$ [Original Soundtrack]

Quincy Jones’ film soundtrack portfolio was full to bursting within a few years of his breakthrough scoring Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker in 1965 — he had no less than five of them in 1969 alone — so by the time he hit the early ’70s, it seemed like he was starting to give himself enough breathing room to get a bit weird with it. And this half-remembered Warren Beatty/Goldie Hawn heist spoof was as startling as he got for his cinema gigs. The title theme “Money Is” and deep cut “Do It - To It” are recognizably of their time, more or less — both ride on a funky backbone that nods to the up-and-coming emergence of R&B-rooted Blaxploitation scores — and scoring lead vox from Little Richard during one of his temporary returns to secular music pushes things straight into rock’n’soul crossover turf. (That said, “Money Is”’s wah-wah-soaked, Clavinet-driven instrumental reprise “Money Runner” is only a notch or two less flamboyant without him.) A simultaneously cheery/heartfelt pop-soul update of old standard “When You’re Smiling” needs only a minute 45 to give Roberta Flack’s voice enough space to run that emotional gamut, a resonance that keeps it from coming across as tossed-off. But the strangeness lies in the margins, the brief cues that are too prickly and odd to count as aural wallpaper. Check out the surreal vocal choir droning over the lurching heavy-horn trudge of herky-jerky suspense-builder “Snow Creatures,” or the comedic nudging of “Rubber Ducky” and “Shady Lady.” Special honors go to legendary cratedigger favorite “Kitty With the Bent Frame” — made famous from a brief synth/string sting that Mobb Deep turned into a pivotal sample for the “Shook Ones, Pt. II” beat, but a strange beast in itself, all creeping lower-than-low basslines and distorted ghostly wordless voices and glimmering keyboards that feel ready to shatter in your hands and cut your fingers open.