Upcoming Spy CDs: Crossplot

Quartet Records will release Stanley Black's fantastic score to the 1969 post-Saint, pre-Bond Roger Moore spy movie Crossplot. I love Crossplot. Sure, it feels more like a TV production than a film (not surprising considering it was made by  a number of people from the Saint crew), but the TV production it feels like is The Saint, so what's wrong with that? It's like The Saint plus helicopter chases, or James Bond minus the budget. Either way, it's pretty awesome and I highly recommend it. (It is available on DVD and streaming on Amazon.) And either way, it's got a great score. Furthermore, since it belonged to Roger Moore and Bob Baker's production company, some of the music was later re-purposed for use in The Persuaders! And regular readers know that a full album of Persuaders! music is my own soundtrack Holy Grail, so the fact that this release gets us a little closer to that is yet another reason to celebrate. Also very cool is the fact that Quartet used such awesome artwork for the cover of the album. Crossplot is one of those movies (like Deadlier Than the Male and Hot Enough For June) that inspired me to collect posters from every country it was released in, and of all the cool Crossplot art (some of which intentionally made it appear to be a Saint movie), this art from the U.S. 1-sheet is the coolest.

Crossplot comes paired with another great Black score from that era, AIP's War Gods of the Deep. The release includes a 28-page booklet with liner notes by Gergely Hubai, who, according to the Quartet website, "discusses the composer and the films with a track-by-track analysis for both titles." You can listen to samples on the Quartet site and pre-order the album from Screen Archives Entertainment. It's due out later this month.