This week on “Picture Perfect,” with the box office success of the most recent incarnation of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” I thought it might be fun to revisit music from the 1942 Korda Brothers’ version. The film starred the charismatic Sabu as Mowgli (for the record, Kipling pronounced “Mowgli” so that the first syllable rhymes with “cow”), and Miklós Rózsa wrote the enchanting score.
We’ll also hear selections from John Barry’s music for “Born Free” (1966), based on Joy Adamson’s memoir about the raising of Elsa, an orphaned lion cub who grows to adulthood and is eventually released into the Kenyan wilderness. The music proved a double Academy Award winner for Barry, who was recognized for Best Original Score and Best Original Song.
Jerome Moross, best known for his music to “The Big Country,” had such a strong personality that his immediately recognizable sound extended even to his work on the National Geographic special, “Grizzly!” (1967), a documentary about a pair of ecologists studying North American bears. “Grizzly!” sports an energetic Americana score that is cut very much from the same cloth.
And I can’t get through the hour without playing Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk,” from “Hatari!” (So many exclamation points in these wilderness titles.) The film was directed by Howard Hawks and starred John Wayne. In case you’re wondering, “Hatari!” is Swahili for “Danger!”
No danger in treating yourself to this cinematic carnival of the animals. We’re going wild this week on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6 EDT, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
