Taste the “cat” and prepare to be keelhauled!
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we give in to the impulse to run away to sea.
Though Gregory Peck cuts a dashing figure as “Captain Horatio Hornblower” (1951), the movie itself is a bit episodic, adapted as it was from three of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels. Canadian-born master of British light music Robert Farnon wrote the music, lending another dimension to this nautical adventure.
Alan Ladd and James Mason engage in a battle of wills in “Botany Bay” (1953). Ladd plays a doctor, wrongly convicted of a crime, who is transported to a penal colony in New South Wales on a ship under the harsh command of Mason. In perhaps the film’s most memorable sequence, Mason has one of his charges keelhauled! Franz Waxman wrote the score.
If it all sounds a mite familiar, it’s because the story is by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who also wrote the book that became the basis for “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1962). The classic film version of “Bounty” dates from 1935, with Clark Gable butting up against Charles Laughton’s Captain Bligh. The ‘60s version bears a certain notoriety, mostly for Marlon Brando’s eccentric performance, which turns Fletcher Christian into a fop, and the fact that he essentially directed all his own scenes himself. The film was colossal failure, earning back only $13 million of its $19 million budget. Nonetheless, it managed to inspire Bronislau Kaper to compose one of his most monumental scores.
Interesting fact: the enlarged replica of the 1787 HMS Bounty, constructed specifically for the 1962 film, sank off the coast of North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The ship had also been used in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise.
Finally, we’ll hear selections from “Windjammer” (1958), the only film shot using the Cinemiracle process. The film documents the round-trip, transatlantic journey of a Norwegian vessel from Oslo to the Caribbean to New York to Portsmouth, NH, and then back home again. Morton Gould wrote the evocative score, which alternates dance rhythms and sea shanties with a recurring melody suggestive of the sweeping romance of the high seas.
Prepare to set sail! It’s tall ships recommissioned, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
