It’s a shame you’ve got to stream all the way from the West Coast now to enjoy “Picture Perfect,” but there it is. Dropped from its natal station, the show can now be heard only in syndication (distributed exclusively by me). Stream it today on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.
It seems only appropriate that the focus of such a fine show, so ignominiously dismissed, should be “Lost Worlds and Lands That Time Forgot.”
While the concept of the “Lost World” dates at least as far back as Plato’s Atlantis, it wasn’t until the Victorian Era that the idea really blossomed in the public consciousness. At the time, of course, lost civilizations were genuinely being discovered – which might help to explain, in part, the incredible of success of “King Solomon’s Mines.” The author, H. Rider Haggard, wrote the book on a bet that he could churn out an adventure story half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” which had been published two years earlier.
“King Solomon’s Mines” became the literary sensation of 1885. Its protagonist, Allen Quatermain, is a direct ancestor of Indiana Jones. The book inspired reams of sequels and at least five film adaptations.
The two best known of these starred Stewart Granger and Princeton-born Paul Robeson, respectively. Robeson, who played Umbopa, a king in disguise, received top billing in 1937. It’s music for THAT version that we’ll be sampling. There was no score for the 1950 Granger version, beyond some tribal drumming (although Miklós Rózsa did provide a cue for the film’s trailer). The score for the 1937 adaptation is by Mischa Spoliansky.
Haggard achieved another “Lost World” hit with “She,” first issued in book form two years later, in 1887 – another adventure about Europeans in Africa, who meet a seemingly immortal white queen, known as the all-powerful “She” or “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.”
“She” has been adapted to film six times. The 1965 version starred Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee. The music is by Hammer Studios house composer, James Bernard. It’s nice to hear Bernard, who wrote mostly horror scores for the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein, provide something a little more nuanced for a change. She’s theme is so sensuous, it sounds as if it could have been cast off from Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe.”
Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” published in 1888, was clearly influenced by the writings of Haggard. In this case, two British adventurers in India strike out for a remote corner of Afghanistan to set themselves up as kings. The story was made into one of the great adventure films of the 1970s, directed by John Huston, and starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. That Christopher Plummer appears as Kipling himself is only icing on the cake. Maurice Jarre wrote the rousing score.
Finally, James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon,” published in 1933, imagines Shangri-La, a Utopian society nestled in a sheltered valley somewhere in the mountains of Tibet. A British diplomat is one of a handful of passengers who survives a plane crash to be taken into the lamasery.
“Lost Horizon” was made into a film twice. The less said about the 1973 version, a musical with songs by Burt Bacharach, the better. Frank Capra directed the classic 1937 version, which starred Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, and outstanding character actors of the day – actors like Edward Everett Horton, Thomas Mitchell, Sam Jaffe, and H.B. Warner.
The score, Dimitri Tiomkin’s first major contribution, was also one of his most ambitious. Seldom was it so obvious that he had studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Alexander Glazunov.
I say unto to you what my former employers said unto to me: Get lost! I hope you’ll join me for music for lost civilizations this week, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – this Friday evening, now on KWAX!
See below for streaming information.
Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)
THE LOST CHORD – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)
Stream them here!
PHOTO: Connery (right) with the man who would be Caine
