Ladies, lords, and gentlepersons all…
Hearken ye to “Picture Perfect” this week for sweet airs from movies set in the Age of Chivalry.
Peradventure ye will encounter sounds and delights from “The Warlord” (Jerome Moross), “El Cid” (Miklós Rózsa), “Lionheart” (Jerry Goldsmith), and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (Erich Wolfgang Korngold).
Verily, chivalry is not dead, this Friday evening at 6 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
We don’t know when, exactly, Shakespeare was born, but his baptismal date is April 26, 1564. Since it’s human nature to try to keep things neat, his natal day is generally held to be April 23, the very date of his death in 1616.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll honor the Bard, just a few days early, with an hour of music from movies based upon his comedies. We’ll hear selections from “As You Like It” (William Walton), “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Korngold), “The Taming of the Shrew” (Nino Rota), and “Much Ado About Nothing” (Patrick Doyle).
What fools these mortals be! Join me this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT for music for Shakespearean comedies, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Spooky comedies – a seeming oxymoron. Yet over the decades, perhaps in an attempt to subvert our fears or to generate laughter from tension, filmmakers have frequently juxtaposed humor with the supernatural or, at any rate, death.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll hear music from “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1944), about two seemingly innocuous spinster aunts who poison lonely old men and have them buried in their basement. The rest of the family’s pretty kooky, too. There’s the uncle who believes he’s Teddy Roosevelt and that he’s digging the Panama Canal. There’s the brother, disfigured by plastic surgery, who is a murderer-on-the-lam, holding up in the house, unaware that his body count pales next to that of his unwitting hosts. And then there’s poor Cary Grant. All he wants to do is get married.
The score, by Max Steiner, is as manic as Grant’s performance – perhaps a mite overdone, with its breakneck allusions to familiar melodies – but it bears the same distinctive gloss as other Steiner classics like “Casablanca” and “Gone with the Wind.”
The first of nine collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann was a black comedy titled “The Trouble with Harry” (1955), a droll farce about a corpse that materializes in a New England community and can’t seem to stay buried. The film starred John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine. Harry is first discovered in a gorgeous, leaf-strewn Vermont landscape, not unlike the autumn that we are experiencing right now.
We’ll also hear music from the Don Knotts comedy, “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” (1966). Vic Mizzy was the composer, and I think it’s immediately evident that this is the man who also wrote the music for “The Addams Family.”
Finally, we’ll have selections from Tim Burton’s loosey-goosey Michael Keaton vehicle, “Beetlejuice” (1988). In a kind of twist on “Topper,” Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play a recently-deceased couple who try to scare off the inhabitants of their former home. In desperation, they enlist the services of a manic “bio-exorcist” by the name of Beetlejuice, and things get seriously antic.
The music is by Danny Elfman, as always a fan of Nino Rota, although he also pays homage to the Stravinsky of “The Soldier’s Tale” and frequently alludes to Raymond Scott. There’s even a touch of Bernard Herrmann in one of the tracks, as Elfman evokes the skeleton fight from “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.”
It’s a mishmash of horror and humor this week, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network, and at wwfm.org.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s the equivalent of a cinematic shell game. We’ll have musical selections from films about confidence games, charlatans and hucksters.
In “The Magician” (1958), also known as “The Face,” Igmar Bergman explores the idea of theatre as both confidence game and beautiful mystery. Max von Sydow stars as a traveling illusionist whose troupe of strolling entertainers, The Magnetic Healing Theatre, is put to test before being granted permission to perform at the royal court. The score, by Erik Nordgren, is sparse, made up of a dozen very short pieces for harp and two guitars, some movements for brass band, and in the main title, the addition of percussion.
George C. Scott plays Mordecai Jones, a confidence man who defrauds the populace of the American South through various means, with a specialty in rigged punchboards, in “The Flim-Flam Man” (1967). The film, shot on location in Kentucky by director Irvin Kershner, features a gallery of colorful character actors, including Jack Albertson, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin and Harry Morgan. The happy-go-lucky score, by Jerry Goldsmith, makes use of harmonica, banjo, and freewheeling honky-tonk piano.
Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” (2002) is based on the real-life exploits of the chameleonic Frank Abagnale, who, before his 19th birthday, managed to successfully pull a series of cons worth millions of dollars. Along the way, he posed convincingly as a lawyer, a doctor, and a pilot. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Abagnale, and Tom Hanks, the bank fraud agent who develops an unusual relationship with him, as the light-hearted cat-and-mouse thriller unfolds. John Williams wrote the intimate and jazzy score, a throw-back to the musical syntax of caper films of the 1960s, but also to the composer’s own jazz roots (when he still went by “Johnny Williams”).
Finally, we’ll hear music from that classic of religious hucksterism, “Elmer Gantry” (1960). Burt Lancaster plays the hard-drinking, fast-talking salesman-turned-revivalist, in one of the great movie performances. Lancaster was recognized with a much-deserved Academy Award for Best Actor. Shirley Jones, of “The Partridge Family” fame, won Best Supporting Actress for playing one of Gantry’s shady ladies. The film’s brilliant score was by none other than André Previn.
Listen with “confidence” to WWFM – The Classical Network, this Friday evening at 6 EDT, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or enjoy the show later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
Composers writing for film AND the concert hall this morning. Right now, we’re listening to Ennio Morricone’s “Esercizi for 10 String Soloists.” Just ahead, Elmer Bernstein’s theme for “The Magnificent Seven” and his Guitar Concerto. Later on this morning, works by Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rózsa and more.
At 10:00, we’ll be joined by Daniel Spalding. Spalding will conduct the New Jersey Capital Philharmonic Orchestra in a blockbuster program of “Cinematic Classics” this weekend, including works by Rózsa, Herrmann and William Walton, with Odin Rathnam the soloist in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto. The concert will take place at the Trenton War Memorial on Saturday evening at 7:30.
It’s ALL magnificent, until 11:00 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com.
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