How to translate visual art to the big screen? Generally, by focusing on the drama in the artists’ lives, that’s how.
And what drama!
This week on “Picture Perfect,” expand your palette with music from movies about the great artists. “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (1965), based on the novel of Irving Stone, dramatizes the friction between Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) and his benefactor, Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), over the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For his part, Michelangelo would have been perfectly content to stick to sculpture. Alex North’s score is an Early Music banquet, with allusions to – and sometimes outright quotations of – music of the Renaissance.
Stone had another bestseller in “Lust for Life” (1956), about the tormented Vincent van Gogh. This time Kirk Douglas plays one of his most sympathetic roles – and looks remarkably like the artist. Anthony Quinn turns up as his “frenemy,” the painter Paul Gaugin, and earns an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The great Miklós Rózsa wrote the music, softening up the edges of his brawny Hungarian sound with ethereal suggestions of the French Impressionists.
John Huston brought Pierre La Mure’s novel about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to the big screen as “Moulin Rouge” (1952) – not to be confused with the more recent Baz Luhrmann spectacle starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, which relegated the artist to a supporting role. José Ferrer dominates the earlier version, spending most of the film walking through off-camera trenches and shuffling along on his knees. Georges Auric, one of the composers of Les Six (the loose collective that also included Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud), captures the spirit of the titular cabaret. The score became one of Auric’s best-known, thanks to the waltz, which yielded the popular hit “Where is Your Heart?”
“The Picasso Summer” (1969) is a departure from the usual formula of focusing on the artist himself. Instead, a young couple (Albert Finney and Yvette Mimieux), admirers of Picasso’s work, take off on a European adventure in an attempt to track him down. Originally Picasso had agreed to appear, but he was driven off by some off-screen drama involving a matador friend and Yul Brynner’s wife! The film was based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury hated the adaptation, as did the studio, and “The Picasso Summer,” after being heavily cut and patched with new footage, was never released theatrically in the United States. The film is striking for its extended animation sequences inspired by Picasso’s paintings, and for its score by Michel Legrand.
I hope you’ll join me for brushes with the great artists, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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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
Tag: Kirk Douglas
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“Odyssey” Mania is Real!
“Odyssey” mania is real! Here are some souvenirs from a trip to the Princeton Barnes & Noble last week. You’ll note a table devoted to Emily Wilson’s translations of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” Someone snuck in a copy of the Robert Fagles’ version. He was, after all, born in Philly and served on the Princeton faculty.
Also, an endcap of other “Odyssey” translations from the B&N bargain bin and related mythological material.
And finally, an impressive display of “Odyssey” books and bric-a-brac.
The other photo was taken yesterday at Princeton Public Library. I was amused to find this plug for Matt Damon survival movies in their collection. The internet is alive with debate about which are better, Matt Damon movies in which he is saved, or those in which he saves himself. The man has established quite the interesting subgenre. When we think John Wayne, we think westerns. When we think Errol Flynn, we think swashbucklers. When we think Matt Damon, we think SAVE HIM!
Last night, I revisited Kirk Douglas’ “Ulysses.” It really is ridiculously entertaining for a 1950s sword-and-sandal adaptation – from Italy, no less, with all the actors dubbed! There are few actors anymore who can fill the screen like Douglas and Anthony Quinn (as Antinous), the latter giving a very different interpretation, and on quite a different level, from Robert Pattinson (who, granted, is wholly believable in the new version as a scheming coward).
Off today to Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, to take in a performance of Richard Strauss’ opera “The Egyptian Helen” – about the troubled reconciliation of Helen of Troy and her husband, Menelaus, following the Trojan War. The opera runs through August 2, with a livestream on Friday, July 31, at 4 p.m. Often Bard archives these things online not long after the run, so watch for it, and check out some of their past performances. For more information, visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/series/the-egyptian-helen/
The Classics are everywhere these days, and I’m riding the wave all the way to Ithaca!
