![]() ![]() Mickey Goldsen took "Les feuilles mortes" to the president of Capitol Records – Johnny Mercer. "If you think it's good," Conkling told him, "we'll give him the money." Aside from the 600 bucks, the French publisher also required Capitol to come up with an English lyric within four months. That seems a modest sum, but Goldsen still had to get authorization from the guy running the company, Jim Conkling. Capitol would get the US rights to the song for $600. Goldsen had his rep in Paris track down the publisher, and they made a deal. ![]() And I listened a minute, and I said, 'Oh, man, this is the greatest song I've ever heard.'" "And I listened to them, and I heard one song, I think Edith Piaf had recorded, called 'Les feuilles mortes'. "He sent me a pile of records this high," said Goldsen. He happened to love French songs, and he asked Serge Glickson, Capitol's rep in Paris, to keep him up to speed on what was popular with Gallic music lovers. The budget-busting film was a flop with French moviegoers in 1945, and so its finest moment took a few years to come to American ears.Īcross the Atlantic, a fellow called Michael Goldsen was running Capitol Records' publishing division. 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. A truly great song for the season isn't about the calendar, or the weather. ![]()
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