Category: Daily Dispatch

G’day! This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’re off to the antipodes for an hour of music from films set in the Australian bush.

Ealing Studios shot several movies there – three independently, and then two in collaboration with MGM. The first was “The Overlanders” (1946), told in semi-documentary style, about a wartime push to evacuate Australia’s Northern Territory, with its 5000 settlers and a million head of cattle, before an anticipated Japanese invasion. The music is by John Ireland. Despite its excellence, it would prove to be Ireland’s only film score.

Ealing’s final independent Australian venture was “Bitter Springs” (1950). One of the earliest cinematic attempts to address Aboriginal land rights and colonial dispossession, the film tells the story of a headstrong patriarch of an Australian pioneer family, who denies the locals access to a watering hole, precipitating a cycle of violence.

The thematic material was by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who left it to composer and conductor Ernest Irving to arrange and orchestrate what he felt needed for the various cues. Vaughan Williams wrote his friend and colleague to express his pleasure with the finished product. Irving would soon receive the dedication of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 7, the “Sinfonia Antartica” (itself derived from RVW’s film score to Ealing’s “Scott of the Antarctic”).

Both of these films, “The Overlanders” and “Bitter Springs,” are essentially westerns set in the Australian outback. From a little closer to our own time, we’ll hear music from another film that’s unapologetic in its use of American western motifs, “Quigley Down Under” (1990).

The film stars Tom Selleck as an American cowboy, hired by an Australian rancher, played by Alan Rickman, allegedly to shoot dingoes; however, he soon finds that the rancher’s real purpose is to rid the land of Aborigines – a proposition Quigley naturally rejects, setting up the film’s conflict.

The score is by Basil Poledouris, a composer who achieved cult status for his work on films like “Robocop” and especially “Conan the Barbarian,” though he never really seemed to receive the recognition the deserved. He did, however, win an Emmy for his score to “Lonesome Dove.”

Finally, we’ll have just a bit from John Barry’s haunting score to Nicholas Roeg’s “Walkabout” (1971), in which two British children find themselves stranded in the bush and survive only through the aid of a young Aborigine.

We’re heading down under and out back this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!

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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/