Past Bard operas and related material archived here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfzbP01j_SLj4B4A46l-jLPjzWdSxt_wS -
Saturn 3 How Could It Go So Wrong Sci-Fi
With a creative team like that assembled for “Saturn 3” (1980) – Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas, ‘70s icon Farrah Fawcett, and Scorsese veteran Harvey Keitel, in a story by “Star Wars” production designer John Barry, developed into a screenplay by acclaimed novelist Martin Amis, directed by “Singin’ in the Rain” maestro Stanley Donen, with a score by “Magnificent Seven” composer Elmer Bernstein – how could it possibly fail? And yet when I saw it in the theater, even as a 13 year-old, I couldn’t believe how bad it was.
But you know, sometimes the worst movies make for the best discussions. I can only guess that that’s our motivation, in selecting it as our topic for the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Roy and I will offer our saturnine assessments of this claustrophobic would-be thriller, about a love triangle between a feather-haired Angel, a dimple-chinned methuselah, and a pin-headed robot.
To help dull the pain, there will also be some fun recollections from special guest Suzanne Peterson, who was Farrah’s stand-in on the film.
Join us in hectoring Hector in the comments section. We’ll do our best to eclipse “Saturn 3,” when we livestream on Facebook, YouTube, etc., this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!
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Vikings 1958 Epic Adventure & Livestream
This week on Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, we’ve got the need for mead!
“The Vikings” (1958) is the kind of film they just don’t make anymore, an overheated historical adventure built on sibling rivalry, cosmic irony, Wagnerian tragedy, and ultimate redemption, with plenty of old-school romance and rip-roaring action along the way.
Richard Fleischer, who directed some terrific genre pictures in the 1950s and ‘60s, including “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Fantastic Voyage,” helms the definitive film about the Norsemen.
This is one movie that still grips and entertains, even as it educates (sort of) with its meticulous reconstruction of Viking dragon boats (built using actual medieval Viking plans) and period-accurate village setting in the actual fjords of Hardanger, Norway.
Kirk Douglas produced the film, which is certainly a showcase for his physical fitness. So we see him riding bareback, running across oars, and climbing a closed drawbridge on an impromptu ladder of hurled battle axes – while co-star Tony Curtis looks on sullenly in his short shorts. At least Curtis was married to the leading lady, Janet Leigh. That said, no one looks like he’s having more fun than Ernest Borgnine. But you just know Ernie was like that in real life.
“The Vikings” stealthily draws you into a relatable human story even as it offers up the vicarious enjoyment of Viking excesses. And Mario Nascimbene’s haunting score, evocative of a spirit of grandeur and adventure – now seemingly (and sadly) a thing of the past, as today’s movies become increasingly mired in claustrophobia and neurosis – is not easily forgotten, a thing of beauty and nobility.
Grab your drinking horn! There will be wenching and pillaging galore in the comments section, as Roy and I trade blows over “The Vikings.” Our brawny exchange will be livestreamed on Facebook, YouTube, etc., this Friday evening at 7:00 EST!
There’s “Nor-way” you’ll want to miss it!
ODINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!
https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner
Enjoy a recent recording of Nascimbene’s music here:
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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Disney Movie Review
Hope you’ve all been enjoying the holidays, albeit with some necessary modifications and perhaps a few compromises. Not to proselytize, but if we all do the right thing, hopefully this year will soon be little more than an unpleasant memory.
Be that as it may, in this season of merriment, Roy and I will conclude 2020 on a low note – and isn’t that saying something? – with an “in-depth” discussion of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954).
This whale of a tale features Kirk Douglas as the swashbuckling Ned Land, James Mason as a brooding Captain Nemo, and a 40-foot squid as the ultimate metaphor for that great leveler, COVID. Land sings a saucy sea shanty about his affairs with loose women, and Nemo plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (of course) on an organ in his decked-out submarine. Gotta love vintage Disney.
Peter Lorre and Paul Lukas are along for the ride, in this intelligent family classic that’s refreshingly free of flatulence jokes.
I hope you’ll join us for a hearty good riddance to 2020, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Leave your comments in the captain’s log as we live-stream on Facebook, this Sunday evening at 7:00 EST.
https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner/
It’s all true… I swear by my tattoo!
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