Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Bible Movie Epics: Samson, Solomon & More

With Passover and Easter right around the corner, we’re entering the peak season for Bible movies. This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s an hour of music from epics inspired by the Old Testament – including “Samson and Delilah” (Victor Young), “Solomon and Sheba” (Mario Nascimbene), “Sodom and Gomorrah” (Miklós Rózsa) and “The Ten Commandments” (Elmer Bernstein).

We begin and end with two Cecil B. DeMille productions. DeMille could always be counted on to give his audience a good show. Both “Samson” and “The Ten Commandments” feature sultry temptresses, violent, bare-chested men, and plenty of austere moralizing. The climactic special effects in both films are still sublime.

Tyrone Power was originally cast as Solomon in King Vidor’s “Solomon and Sheba.” However, he died of a massive heart attack during shooting (at the age of 44), paving the way for Yul Brynner to assume the role of the wise king. Brynner, of course, would later become DeMille’s pharaoh Rameses. With Gina Lollobrigida as the Queen of Sheba, you know there has to be an orgiastic dance.

Miklós Rózsa characterized “Sodom of Gomorrah” as “an intriguing subject which developed into a bad picture,” and most critics agreed. Any film that casts Stewart Granger as Lot should be taken with a pillar of salt. Rózsa determined not to score any more Biblical epics after “Sodom,” though his music is nothing to be ashamed of. It possesses that classic Rózsa epic sound, much beloved, thanks to his work on “Quo Vadis,” “Ben-Hur” and “King of Kings.”

Chariots! Tunics! Histrionic acting! It’s going to be epic, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org!

PHOTOS: Victor Mature’s stuffed lion vs. Charlton Heston’s cotton candy beard

April 9, 2022
Somewhere in Time Secrets Revealed

We lost all track of time last night, as we discussed “Somewhere in Time” (1980). I suppose it’s only appropriate, given the subject matter. Still, the show ran to three hours! Then we stopped the stream on the assumption that everyone had had enough, and we wound up talking for another hour, until 11:00 pm!

Thank you, Jo Addie, for sharing your recollections of working on the film. Jo is president of INSITE, the International Network of Somewhere In Time Enthusiasts. In that capacity, she has done great things for the film’s legacy – getting it restored and reissued on home video, getting it back into theaters for a limited run, producing documentaries, keeping up with the cast and crew, overseeing the newsletter, and hosting annual “Somewhere in Time” weekends on Mackinac Island.

You can learn all about it and her amazing journey, and marvel at how spontaneity and serendipity can literally change the course of one’s life, by listening to her story here:

Then definitely do check out the INSITE website, where you’ll find lots more great anecdotes and information:

https://www.somewhereintime.tv/

Ironically, in three hours, there was very little time to actually discuss the content of the movie itself, so maybe we’ll have to go back in time and address it again at some point.

For the immediate future, Roy’s got another special guest lined up for tomorrow: actress and dancer Tanya Lemani. Fans of the original “Star Trek” television series will remember Lemani from the episode “Wolf in the Fold” (1967).

Wolf down your dinner and make the trek to the comments section for an out-of-this-world conversation. You’ll be howling for more, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, when they livestream on Facebook, this Sunday evening at 7:00 EDT!

https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

PHOTO: Jo Addie with Christopher Reeve on the set of “Somewhere in Time”

https://www.somewhereintime.tv/

April 9, 2022
Somewhere in Time: Jo Addie Interview

BREAKING! Jo Addie will be joining us tonight on “Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner” to share her reminiscences of “Somewhere in Time” (1980). A series of happenstances led Addie to appear through most of the film as an extra. During her three weeks on the intimate shoot on Mackinac Island, she got to know everyone pretty well, and she’s full of anecdotes about cast and crew, including actors Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, Christopher Plummer, and Teresa Wright, writer Richard Matheson, and director Jeannot Szwarc.

