This week on “Picture Perfect,” we journey through the awe-inspiring landscapes of India and Tibet, even as we feel our way to the inner realms of spirit and psyche, with an hour of Himalayan adventures.
The Himalayas, in film, have frequently been the source of enlightenment; though occasionally their overwhelming influence has also led to madness. Intriguingly, the latter is the case in the Powell-Pressburger classic, “Black Narcissus” (1947). Psychological and emotional tensions abound in this tale of repressed nuns struggling to maintain their composure in a voluptuous Himalayan valley.
The stunning cinematography was by Jack Cardiff, and Brian Easdale (of “The Red Shoes” fame) wrote the music. Incredibly, the entire film was shot in England, mostly at Pinewood Studios. From a purely visual standpoint, “Black Narcissus” must be one of the most beautiful films ever made. It’s also one of the craziest, with unlikely object-of-desire Mr. Dean driving the sisters to the brink.
The Himalayas also form the backdrop to “Seven Years in Tibet” (1997), based on a memoir of Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer. Harrer escapes from a British internment camp in India during the Second World War. He travels across Tibet to its capital, Lhasa, where he eventually becomes the tutor of the 14th Dalai Lama. In the film, Brad Pitt plays Harrer. John Williams wrote the music, and Yo-Yo Ma performs the cello solos.
“The Razor’s Edge” (1946) tells the story of a traumatized World War I veteran, who sets off in search of some kind of transcendent meaning to his existence. He finds it in India, at a Himalayan monastery. The 1946 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel (which he claimed was thinly-veiled fact) features Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, and Ann Baxter. The music is by Alfred Newman, who will conduct a selection from his score.
Finally, we’ll hear a suite from the Frank Capra classic, “Lost Horizon” (1937). Based on the book by James Hilton, the film stars Ronald Colman and an outstanding supporting cast, including Jane Wyatt, Thomas Mitchell, Edward Everett Horton, H.B. Warner, and Sam Jaffe. The novel, and the film, brought the term “Shangri-La” into popular usage, a Utopian paradise hidden in a secluded Himalayan valley, a place of ageless beauty and serenity.
“Lost Horizon” provided composer Dimitri Tiomkin (a pupil of Alexander Glazunov) with his first major project. The result is one of his most colorful scores. The recording is one of the gems of RCA’s Classic Film Scores series, originally issued in the early 1970s. Made in the presence of the composer, it features 157 performers, with the chorus standing on a platform behind the conductor, Charles Gerhardt, and the various percussionists stationed in the encircling balcony.
I can’t guarantee that you’ll find enlightenment, but there will be plenty to awe and inspire in these Himalayan adventures, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical 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 EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
Tag: Frank Capra
-
It’s a Wonderful Life Turns 75!
75 years ago today, “It’s a Wonderful Life” opened at the Globe Theatre in New York. It had been slated for a January premiere, but was bumped up to qualify for Academy Awards consideration. The film would be nominated in five categories, including those for Best Picture, Best Director (Frank Capra), and Best Actor (James Stewart).
It’s amazing that nobody involved in the making or distribution of the film seemed to regard it, from the start, as a Christmas movie. “It’s a Wonderful Life” received mixed reviews and was something of a box office disappointment. However, decades later, it attained classic status through incessant television broadcasts around the holidays, back when the film was still in the public domain.
When Republic Pictures finally realized the value of what it had lost, after having allowed the copyright to lapse in 1974 (opening the floodgates for anyone to exhibit the film without having to pay them a fee), the studio was determined to regain control of the property, which it did in 1993. It accomplished this by pushing its ownership of both the original story, upon which the film was based, and the film’s music score, by Dimitri Tiomkin. Now, legally, no one is allowed to show “It’s a Wonderful Life” without the studio’s express permission, as long as those components are intact. Republic wasted no time in signing a long-term agreement with NBC, which holds onto its broadcast rights like grim death.
Capra himself thought the film his finest achievement. Interestingly, while many would be inclined to agree with him, “It’s a Wonderful Life” has also generated its share of backlash, with some finding it too dark, and others put off by its sentimentality. Too bad for them. It’s a fascinating movie, full of heartwarming snapshots of a world that probably never was. But damn it, I’m in love with the vision (and also with Donna Reed).
It was a novel approach, to turn “A Christmas Carol” on its head and have the idealistic hero (as opposed to Old Man Potter) be the one who winds up desperately in need of redemption. The explosion of joy at the film’s climax would leave Alastair Sim winded.
Tiomkin’s original score, which even alludes to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (not heard in the final film), was issued only last month on La-La Land Records. The restoration is fabulous, considering the source material, like the film, is now 75 years-old. The album contains Tiomkin’s original thoughts, which were butchered in the editing and looping of the film. The release also contains a number of bonus tracks, including alternate takes, source music, music for the film’s trailer, and a “single,” with vocals, of the movie’s love theme, proposed for broadcast. A missed opportunity, for sure, as it was only six years later that Tiomkin would kick off the mania for main title songs with his Academy Award winning “The Ballad of High Noon.”
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is not my favorite Tiomkin score, by a long shot. I much prefer the music he wrote for Capra’s “Lost Horizon,” which didn’t have all the shotgun, cartoony allusions to classical, pop, patriotic, and folk melodies that were the stock-in-trade for Capra’s populist fantasies (like “You Can’t Take It with You,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and “Meet John Doe”). Only Tiomkin would juxtapose “Ave Maria” with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Even so, the score works great on record. There are many differences from what we’ve become familiar with from the film, since entire sequences of Tiomkin’s original conception were jettisoned as the movie was repositioned for a Christmas release. Heartbreakingly for the composer, the film’s music editor began to draw heavily on pre-existing cues from the RKO music library, in spackling together the soundtrack for certain key sequences.
Tiomkin called the finished project “an all-around scissors job.” Though he and Capra would remain friends, they kept their distance for a year and a half, and then they never worked together again.
There’s no question this release of the film’s original score is evocative. It’s at its most interesting when it plunges into the dark side, and then swings back hard to the light. You really get a sense of the scope of Tiomkin’s vision as he brings the love theme to its apotheosis. As an unapologetic fan of the film, La-La Land’s soundtrack release is one I wouldn’t want to be without.
https://lalalandrecords.com/its-a-wonderful-life-75th-anniversary-remastered-limited-edition/
Believe it or not, I once owned one of the 200 original copies of “The Greatest Gift,” the 4,100-word story upon which “It’s a Wonderful Life” is based. It was self-published by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1943 to be distributed to his friends as a kind of Christmas card. For years, I was living hand-to-mouth as a young book dealer in Philadelphia, and regrettably I wound up having to sell it in order to pay the rent. It’s now listed, if you can find a copy, for thousands. Not that I’d ever sell it now. It’s one of my life’s great regrets – of those that don’t involve other people – to have had to part with it. I sold it to a real creep, too. But at least he paid cash.
Tag Cloud
Aaron Copland (92) Beethoven (94) Composer (114) Film Music (116) Film Score (143) Film Scores (255) Halloween (94) John Williams (185) KWAX (228) Leonard Bernstein (99) Marlboro Music Festival (125) Movie Music (131) Opera (197) Philadelphia Orchestra (86) Picture Perfect (174) Princeton Symphony Orchestra (106) Radio (86) Ralph Vaughan Williams (85) Ross Amico (244) Roy's Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner (290) The Classical Network (101) The Lost Chord (268) Vaughan Williams (99) WPRB (396) WWFM (881)