Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Film Scores

Spooky Comedy Movie Soundtracks Halloween Mix

Spooky comedies. A seeming oxymoron. 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 conjure some Hallowe’en spirit with music from four macabre comedies.

Frank Capra’s screen adaptation of “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1944) was actually shot in 1941, but it could not be released until after the hit stage play, by Joseph Kesselring, had concluded its Broadway run.

The film starred Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Jack Carson, and Capra favorites James Gleason and Edward Everett Horton.

Two seemingly innocuous spinster aunts poison lonely old men and have them buried in their basement, by a family member who believes that he’s Teddy Roosevelt. (He thinks that he’s digging the Panama Canal.) Massey and Lorre play a murderer on the lam and his plastic surgeon, respectively, who hole up in the house, unaware that Massey’s body count pales next to that of his unwitting hosts.

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 “Gone With the Wind” and “Casablanca.”

Composer Bernard Herrmann will always be most closely associated with the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In particular, his music for the shower scene in “Psycho” has entered the popular consciousness as few other film scores have. Hitchcock and Herrmann collaborated on nine films in all. The first of these was a black comedy called “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.

Don Knotts and a haunted house – that’s the high concept behind “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” (1966). How could it possibly miss? Knotts’ elastic-faced terror finds a goofy foil in Vic Mizzy’s score. Mizzy also wrote music for “The Addams Family.”

Finally, 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 “Beetlejuice” (1988). In desperation, they enlist the services of a manic “bio-exorcist” (a loosy-goosy Michael Keaton) 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.”

I hope you’ll join me for a mishmash of horror and humor this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

October 24, 2025
Herrmann’s Fantasy Film Scores for Halloween

Hallowe’en is fast approaching. This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s high time we get the pumpkin rolling, with an hour of fantasy film scores of Bernard Herrmann.

Just about everyone has some awareness of Herrmann’s fruitful run with Alfred Hitchcock, a collaborative relationship which yielded scores to “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest” and “Psycho,” among others. Concurrently, Herrmann worked with producer Charles H. Schneer to create a series of classic films on fantastic subjects, featuring special effects by stop-motion maestro Ray Harryhausen. We’ll be listening to selections from two of these.

Jules Vernes’ novel, “Mysterious Island,” was a sequel of sorts to “20,000 Leagues under the Sea.“ During the American Civil War, a ragtag band of Union soldiers escape from a Confederate prison by hot air balloon. A storm sweeps them off to the titular island, where they encounter pirates, a castaway, and an orangutan. Indeed Captain Nemo turns up late in the narrative, though no giant creatures, as in the film (made in 1961). Herrmann has a field day characterizing an enormous crab, bee, and especially bird, for which he employs a fugue!

Harryhausen’s skeleton fight from Schneer’s “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963) stands as one of the all-time classic fantasy sequences, a dream marriage of visuals and music. Herrmann, who always provided his own orchestrations, was well known for putting together unique combinations of instruments, the better to illustrate the special character of a given film. In the case of “Jason,” he went in the opposite direction from what he had taken with “Psycho,” stripping away the strings and concentrating instead on winds, brass and percussion.

On a somewhat gentler note, Herrmann scored the beautiful spectral romance, “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1947), with Gene Tierney as a young widow who moves with her daughter to a seaside village, where she encounters the ghost of salty Captain Gregg (played by Rex Harrison). Of course, their banter leads to a hopeless attraction developing between them. Herrmann was a master at creating musical evocations of yearning, and his score for “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” is full of romantic longing.

Criminally, for a composer whose career spanned over four decades, from “Citizen Kane” to “Taxi Driver,” Herrmann received only a single Oscar, for “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (released in 1941 as “All That Money Can Buy”). Walter Huston makes a meal of his role as Mr. Scratch in Stephen Vincent Benét’s recasting of the Faust legend, transferred to the New England countryside. Director William Dieterle, who had his roots in German Expressionism, creates some truly eerie visuals, and Herrmann’s score barn-dances deftly back and forth between dread and whimsy.

Join me for fantasy film scores of Bernard Herrmann this week on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

October 17, 2025
Pirate Movie Music Swashbuckling Soundtracks

“Seas ablaze… with black villainy, with fiery romance, with breathless deeds of daring… in the roaring era of love, gold and adventure!”

That tagline for “The Black Swan” (1942) just about sums it up. The allure of the pirate genre.

September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we hoist the Jolly Roger for an hour of music for movies about buccaneers, sea rovers, and freebooters.

Of course, these men, and sometimes women, are seldom REALLY pirates – violent, ruthless criminals – but rather pirates by circumstance. Kindly rogues pushed into lawlessness by tyrannical powers greater than themselves (at least for the time being), fighting back, through subversive means, sometimes out of revenge, perhaps, but it is a revenge driven by motives of duty, conscience and/or patriotism, certainly tempered with moral righteousness.

In “Anne of the Indies” (1951), Jean Peters plays Captain Anne Providence, a protégée of Blackbeard the Pirate. The story is based on the real-life exploits of Anne Bonny, though obviously given the Hollywood treatment, so that the final product bears little resemblance to the historical figure that inspired it. Franz Waxman wrote the stirring music.