Addie is also longtime president of INSITE (International Network of Somewhere In Time Enthusiasts, founded by Bill Shepard in 1990). In this capacity, she hosts “Somewhere in Time” weekends at Mackinac’s Grand Hotel, conducts interviews, produces documentaries, and oversees the publication of the society’s fan magazine.

Furthermore, I love the fact that her husband, Jim, worked for many years as an audio engineer at Chicago’s classical music station, WFMT!

Join us on a sentimental journey to 1912, by way of 1980, when we meet up “Somewhere in Time,” on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana, when we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!

https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

PHOTO: Jo Addie (left) with Jane Seymour, on a visit to the plaque that now marks the location where the film’s time-defying lovers first meet.

More insight into INSITE here:

https://www.somewhereintime.tv/intro1.htm

April 8, 2022
Somewhere in Time John Barry’s Magic Touch

Composer John Barry does a lot of the heavy lifting in the fantasy romance, “Somewhere in Time” (1980).

Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour star in a film about a modern-day playwright, who becomes obsessed with a portrait of an early 20th century actress, and wills himself, through self-suggestion, back through the decades to meet her.

Richard Matheson provided the screenplay, based upon one of his own novels. Matheson is the weird fiction scribe who gave us “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” “I Am Legend,” “The Legend of Hell House,” “Duel,” “What Dreams May Come,” and some of the best “Twilight Zone” episodes.

The author felt that “Somewhere in Time”s source material, “Bid Time Return,” represented some of his best writing. But in the movie, it’s Barry that really sells it. And a good thing too, since the director is Jeannot Szwarc – he of “Jaws 2,” “Supergirl,” and “Santa Claus: The Movie” notoriety.

Barry, a five-time Academy Award winner, left his stamp on a dozen James Bond movies. He scored the project as a favor to Seymour, a personal friend. Elsewise, the film’s modest budget would have prohibited hiring the composer at his usual fee.

Barry wrote the score shortly after losing both of his parents, which he credited, in part, for its strong emotional content. He must still have been under its spell a few years later, when he came to write his Oscar-winning music for “Out of Africa.”

Oh yeah, Rachmaninoff gets a pretty good workout too, as the characters are fond of “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”

At the time of its release, “Somewhere in Time” received lukewarm reviews, but the film has been kept alive by an ardent fanbase of hopeless romantics.

You’ll need a steamer trunk full of lace handkerchiefs, when Roy and I make time for “Somewhere in Time,” on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Leave your implausible timepieces in the comments section (and your pennies at home), when we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!

https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

April 7, 2022
Destouches Turns 350 A French Baroque Birthday

Today is the 350th birthday of André Cardinal Destouches. My, but how time flies!

Destouches’ best-known music is “Les Élémens” (“The Elements”) of 1721. The complete opéra-ballet, consisting of a prologue and four “entrées,” was written in collaboration with Michel Richard Delalande. In the grand tradition of footloose French kings, an 11 year-old Louis XV danced in the divertissements.

According to the composer, “At its first appearance this ballet was by no means the success we hoped for. It was found to be long; it seemed to be too serious; it was danced by noble youths whose talents were not up to the highest standards. Which caused very unpleasant boredom that was most humiliating for the authors.”

It was revived at the Paris Opera four years later to increasing success, and remained in the repertoire for half a century.

In 1697, Destouches’ opera “Issé” had been a big hit with dancing monarch Louis XIV, who claimed to enjoy Destouches’ music as much as that of Jean-Baptiste Lully. (Lully, also a dancer, and the most powerful musician in France, died of a gangrenous foot wound ten years earlier.)

In 1713, Louis appointed Destouches inspector general of the Académie Royale de Musique, at a stipend of 4000 livres a year. In 1725, Louis XV made him director of the Académie, as well as superintendent of La Musique de la Chambre du Roi. With the death of his colleague, Delalande, in 1726, Destouches was installed as Surintendant de la Musique du Roi – a post once held by Lully himself.

Happy semiseptcentennial, André Cardinal Destouches!

From “Les Élémens”

From “Issé”

And speaking of “entrées,” Delalande’s “Symphonies for the King’s Supper”

April 6, 2022

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