Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Dimitri Tiomkin

Trains in Movies Music from Hitchcock and More

Traditionally, trains have been very good for drama. They are symbols of departures and arrivals. They are conveyors of prisoners and vehicles of escape. They are objects of romance and objects to “hobo around” on. They are the harbingers of civilization, and they are transports be robbed. You can fight on top of them. You can make out with Eva Marie Saint, or you can protect Marie Windsor so that she can testify against the mob. You can shuffle off to Buffalo.

For decades, trains have provided good escapist fun at the movies. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ve got an hour of music from four memorable films in which trains play an important role.

In “Strangers on a Train” (1951), arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s most underrated film of the 1950s, Farley Granger plays a tennis pro who unwittingly becomes involved in a double-murder plot through a chance encounter on a passenger train with a psychopath named Bruno (probably Robert Walker’s finest performance). The music is by Dimitri Tiomkin, who scored four films for Hitch – including “Shadow of a Doubt,” “I Confess,” and “Dial M for Murder.”

Burt Lancaster stars in a film titled, simply, “The Train” (1964), as a reluctant railroad inspector who is persuaded to join the French Underground’s efforts to delay the transport of masterpieces looted from the museums of Paris by the Nazis, since Allied liberation of France is imminent. Paul Scofield plays the art-loving German officer determined to move the art at all costs. Real trains were destroyed in the making of the film, real dynamite was used, and Lancaster, as was often the case, did all his own stunts. The score is by Maurice Jarre.

“Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) is based on one of the best-known Agatha Christie vehicles conceived for her recurring character, the celebrated detective Hercule Poirot. Albert Finney plays Poirot most memorably in this, the first and best of the all-star Christie thrillers, set on a long-distance passenger train connecting Paris to Istanbul. He’s joined by Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, Richard Widmark, and Michael York. The unforgettable score is by Richard Rodney Bennett.

Finally, we turn to the lighthearted caper film “The Great Train Robbery” (1979), starring Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Leslie-Anne Down. Michael Crichton wrote the screenplay, after his own novel, which in turn was based on an actual historical incident – an 1855 heist, in which an unbelievable amount of gold disappeared from a moving train. Crichton also directed the film. The music is by Jerry Goldsmith.

We’ll be taking the train today, on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network.

Since today happens to be Jerry Goldsmith’s birthday, join me a little early, as I’ll be cueing up a medley of some of his greatest film themes, to help get you in the mood, starting around 5:30.

February 10, 2017
Steiner and Tiomkin Hollywood Giants

There are only so many days in a year, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that two giants in a particular field would share a birthday anniversary. Hence, we have Rachmaninoff and Busoni on April 1, and Heifetz and Kreisler on February 2. May 10 marks the birthdays of Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin.

Steiner (1888-1971), the literal godson of Richard Strauss, helped transplant the sound of fin de siècle Vienna to the realm of cinematic dreams. He composed over 300 film scores for RKO and Warner Brothers, earning 24 Academy Award nominations and winning three – for “The Informer,” “Now, Voyager” and “Since You Went Away” – though he is unquestionably better remembered today for his work on “King Kong,” “Gone with the Wind” and “Casablanca.”

Tiomkin (1894-1979), a pupil of Alexander Glazunov, was born in Ukraine. He settled in the United States, where he composed music for films in all genres, though in the 1950s he enjoyed particular success writing for Westerns, including the Academy Award-winning “High Noon.” When asked why this would be the case, that a composer born half a world away would have such a command of this distinctly American idiom, Tiomkin replied, “A steppe is a steppe is a steppe.”

Tiomkin was honored with four Academy Awards – three for Best Original Score (for “High Noon,” “The High and the Mighty” and “The Old Man and the Sea”) and one for Best Original Song (“The Ballad of High Noon”).

Here’s a transcript of his reception speech, when winning the Oscar for “The High and the Mighty” in 1955:

“Lady and gentlemen, because I working in this town for twenty-five years, I like to make some kind of appreciation to very important factor what make me successful to lots of my colleagues in this town. I’d like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov. Thank you.”

You can watch here:

Steiner’s “Now, Voyager”:

Tiomkin’s “Land of the Pharoahs”:

If you have an interest in Hollywood composers and what they achieved on screen and in the concert hall, you might want to set aside your Thursday morning this week to join me on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. I’ll tell you a little more about it tomorrow.

PHOTOS: Steiner conducts (top); Tiomkin composes

May 10, 2016
Walpurgis Night Devils Cabaret Pre-Code Film

For Walpurgis Night, here’s “The Devil’s Cabaret” (1930). The pre-Code short climaxes with “The Hades Ballet,” reminding us that Dimitri Tiomkin once studied with Alexander Glazunov.

Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij2AsmQ_6ZE
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOgHueVqyyU

BTW – Satan is played by Charles Middleton, perhaps better known as Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials.

