Classic Ross Amico

  • Them! Giant Ants Invade Roy’s Sci-Fi Corner

    Them! Giant Ants Invade Roy’s Sci-Fi Corner

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    Ross Amico
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    This Memorial Day weekend, I hope you’ll join us at a special time, as the U.S. brings all its might and intelligence to bear against invading giant ants. Now that’s one hell of a picnic!

    The Army, FBI, top scientists, and local law enforcement all coordinate to save our bacon without a single rumble of conspiracy. Furthermore, the citizenry accepts lockdown with a degree of maturity and responsibility inconceivable in 2021. Temporarily deferred freedoms are always most easily assimilated when the sewers are flooded with giant ants. For once, it’s all of us against “Them!” (1954).

    Easily the best and most intelligent of the nascent Atomic Age giant bug movies, “Them!” manages to get everything right: a solid cast, good pacing, pitch perfect tone, and truly crawly animatronics. Keep a sharp eye out for walk-ons by fresh faces soon to become weekly regulars in living rooms across America, actors like Leonard Nimoy, Dick York, Richard Deacon, and William Schallert. Basically, anyone wearing an Army helmet is on the cusp of fame. Fess Parker makes the most memorable impression in a single scene that supposedly secured his casting as Davy Crockett.

    Of the principals, Academy Award nominee James Whitmore bands together with James Arness (the extraterrestrial menace in “The Thing,” soon to embark on the gig of a lifetime as Marshal Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke”) and everyone’s favorite Kris Kringle, Academy Award winner Edmund Gwenn. Gwenn plays a somewhat absentminded, but wholly authoritative and respected myrmecologist. In the 1950s, apparently, people still believed in science. A film that could very easily have turned into “Santa Claus Conquers the Giant Ants” instead winds up being probably one of the top-five science fiction movies of the decade.

    Furthermore, its influence can still be felt in everything from the “Alien” franchise to any number of CGI giant bug fests of the past 25 years. This is one movie that really has legs!

    Nevermind those Brood X cicadas – there will be plenty of high-frequency, outsized shrieking, as we chat about “Them!” on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Leave your songs and whistles in the comments section, as we livestream on Facebook, this Sunday evening at 7:00 EDT!

    https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner/

  • Memorial Day Symphonies on WWFM

    Memorial Day Symphonies on WWFM

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    Ross Amico
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    8 responses

    This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” get ready for Memorial Day with two symphonies composed for the armed forces.

    Morton Gould wrote his Symphony No. 4, his first large scale piece for symphonic band, in 1952, for the United States Military Academy at West Point. The score calls for a “marching machine,” but on the recording we’ll hear, now a classic on the Mercury label, the feet are those of the 120 musicians of the Eastman School Symphony Band. Frederick Fennell directs the Eastman Wind Ensemble.

    Samuel Barber composed his Symphony No. 2 in 1943, while he was serving in the U.S. Army Air Force. 20 years later, he revised and published its slow movement as a separate piece, titled “Night Flight.” He then jettisoned – and actually tried to destroy – the rest of the symphony. The work was reconstituted only after the composer’s death, from rediscovered parts in a warehouse in the UK. We’ll hear a recording with Marin Alsop and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

    Reflect on the sacrifice of Americans at war, on “Orchestrated Maneuvers” – American military symphonies for Memorial Day – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

    PHOTO: Corporal Samuel Barber with the score of his Second Symphony

  • Sibelius Rediscovered Avanti Orchestra Concert

    Sibelius Rediscovered Avanti Orchestra Concert

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    Ross Amico
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    4 responses

    Earlier this week, the Avanti Chamber Orchestra shared the modern premiere of a rediscovered Sibelius “Concert Overture” on its Facebook page.

    Today the complete concert will stream at 12 pm (EDT). Also on the program will be other Sibelius rarities (a suite from his incidental music to “Belshazzar’s Feast” and the melodrama “The Countess’ Portrait”) and the “Conte fantastique” for harp and string orchestra by André Caplet, after Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” If you miss it, I assume the concert will be archived on Avanti’s Facebook page.

    For more information:

    Avanti! conducted by Tuomas Hannikainen resurrects Sibelius work dormant for 120 years

    While you’re waiting, enjoy this brief review of a Sibelius cigar by Zack the Stogie Man!

    http://zackthestogieman.blogspot.com/2012/04/jean-sibelius-review.html

  • Korngold Errol Flynn Hollywood Composer

    Korngold Errol Flynn Hollywood Composer

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    Ross Amico
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    5 responses

    May 29 marks the birthday of one of my favorite composers: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957). Thanks to a steady diet of Errol Flynn films, Korngold will forever be a part of the soundtrack to my life.

    Korngold went from being one of Europe’s most astounding musical prodigies – his works admired by Mahler, Strauss and Puccini, and championed by Schnabel, Weingartner and Klemperer – to becoming one of Hollywood’s transformative film composers. He is a link from Old World opulence to New World fantasy, his music gracing a number of Warner Brothers’ classic historical adventures.

    The best ones starred Flynn, and this week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll hear music from “The Sea Hawk” (1940) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), as well as the mostly forgotten “Another Dawn” (1937). Flynn stars alongside Kay Francis and Ian Hunter (who would go on to play Richard the Lionheart in “Robin Hood”) in this love triangle involving pilots in a British desert colony.

    The film may be an obscurity to all save classic movie buffs, but Korngold thought enough of his music that he salvaged the main title as the opening theme of his Violin Concerto, premiered by Heifetz in 1947.

    It was an invitation from theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt that brought Korngold to Hollywood in the first place, for a cinematic adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935). The film stars James Cagney, Dick Powell and Olivia de Havilland, in her big screen debut, with Mickey Rooney an irrepressible Puck.

    For the project, Korngold adapted the famous incidental music of Felix Mendelssohn, interweaving material from Mendelssohn’s symphonies and orchestrating some of the “Songs without Words.” Even so, the music bears the composer’s unmistakable stamp, as you’ll hear in the opening number, lifted from the “Scottish Symphony,” but infused with plenty of Korngoldian swagger.

    I hope you’ll join me, as the playlist is all-Korngold this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

    Happy birthday, EWK!

  • Them Giant Ants Invade Roy’s Sci-Fi Corner

    Them Giant Ants Invade Roy’s Sci-Fi Corner

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    Ross Amico
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    One response

    What’s a picnic without ants?

    This Memorial Day weekend, as the woods resonate with the eerie, UFO-like drone of Brood X cicadas, we direct our thoughts to the quintessential giant insect invasion classic – marked by equally distinctive, otherworldly calls – “Them!” (1954).

    In the age of atomic anxiety, gigantic mutated ants emerge from the New Mexico desert to wreak havoc in Los Angeles. James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, and James Arness put in an order for a whole lot of RAID, and Fess Parker secures for himself the role of Davy Crockett with one short but memorable scene. You’ll have to watch fast for Leonard Nimoy, Dick York, Richard Deacon, William Schallert, and many others.

    Released four months before “Godzilla,” drive-in thrills didn’t come any bigger than “Them!” The “Wilhelm scream” gets a good workout in this one. If Ridley Scott didn’t watch “Them!” before he made “Alien,” I’ll wander through the storm drains of Los Angeles with a box full of sugar cubes.

    I hope you’ll join us as we flap our mandibles about “Them!,” on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, this Memorial Day weekend AT A SPECIAL TIME. Leave your sweets and formic acid in the comments section, as we livestream with our flamethrowers, to the full extent that Facebook allows, this SUNDAY EVENING AT 7:00 EDT!

    https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

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