Calling all rapscallions and scapegraces! This week on “Picture Perfect,” get ready to revel in some freewheeling lack of judgment, with an hour of films based on picaresque novels.
For those of you who weren’t English majors, the picaresque novel is a literary genre often characterized by the presence of rogues or anti-heroes as protagonists, episodic, wayward structures, and, not infrequently, low humor.
We’ll hear music from “The Reivers,” after William Faulkner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a coming-of-age story about a boy swept into automobile theft and illicit horseracing in the American South. Mark Rydell directed the 1969 film, which stars Steve McQueen as the rakish Boon Hogganbeck and features narration by Burgess Meredith. John Williams wrote the breezy Americana score.
Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is frequently categorized as an American picaresque. It’s certainly one of the funniest of “serious” books. A middling film adaptation was made in 1960, directed by Michael Curtiz, with Tony Randall given top billing, shifting the focus of the story to the con artistry of the King and the Duke. It features an evocative score by Jerome Moross.
If Hervey Allen’s “Anthony Adverse” had any humor to begin with, it was definitely lost in translation. (Too bad the novel was written in English.) However, the 1936 screen adaptation certainly does sprawl. One could say it’s picaresque in the worst way. It just doesn’t go anywhere. It does, however, feature a top-notch cast (Frederic March, Olivia De Havilland, Claude Rains, etc.) and an Academy Award-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
While the modern picaresque novel has its roots in the Renaissance, the genre really seemed to hit its stride in the 18th century, with comic novelists such as Henry Fielding. Fielding’s “Tom Jones,” perhaps the quintessential picaresque, was made into a film in 1963. It went on to win Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Tony Richardson), Best Adapted Screenplay (John Osborne), and Best Original Score (John Addison). Addison’s music suits Richardson’s quirky virtuosity like an off-kilter powdered wig.
We’re up to no good, with an hour of picaresque adventures, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Tag: John Addison
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Picaresque Adventures on “Picture Perfect”
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Tom Jones & The Genius of John Addison
If I hadn’t watched the Academy Awards the other night, one of the movies I would have had in my watch pile would have been “Tom Jones,” Best Picture winner of 1964, totally inappropriate – if it ever WAS appropriate – for these days of Twitter-propelled outrage. Let’s just say there is plenty of wenching in evidence and also a fox hunt that, though not excessively graphic, I confess is hard to watch. I think that’s the point, actually, but it does kind of wipe the smile off one’s face, coming as it does in the middle of a bawdy farce. The film also features a memorable eating scene, surely one of the most prolonged and comically eroticized in the entire history of cinema.
“Tom Jones” was also the recipient of awards for Best Director (Tony Richardson) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Osborne), after the picaresque novel of Henry Fielding.
Also nominated were Albert Finney for Best Actor (the first of his five nominations), Hugh Griffith for Best Supporting Actor (his antics would be so “cancelled” in 2023), and Diane Cilento, Edith Evans, and Joyce Redman for Best Supporting Actress. “Tom Jones” is the only film in the history of the Oscars for which three actresses in the same movie were in competition for Best Supporting Actress. (The award went to Margaret Rutherford for “The V.I.P.s.”)
In addition, it received a nod in the category of Best Art Direction.
Freewheeling is one of the most fitting adjectives I can think of for “Tom Jones,” which is also vivacious, versatile, and virtuosic. The same could be said for Richardson’s direction, which at times reverts to silent movie style slapstick. It can certainly be said of the hand-in-glove score by John Addison, who was born on this date in 1920.
Addison too was awarded an Oscar. His music is a brilliant mix of unusual instrumentation (harpsichord, well-worn upright, banjo, accordion) and music hall brio.
Later, he provided the memorable music for “Sleuth.”
And, for television, “Murder She Wrote.”
Addison was the composer to whom Alfred Hitchcock turned, notoriously, after his falling out with Bernard Herrmann over the scoring of “Torn Curtain.” The studio was pressuring Hitch for a more “popular” sound. Ironically, Addison just wound up trying to conjure Herrmann – as did every one of Hitch’s collaborators thereafter.
Addison also provided music for “The Entertainer,” “A Taste of Honey,” “The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner,” “Start the Revolution Without Me,” “Luther,” “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” “A Bridge Too Far,” and the television miniseries “Centennial.”
A student of Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music in London, he wrote a number of concert works, though he remarked, “If you find you’re good at something, as I was as a film composer, it’s stupid to do anything else.”
Here is Addison’s Trumpet Concerto in three movements:
I. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9kX_RyXhac
II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrW_Tj8Pkw4
III. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOJTZ2cnPLcOver a half century before Warren Beauty and Faye Dunaway got caught up in the infamous “La La Land” snafu, Sammy Davis Jr. was bitten by “Tom Jones”:
Happy birthday, John Addison!
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John Addison’s Centennial A Musical Tribute
Today is the 100th birthday of Academy Award winning composer John Addison.
Addison was awarded his statuette for “Tom Jones” in 1964. The score is a brilliant admixture of unusual instrumentation (harpsichord, well-worn upright, banjo, accordion) and music hall brio.
Addison also provided the memorable music for “Sleuth.”
And, for television, “Murder She Wrote.”
Addison was the composer to whom Alfred Hitchcock turned, notoriously, after his falling out with Bernard Herrmann over the scoring of “Torn Curtain.” The studio was pressuring Hitch for a more “popular” sound. Ironically, Addison just wound up trying to conjure Herrmann – as did every one of Hitch’s collaborators thereafter.
Addison also provided music for “The Entertainer,” “A Taste of Honey,” “The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner,” “Start the Revolution Without Me,” “Luther,” “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” “A Bridge Too Far,” and the television miniseries “Centennial.”
A student of Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music in London, he wrote a number of concert works, though he remarked, “If you find you’re good at something, as I was as a film composer, it’s stupid to do anything else.”
Here is Addison’s Trumpet Concerto:
Over a half century before Warren Beauty and Faye Dunaway got caught up in the infamous “La La Land” snafu, Sammy Davis Jr. was bitten by “Tom Jones”:
Happy birthday, John Addison!
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