Today is Richard Wagner’s birthday. Perhaps in his honor, I am going to go his megalomania one better by completely ignoring the fact and using the space for shameless self-promotion!
This week on “Picture Perfect,” as we near Memorial Day, the focus will be on music from World War II classics.
Among the selections will be a new release – and a very fine one – on the Intrada label of music by Miklós Rózsa. The album is called “The Man in Half Moon Street,” and includes re-recordings of some of his underrepresented though certainly deserving scores, among them, “Valley of the Kings,” “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers,” and “Sahara.”
In “Sahara,” Humphrey Bogart plays a WWII tank commander who holes up at a desert well and uses his apparent position of power to delay a parched German battalion from participating in the First Battle of El Alamein. Allan Wilson conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, in what is truly the best project of its kind I have encountered in quite some time. Re-recordings so often lack the punch of the originals, but here is Rózsa is all his glory, sounding wholly idiomatic and presented in vivid digital splendor.
Jerry Goldsmith’s music for “Patton” should require no introduction. The film is a bona fide classic, a winner of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Unfortunately for Goldsmith, at that stage of his career, he was always a bridesmaid but never a bride. George C. Scott notoriously rejected his Oscar for Best Actor; he should have given it to Goldsmith.
Errol Flynn may seem an unlikely choice to play a U.S. Army captain, but he does just that in “Objective, Burma!” Flynn received criticism for remaining in Hollywood during the war, but the Warner Brothers publicity machine did what it could to hush up the fact that the world’s most famous swashbuckler had tried to enlist but was rejected on medical grounds. “Objective, Burma!” infuriated Churchill, and the film was actually banned in Britain for what was perceived as the Americanization of a largely British, Indian and Commonwealth conflict. The rousing score, also nominated for an Oscar, was by Franz Waxman.
“The Guns of Navarone,” adapted from the novel of Alistair MacLean, is one of the all-time great adventure films. A team of Allied military specialists – played by Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn, among others – undertake a mission to blow up some very big Nazi guns trained over the Aegean Sea. Dimitri Tiomkin pulled out all the stops for his Oscar-nominated music. The recording features a spoken introduction by James Robertson Justice, who plays Commodore Jensen in the film.
Join me for these scores from World War II classics on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 ET, or listen to it as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.
