‘Mission: Impossible’ composer Lalo Schifrin dies at 93

For a while in the 1960s and ’70s, if a story moved fast, directors wanted it to move to the propulsive rhythms of Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin.

Schifrin died on Thursday at the age of 93, his son, William, told NPR.

“He really was such a genius at combining rhythm, texture, instrumentation and melody in such a powerful and unique way,” Daniel Pemberton, an English composer and songwriter who works in film and television and composed the scores for the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, wrote on X.

Schifrin scored episodes for more than a hundred films and TV shows, and provided theme music for quite a few, including Starsky & Hutch, Mannix, and most notably, for a tense TV spy series that launched an even tenser film spy series.

Mission: Impossible always got underway with a flaring match, a lit fuse, and the words “this tape will self-destruct in five seconds.” But it was the flute glissando and the distinctly Latin beat that got things moving. Has there ever been a thriller theme more instantly recognizable?

A childhood steeped in opera, tango and jazz

Schifrin grew up in Buenos Aires, surrounded by music. His father played violin in the Teatro Colon Opera, so young Lalo’s early piano training was classical. But he also played with tango-great Astor Piazzolla, represented Argentina in an international jazz festival in Paris, and started a 16-piece jazz band while still in his 20s.

An encounter with Dizzy Gillespie resulted in Schifrin writing a piece called “Gillespiana,” and not long after that, Gillespie brought him to the U.S. as his arranger. From there, Hollywood beckoned.

After scoring all those action scenes in TV shows, Schifrin was hired for the Steve McQueen movie thriller Bullitt — oddly, to score everything except the big car chase for which the film is famous. Schifrin builds the tension to a thrumming frenzy beforehand. And then, when McQueen snaps on his seat belt and guns his engine, the only music you hear for about seven minutes is the squeal of wheels.

Scoring Sensurround, horror and martial arts

But he got to score plenty of other movie chases — in pretty much everything that fellow jazz-buff Clint Eastwood did for a while, including Dirty Harry. And in a less frenzied vein, he scored Paul Newman’s stint in prison in Cool Hand Luke.

He also provided the thrum for Rollercoaster‘s Sensurround, a movie theater sound system popularized in the 1970s that used low-frequency sound waves to physically vibrate the audience. Developed by MCA and Cerwin-Vega, it was famously used in the film “Earthquake” to simulate the sensation of an earthquake.as well as bringing tension to the apparitions in The Amityville Horror frenzy to the killer ants in the documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle. And somewhat to his surprise, he was hired to score Bruce Lee’s final film, Enter the Dragon, at the star’s request.

Though Bruce Lee and the composer never met, Lalo Schifrin learned later that the reason he got the gig was that Lee had been running his martial arts practice sessions to the theme from Mission: Impossible.