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Tag: Film Scores

Fairy Tale Film Scores Nostalgic Movie Magic

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll play on the inherent nostalgia of the holidays by recalling the magic of childhood, through our collective and personal interactions with the world of fairy tales.

George Pal’s “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” (1962) was filmed in Cinerama and features the producer-director’s trademark stop motion effects. Its all-star cast includes Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Barbara Eden, Russ Tamblyn, and Buddy Hackett. The narrative incorporates a number of familiar Grimm tales, while dealing with the brothers’ real-life struggles.

The music is by Leigh Harline. Harline was an integral part of the Disney team that scored an earlier fairy tale adaptation, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” He would win two Academy Awards for his work on “Pinocchio,” including one for Best Original Song, for “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

“The Company of Wolves” (1984), one of Neil Jordan’s earlier films, explores the psychological underpinnings of the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood,” which is presented as an allegory of adolescence and the loss of innocence. Angela Carter co-wrote the screenplay, based upon a selection of her original short stories. The film features Angela Lansbury, any number of werewolves, and Terence Stamp as the Devil. The music is by George Fenton.

With the advent of computer animation, a snarkier, post-modern take on the fairy tale predominates, most notably with the “Shrek” series, beginning in 2001. The “Shrek” films were so successful, they led to a spin-off, centered on the character of “Puss in Boots” (2011).

Voiced by Antonio Banderas, Puss provides ample opportunity to vamp on the actor’s swashbuckler image, especially as depicted in “The Mask of Zorro.” Likewise, the composer, Henry Jackman, chooses to rib James Horners’ “Zorro” score.

Finally, we’ll hear selections from perhaps the finest fairy tale ever committed to film, Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et la Bête” – “Beauty and the Beast” (1946). Moody, atmospheric, dreamy, clever, hypnotic, funny, and romantic, sporting production design that looks like something Gustav Doré might have dreamed up while smoking Dutch Masters cigars, Cocteau’s masterpiece stars Jean Marais and Josette Day.

The alternately mysterious and majestic score is by Georges Auric. Cocteau, you’ll recall, was the one-man publicity machine that propelled Auric and his composer-colleagues, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey, to fame in Paris, circa 1920, dubbing them “Les Six.”

I hope you’ll join me for an hour of once-upon-a-time and happily-ever-after, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.

November 27, 2021
Semi-Documentary Film Scores Copland Thomson & More

A “semi-documentary” is documentary-like, but allows staged or fictional elements, sometimes recreations or reenactments, sometimes flat-out embellishments, often with non-actors playing most of the roles. This week on “Picture Perfect,” enjoy music from four acclaimed examples.

Aaron Copland, one of America’s most respected composers, was more active in film than most people realize. He even won an Academy Award in 1950, for his score to “The Heiress.”

During the World War II, Copland was approached by the Office of War Information to score a brief film about the resettlement of European refugees in a rural Massachusetts town. The film was called “The Cummington Story” (1945). The music is rather interesting in that, having been written at the height of Copland’s “populist” phase, he employs melodies which were later fleshed out into more familiar concert works, such as the Clarinet Concerto and “Down a Country Lane.”

Director Robert Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story” (1948) is often misidentified as a straight documentary. (Flaherty made the first commercially-successfully, feature-length documentary, “Nanook of the North,” in 1922 – itself later revealed to have been more of a docudrama.) However, the plot is entirely fictional, an idealized story of a Cajun family that reaps the rewards of oil drilling that takes place in an inlet behind its house. The film was shot on location in bayou country, using Cajun locals as actors, giving it a certain verisimilitude.

Although it was selected for preservation in the United States film registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and its script was nominated for an Academy Award, “Louisiana Story” acts as a kind of time capsule in its naiveté. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the entire project is the film’s score, by American composer and revered critic of the New York Herald Tribune, Virgil Thomson. So far, it is the only film score ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Like Copland and Thomson, Ulysses Kay is associated more with his works for the concert hall. Nevertheless, he wrote music for numerous television shows and documentaries in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. His first scoring assignment was for an experimental quasi-documentary called “The Quiet One” (1948), a film about an abused African American child and his subsequent coming of age. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Story and Screenplay, and was listed as one of the ten best movies of the year by the New York Times and the National Board of Review. Kay, a long-time resident of Teaneck, NJ, was a rarity in the world film scoring, a composer of color.

Finally, we’ll turn to Morton Gould and “Windjammer” (1958), the only film ever to be shot in the widescreen “Cinemiracle” format. “Windjammer” depicts the training cruise of a fully-rigged sailing ship, from Oslo, across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, New York, and back home again. Its dreamy theme music is full of the romance of the high seas.

Artistic truth is based on fact this week. I hope you’ll join me for an hour of selections from semi-documentaries on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

November 13, 2021
Ennio Morricone Gone But Never Forgotten

Happy birthday, Ennio Morricone, gone but never forgotten.

The composer of an estimated 500 film and television scores – perhaps the most prolific film composer of all time – Morricone died last year at the age of 91.

Grazie, Maestro. You are greatly missed.

Morricone celebrates his 90th birthday with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and music from “The Mission”

“Once Upon a Time in the West”

Vintage Morricone: “Two Mules for Sister Sara”

A personal favorite

Another, not to be confused with the oft-reissued “Il Gatto a Nove Code” – a completely different animal! Is that a mandolin and a muted trombone? Morricone always provided his own orchestrations.

Conducting “Cinema Paradiso”

Andrea Morricone conducts his father’s Concerto for Orchestra:

Another concert work: “Esercizi for 10 Strings”

Ricercare per pianoforte (thanks to Paul Moon)

Easily his greatest hit

“The Ecstasy of Gold.” I think I need to watch this movie NOW!!

Far and away the best thing about “The Hateful Eight” (for which he received his only competitive Oscar)

Morricone conducts “The Untouchables”

November 10, 2021
Hollywood Writers Music on Film

Words on the printed page captivate us so completely that it’s natural to assume that the lives of writers must be rich, full of incident, and very dramatic indeed. Surely that is sometimes the case. Who among us could keep up with a Byron or a Pushkin or a Poe?

Yet, with even the most outlandish writers, Hollywood for some reason often feels the need to fabricate. How else to explain “Devotion” (1943), Warner Brothers’ salute to the Brontës? Then again, the temptation must be strong to characterize the sisters who penned “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” as tortured Romantics.

Ida Lupino plays Emily, the creator of Cathy and Heathcliff, and Olivia de Havilland, Charlotte, who conceived Jane and Rochester. Nancy Coleman is their sister Anne, who wrote “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” and Arthur Kennedy, their dissolute brother Branwell. The film also features Sidney Greenstreet as William Makepeace Thackeray, Paul Henreid as an Irish priest, and – well, you get the idea. The casting, at times, strains credulity.

However, the music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold is up to the composer’s usual high standard. Korngold himself became so enamored of one of its themes that he recycled it for use in the first movement of his Violin Concerto. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll have chance to sample some of it.

We’ll also hear selections from movies about Iris Murdoch (“Iris,” with music by James Horner), the Bard of Avon (“Shakespeare in Love,” with an Academy Award-winning score by Stephen Warbeck), and Samuel Clemens (“The Adventures of Mark Twain,” by Max Steiner).

Writers are such characters, especially when they’re depicted on the big screen. Everything’s writ large, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

November 6, 2021
Spooky Comedy Film Scores for Halloween

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, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

October 23, 2021

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