“The Buccaneer” (1958) stars Yul Brynner as Jean Lafitte and Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson (!). The film, again based upon a true episode, is heavily fictionalized, though the pirate Lafitte did assist the United States against the British at the Battle of New Orleans.

This was the second telling of the tale by Cecile B. De Mille, who directed an earlier version, with Frederic March, in 1938. The remake came very late in DeMille’s career, and in fact his health was such that he was unable to oversee the film’s actual direction, assigning the duty instead to his son-in-law, Anthony Quinn. It would be the only film Quinn ever directed.

The music is by Elmer Bernstein, who had previously written the score for DeMille’s perennial favorite “The Ten Commandments.” Twenty years later, Bernstein would go on to score a series of comedies for Ivan Reitman and John Landis, beginning with “Animal House,” in 1978. There is a scene toward the end of “Animal House,” in which John Belushi appears in the guise of a pirate, scales a building, and then swings down a banner. His antics are underscored with a near quotation from “The Buccaneer.”

In “The Crimson Pirate” (1951), Burt Lancaster is joined by his lifelong friend, Nick Cravat, born Nicholas Cuccia. He and Lancaster had partnered in a trapeze act before breaking into the movies. They costarred in nine films all together, with Cravat, as often as not, playing a mute, on account of his thick Brooklyn accent. The music for “The Crimson Pirate” is by William Alwyn, also a respected concert composer.

For “The Black Swan,” the cast includes Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, and Laird Cregar as Henry Morgan. Also, if you ever wanted to see George Sanders in a red beard, then this is the movie for you! The score is by Alfred Newman, 20th Century Fox music director, who provided the music for all of Power’s historical adventures. We’ll hear the composer conduct, from the film’s original elements.

Finally, Errol Flynn attained superstardom in the 1935 pirate opus “Captain Blood.” Within five years, he had become cinema’s quintessential swashbuckler. “The Sea Hawk” (1940), with Flynn playing a privateer in the service of England and Elizabeth, sports arguably the greatest pirate score ever written, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. We’ll hear a couple of suites, played back-to-back, from two albums in the celebrated Classic Film Scores series, originally issued back in the 1970s on the RCA label. Charles Gerhardt conducts National Philharmonic Orchestra and Ambrosian Singers.

As with the western, the epic, and the space opera, the pirate genre tends to draw forth some very colorful contributions. Lock up your daughters and join me for “Swords at Sea,” on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX the radio station of the University of Oregon!

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

September 19, 2025
Gulliver’s Travels Movie Music & More on KWAX

I haven’t had time to post today, because I had some deadlines to meet and then I had to hightail it up to the Bard Music Festival for the opening night of “Martinů and His World” — music of Bohuslav Martinů and friends at Bard College. So I’ll just interject briefly that today is the birthday of film composer Victor Young. Some of my favorite Young scores include those for “Scaramouche,” “The Quiet Man,” and “Around the World in 80 Days.”

This week on “Picture Perfect,” however, we’ll enjoy selections from his score to the Fleischer Brothers’ production of “Gulliver’s Travels” (1939). Based on the novel by Jonathan Swift, the film was given the greenlight thanks to the success of Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The brothers, responsible for those classic “Popeye,” “Betty Boop,” and “Superman” cartoon shorts, here may have bitten off more than they could chew with this, their only animated feature.

Victor Young’s music will be bookended by that of Bernard Herrmann for “The Three Worlds of Gulliver” (1960), a film also notable for its special effects by legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, and John Addison’s riotous score for Tony Richardson’s picaresque romp “Tom Jones” (1963), based on the novel by Henry Fielding.

You don’t have to be Lilliputian to find these big shoes to fill. It’s music from movies inspired by two beloved 18th century British literary classics, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

August 8, 2025
Christmas in July Wintry Movie Music on KWAX

It’s the 25th. Christmas in July! This week on “Picture Perfect,” there won’t be a manger or a Santa Claus in sight, but I’m sure we’ll all be grateful for a blast of frigid air and some chilly scenes from world cinema.

We’ll begin with music from “The Snow Storm” (1964), an adaptation of Pushkin’s “The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkan.” The score’s Waltz and Romance enjoyed particular popularity, earning its composer, Georgy Sviridov, two of his greatest hits.

Then Arthur Honegger will take us to higher altitudes with his music for “The Demon of the Himalayas” (1935), complete with the eerie electronic timbre of the ondes Martenot.

Ralph Vaughan Williams will guide us to the South Pole with selections from his score for “Scott of the Antarctic” (1948). The music perfectly reflects the sublime, austere beauty of an unforgiving landscape. The score became the basis for the composer’s seventh symphony, “Sinfonia Antartica” (note the Italian spelling; hence the single “c”).

Finally, the “Battle on the Ice” from “Alexander Nevsky” (1938) provides a textbook marriage of music and film. Director Sergei Eisenstein granted the composer, Sergei Prokofiev, the unusual luxury of having the images cut to suit his music, as opposed to the usual practice, which is the other way around. The result is not only one of the great films, but also one of the great film scores.

Feeling hot under the collar? Chill out with wintry scenes from world cinema this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music from the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

July 25, 2025

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