rock’s Caruso,” went on to record a number of hits written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and enjoyed some success himself as a songwriter. “He’s a Rebel” and “Hello Mary Lou” are among his best known, the latter reaching No. 9 on the Billboard charts in May of 1961. Over the next four years, more than a dozen of his records landed on the Top 40 chart, making him one of the most successful solo male vocalists in America. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

In March 2006, Olivia Tiomkin Douglas had the pleasure of attending a Pitney concert in Salisbury. The capacity crowd of adoring fans rewarded him with a standing ovation, and Pitney returned the gesture with a warm handshake for everyone he could reach from the stage. Visiting backstage with him after the concert, Tiomkin Douglas learned that the Town Without Pity title song recording session started at seven o’clock in the evening and continued into the early morning without one successful take. By three A.M., Pitney recalled, his strained voice had become increasingly noticeable in a particular take. An excited Tiomkin blurted out, “That’s it! That’s the quality I want!” After the film was released, a perceptive film critic even commented on Pitney’s “laryngitic voice.”

That Pitney came to record “Town Without Pity” was likely the result of his relationship with the newly formed Musicor label, a division of United Artists, the film’s releasing company. Musicor had already released “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away” and “Take Me Tonight.” “Town Without Pity” (Musicor 1009), his third single, was recorded before his next hit, “Every Breath I Take,” but released after. The latter, produced in association with the legendary Phil Spector, is an early example of the “Wall of Sound,” the now famous effect created by Spector’s groundbreaking production techniques.

Produced and directed by Gottfried Reinhardt (son of the director Max Reinhardt), Town Without Pity was a coproduction between the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. Its running time was 112 minutes at the film’s premiere in Germany in March 1961. It screened in New York City six months later and seven minutes shorter. Both the delay and the truncated running time were due to objections from the Production Code Administration over the film’s subject matter and dialogue. Within a month of the film’s general U.S. release on October 10, Pitney’s single was No. 88 on the charts. By the end of the year it was at No. 36, and peaked at No. 13 in 1962.

Sheet music for Town Without Pity.

Tiomkin was scheduled to attend a screening of the film—arranged especially for Academy members in hopes of snagging an Oscar nomination for lead actor Kirk Douglas—at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles on January 26, 1962. It is unclear whether Tiomkin actually attended, because a few days later he was in London meeting with the producer Carl Foreman about The Guns of Navarone. When the Academy Award nominations were announced on February 26, however, the film’s sole nomination went to the song “Town Without Pity,” by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington.

The following month, at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association banquet at the Beverly Hilton, Tiomkin was indeed in attendance, accepting a Best Original Score Golden Globe for The Guns of Navarone and a special honorary citation for “Town Without Pity.” This marked the first time in its nineteen-year history that the Hollywood Foreign Press had acknowledged a song from a motion picture. Two years later, the Press officially created the Best Original Song category and awarded the Golden Globe to none other than…Dimitri Tiomkin, for the title song from the film Circus World, making him the recipient of the first two Golden Globes for Best Song.

Gene Pitney performed “Town Without Pity” at the 34th Annual Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1962, backed by a trio of female singers. At 21, he may have been one of the youngest featured singers ever to participate in the show. Henry Mancini’s classic “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s took home the gold that night. Ironically, Mancini’s song, which generated some two dozen cover versions, capitalized on the theme score concept put into play by Tiomkin with High Noon. As Jeff Smith points out in The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, “Dimitri Tiomkin’s High Noon (1952) popularized the monothematic or theme score, which organized its melodic and motivic material around a single popular tune rather than a group of leitmotifs.”

Town Without Pity is the quintessential monothematic score. In the opening scene, four American soldiers stationed in Germany stroll into a bar. They select a song from the jukebox, and we hear Pitney croon, “When you’re young and so in love as we…” The song continues through the scene and the opening credits, ending with the solo lyric, “What a town without pity can do.” Part rock, part jazz, part lounge, the memorable theme is then heard in all eighteen orchestral background score cues.

Variety declared the title tune “a superior example of its usually lacklustre breed” with “an astonishingly haunting refrain.” Hollywood Reporter noted the tune, “gives an eerie contrapuntal emphasis to the film’s unpleasant events,” the latter including the rape of a young girl and the subsequent trial of the four GIs. The vocal version of the song is heard once in the film on Douglas’s car radio and over the end titles.

Reviews mentioning the film’s song and score were generally enthusiastic. Limelight‘s Len Simpson raved, “Perhaps the outstanding contribution to the entire package lies in the Dimitri Tiomkin music. Tiomkin has taken situations that might normally call for the usual type of mood scoring and has intermingled a haunting melody with a beat that is almost progressive jazz. Another plus is the Tiomkin title song, with lyrics by Ned Washington, which Gene Pitney sings in the picture. Already it has shown signs of becoming a big hit record.” Film Daily called the song and music “highly effective.”

Not all critics were in agreement. Arthur Knight, in the Saturday Review, felt “Dimitri Tiomkin’s blatant score, which sets rock-and-roll ricocheting through the streets of the quiet German town where the movie was made, manages unfailingly to inject Hollywood into the scene whenever it is heard—and his theme song just isn’t to be believed.” A Los Angeles Times reviewer thought the title tune provided a “weird accompaniment and is repeated interminably throughout the film.”

Nevertheless, the tune stuck in moviegoers’ minds. Between 1961 and 1971, Musicor included the song on some half-dozen Pitney compilation albums, from The Many Sides of Gene Pitney to World Wide Winners. An Italian-language version, “Citta Spietata,” earned him a new legion of fans, and the song also appeared numerous times on the Sequel label in Great Britain. “Town Without Pity” was featured on Original Motion Picture Hit Themes, released by United Artists (LP 6197) in 1963. By the late 1960s it was on its way to becoming a classic when a local Los Angeles radio station included the song in its “Hit Parade ’69—The Hits of Today and Yesterday.” After the New York Times proclaimed “The Return of Gene Pitney” in 1984, the song popped up in films such as Hairspray and Look Who’s Talking. Pitney’s only other film song hit was “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” in 1962, inspired by but not used in the film of the same name.

“Town Without Pity” will forever be associated with Gene Pitney’s memorable vocals. “[It] maybe sold a fifth of some of the other ones,” he told the New York Times in 1984, “but it is the one that hung in people’s heads. I still close my shows with it.” Indeed, that night in Cardiff, at the end of what would be his final concert, Pitney treated the audience to an exuberant rendition of “Town Without Pity.”

© 2006 Volta Music

Sources

  • The American Film Institute catalog
  • The Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the University of Southern California
  • The Core Collection and Production Code Administration files at the Margaret Herrick Library
  • Los Angeles Times
  • New York Times
  • The Daily Telegraph
  • www.answers.com
  • www.genepitney.com
  • www.wikipedia.com
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