Get out your Silly Putty! There will be plenty of vibrant colors for you to enjoy this week on “Picture Perfect,” when the focus will be on comic adventurers – as in heroes from the funnies.
We’ll have music from movies inspired by the two-dimensional cliffhangers of newspaper favorites Prince Valiant, The Phantom, and Dick Tracy, as well as the longer-form, Golden Age adventures of Tintin.
“Prince Valiant” (1954) brings to life Hal Foster’s enduring Sunday strip about the exploits of a Viking prince at the court of King Arthur. Robert Wagner dons the signature page-boy haircut at the head of a hodge podge cast that also includes Janet Leigh, James Mason, Sterling Hayden, and Victor McLaglen (as Val’s Viking pal Boltar). The film also happens to feature one of Franz Waxman’s most rousing scores, clearly a prototype for the kind of music that later made John Williams a household name.
Then Billy Zane is “The Ghost Who Walks,” in a big screen adaptation of Lee Falk’s “The Phantom” (1996). Like Batman, The Phantom harnesses personal tragedy – in his case, the murder of his father – to a thirst for justice. He also happens to be part of an ancient lineage of Phantoms, who don the purple suit and fight crime from a secluded skull cave in a remote African country. The memorable, though somewhat monothematic, score is by David Newman, one of the sons of legendary Hollywood composer Alfred Newman.
Warren Beatty directs an amusing adaptation of Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy” (1990), replete with primary color production design and meticulously applied prosthetic makeup, transforming some of the most respected actors of the day (including Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and James Caan) into a live-action Rogue’s Gallery. Both design and makeup were recognized with Academy Awards, as was Stephen Sondheim, for his original song “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man),” sung in the film by Madonna. We won’t hear Sondheim’s song, but we will hear some of Danny Elfman’s underscore, which harkens back to Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Finally, we’ll turn from American newspaper strips to the comic albums of Belgian cartoonist Hergé, and his most famous creation, Tintin, an intrepid journalist whose stories seem always to embroil him in globetrotting adventures. Developed for the screen by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, “The Adventures of Tintin” (2011) was shot as 3-D motion capture animation.
After 50 years in the business, during which he wrote music for all manner of films, in virtually every genre, John Williams finally got a crack at scoring an animated feature. The result was a double Academy Award nomination, as Williams had also written the music that year for Spielberg’s “War Horse.” Not bad for a 79 year-old composer.
Unfortunately, “Tintin” never gained the kind of traction with the public that the filmmakers had hoped for, otherwise the score would certainly be much better known, as it is cut from the same cloth – and is of the same high quality – as those for the “Star Wars,” Indiana Jones, and Harry Potter series.
We’ll see you in the funny pages, this week on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org!
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