In Cold Blood-Truman Capotes story of the Clutter family murders in Kansas in 1959 and starring Robert Blake, John Forsythe and Scott Wilson. The film is very good and still holds up well after all this time. Also featured in it was a short part with Charles MacGraw as one of the fathers of the killers. The score by Jones is very effective and is right on. The main title is powerful. I characterize it as a semi-jazz dramatic score. It fits the mood and pacing of the film. I would like a CD of this. I had the LP for years. Dont know what happened to it. It was on the Colgems Label.

2. The second one-Mackennas Gold is a modern type western with all the gimmicks. Starring Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif and an allstar cast of the men from Hadleyville. Also several non-speaking parts, but people who were in many scenes, Keenan Wynn(he laughed but said little in the film}, along with Ted Cassidy and Julie Newmar. All three said little in film. A very stupid and hokey movie with lots of jerky camera work about finding gold in a canyon where Indians control. The funniest scene of all is where Peck is on a horse on a bridge and the horse starts raring up on its back legs and you can tell its a mechanical horse shot from long range. Lots of shaky film sequences shot from the eye trying to mimic 3=D without the actual thing. Very silly. The score by Jones is very good. Incorporating the song that Jose Felicano sings into the score. The Main title is once again very good and variations of it are heard in the score. Many good cues in it.

These are two of the few he did back in 60s and early 70s that were very good and he was progressing nicely before he quit doing films. No telling what he would have done had he continued for he was very good and had good skills.

Mirage, The Deadly Affair and The Pawnbroker.

The Deadly Affair is very good, with a Bossa Nova song sung by Astrid Gilberto. The CD is available paired up with his score for The Pawnbroker.

Mirage was released on LP from Mercury at the time the film was released. If you can find a copy, I highly recommended.

Jones had a very good dramatic sense for scoring in his 60s work.

Quincy Jones Stunning Oscar-Nominated Score Was a Breakthrough . . .
by filmfactsman (February 10, 2005)
The true breakthrough for black composers in Hollywood came with Quincy Jones's riveting work on 1967's "In Cold Blood". That year, Jones did the music for both "In the Heat of the Night" and "In Cold Blood". Although his theme for "In the Heat of the Night", sung by the late Ray Charles, gained more popularity with the mass audience, critics devoted more attention to his work on "In Cold Blood", in which he pushed farthest the infusing of a jazz score with a deeply disquieting musical idiom.

Jones, a new Hollywood composer in the 1960s, demonstrated great flexibility and openness to experimentation, but he also displayed a capacity to let go of any posture of preciousness toward his own artistic creations when the situation demanded. For example, when Richard Brooks, the director of the film, disliked a section of Jones's score, Brooks instructed the sound mixer, Jack Solomon, to simply leave it out. Solomon, however, played Jones's composition backwards on the tape and decided to use the music in this way to accompany a scene where two drifters approach the farmhouse of their victims. Brooks was delighted with the results, as was Jones.

Bond, I love both THE PAWNBROKER (shattering) and THE DEADLY AFFAIR. For the latter, his lush bossa nova take sometimes seems at odds with the grimy London locales, but it's a great, if monothematic listen.

I mentioned on another thread that Quincy Jones' subsequent reaching the peak as the greatest record producer of all time was very much our loss, but that's just my narrow-minded opinion. Just ask a Michael Jackson fan. Or Quincy Jones himself.