April 30, 2015
Theremin Sounds in Sci-Fi Film Scores

You all know the sound. That crazy, trilled electronic whistle that dips into a whoop. Or it starts in a trough and shoots up into the super stratosphere. It’s the sound of UFOs and mad science. It’s the sound of the theremin.

The electronic instrument, invented by Leon Theremin in 1928, is played without physical contact. The proximity of the hands to two antennae determines volume and pitch.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll hear music from four films which feature the instrument’s distinctive, extraterrestrial timbre.

“The Thing from Another World” was one of two seminal science fiction scores written in 1951. (The other was Bernard Herrmann’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”) On the soundtrack, the theremin acts as a musical counterpart to James Arness’ rampaging humanoid carrot. This was unquestionably composer Dimitri Tiomkin’s wildest hour; he never wrote anything like it again.

“The Thing” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” may have been the most influential, but “Rocketship X-M” was the first. The film was rushed into production in 1950 to beat George Pal’s “Destination Moon” to theaters. It was shot in just 18 days! The unlikely plot has the crew of a moon expedition blown off course to Mars. Interestingly, the composer was none other than Ferde Grofé – he of the “Grand Canyon Suite” fame.

Far more reputable, but still not wholly comfortable with its science, is Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” from 1945. Gregory Peck plays an amnesiac, who may or may not have committed murder, and Ingrid Bergman plays the psychoanalyst who falls in love with him. The film is of greatest interest for its production design, which features dream sequences conceived by Salvador Dali, and for its music, by Miklós Rózsa.

Hitchcock disliked the score – he thought it got in the way of his direction – but the Academy disagreed, and the music earned Rózsa the first of his three Academy Awards.

Closer to our own time, Howard Shore incorporated the theremin into his Mancini-esque score to “Ed Wood,” released in 1991, Tim Burton’s love letter to the grade-Z director of “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” which is widely regarded as the worst movie ever made (worse even than “Rocketship X-M”).

Join me for an hour of theremins for Hallowe’en this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies – this Friday evening at 6 ET, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

FUN FACT: On three of the four movies from which scores we’ll be sampling (“Spellbound,” “Rocketship X-M,” and “The Thing”), the original thereminist was Samuel Hoffman. Hoffman played in dozens of Hollywood films in the 1940s and ‘50s. By day, he worked as a podiatrist!

PHOTO: Hoffman (right) looks on as Cary Grant tries his hand at the theremin

October 30, 2014
WWII Film Scores Memorial Day Special

Today is Richard Wagner’s birthday. Perhaps in his honor, I am going to go his megalomania one better by completely ignoring the fact and using the space for shameless self-promotion!

This week on “Picture Perfect,” as we near Memorial Day, the focus will be on music from World War II classics.

Among the selections will be a new release – and a very fine one – on the Intrada label of music by Miklós Rózsa. The album is called “The Man in Half Moon Street,” and includes re-recordings of some of his underrepresented though certainly deserving scores, among them, “Valley of the Kings,” “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers,” and “Sahara.”

In “Sahara,” Humphrey Bogart plays a WWII tank commander who holes up at a desert well and uses his apparent position of power to delay a parched German battalion from participating in the First Battle of El Alamein. Allan Wilson conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, in what is truly the best project of its kind I have encountered in quite some time. Re-recordings so often lack the punch of the originals, but here is Rózsa is all his glory, sounding wholly idiomatic and presented in vivid digital splendor.

Jerry Goldsmith’s music for “Patton” should require no introduction. The film is a bona fide classic, a winner of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Unfortunately for Goldsmith, at that stage of his career, he was always a bridesmaid but never a bride. George C. Scott notoriously rejected his Oscar for Best Actor; he should have given it to Goldsmith.

Errol Flynn may seem an unlikely choice to play a U.S. Army captain, but he does just that in “Objective, Burma!” Flynn received criticism for remaining in Hollywood during the war, but the Warner Brothers publicity machine did what it could to hush up the fact that the world’s most famous swashbuckler had tried to enlist but was rejected on medical grounds. “Objective, Burma!” infuriated Churchill, and the film was actually banned in Britain for what was perceived as the Americanization of a largely British, Indian and Commonwealth conflict. The rousing score, also nominated for an Oscar, was by Franz Waxman.

“The Guns of Navarone,” adapted from the novel of Alistair MacLean, is one of the all-time great adventure films. A team of Allied military specialists – played by Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn, among others – undertake a mission to blow up some very big Nazi guns trained over the Aegean Sea. Dimitri Tiomkin pulled out all the stops for his Oscar-nominated music. The recording features a spoken introduction by James Robertson Justice, who plays Commodore Jensen in the film.

Join me for these scores from World War II classics on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 ET, or listen to it as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.

May 22, 2014

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