Johnny Mandel, the composer who gave “M*A*S*H” its theme song, “Suicide Is Painless,” who wrote the Oscar-winning “The Shadow of Your Smile” for “The Sandpiper,” and whose talents as an arranger were employed by entertainers as varied as Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, died June 29 at his home in Ojai, Calif. He was 94.
Johnny Mandel, the composer who gave “M*A*S*H” its theme song, “Suicide Is Painless,” who wrote the Oscar-winning “The Shadow of Your Smile” for “The Sandpiper,” and whose talents as an arranger were employed by entertainers as varied as Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, died June 29 at his home in Ojai, Calif. He was 94.
The cause was a heart ailment, said his daughter, Marissa Mandel.
Mandel began his career as a trumpeter and trombonist with top big bands of the 1940s and early 1950s. As rock began to supplant jazz — “some of the best players in the world were starving,” he later said — he transitioned to arranging music for Las Vegas floor shows. He entered the new medium of television, writing background music for programs such as Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” and, by the late 1950s, had slipped easily into Hollywood film scoring.
He injected jazz — the idiom he knew best — into movie music just as the old studio system and its romantic symphonic language were dying. He delivered what was widely seen as his finest work in his debut, “I Want to Live!” (1958), director Robert Wise’s Oscar-nominated film about a prostitute (Susan Hayward) on death row for a murder she didn’t commit.
Mandel hired top-flight musicians for the film score, among them trumpeter Art Farmer, trombonist Frank Rosolino, baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and drummer Shelly Manne. He underlaid moments of suspense with rumbling jazz percussion and made the execution scene queasier with a slinking piccolo motif over a drooping swing rhythm.
One of the first pure jazz soundtracks ever written for a film, it vividly announced Mandel as a new force in the medium. He remained in demand as an arranger for jazz albums, with credits including Sinatra’s “Ring-a-Ding-Ding!” and Jo Stafford’s dazzling “Jo + Jazz,” but he mostly focused on his movie career.
He won an Academy Award for best original song for the gentle, bossa nova-tinged “The Shadow of Your Smile,” from the 1965 romantic drama “The Sandpiper” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He received an Oscar nomination for “A Time for Love” from “An American Dream” (1966), a crime story with Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh. Both tunes featured lyrics by Paul Francis Webster.
Mandel demonstrated his versatility in a range of other A-list films. He worked on “Harper” (1966), a sleuthing yarn starring Paul Newman as a self-destructive detective; “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” (1966), a hit Cold War comedy with Carl Reiner; “Point Blank” (1967), a stylish crime drama with Lee Marvin; and “The Last Detail” (1973), an acclaimed military comedy-drama with Jack Nicholson.
