Open sesame! It’s an Aladdin’s Cave of cinematic delights.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” the focus is on tales from “The Arabian Nights.”
These traditional folk stories from the Orient have come down to us filtered through the sensibilities of Western translators. Further translation was required to get the stories from page to screen; so it’s hardly surprising to find Sinbad, for instance, fighting a giant walrus at the North Pole.
The film versions are often showcases for the work of production designers and special effects artists, but composers have certainly gotten in on the act with appropriately imaginative scores.
Bernard Herrmann lent plenty of color and wit to the skeleton duel in “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” (1958) by employing a battery of castanets, xylophone and brass. Stop motion artist Ray Harryhausen was responsible for the memorable effects. “Sinbad” proved to be a dry run for the climax of “Jason and the Argonauts,” in which Harryhausen outdid himself by animating not one, but seven skeletons, and again, Herrmann supplied the music.
Harryhausen animated two further Sinbad adventures – “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad” (1974), and “Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger” (1977). Over the course of the three “Sinbad” films, audiences were treated to fantastic encounters with, in addition to the skeleton, a Cyclops, a roc, a dragon, a statue of the goddess Kali, a centaur, a giant walrus, and a saber-tooth tiger, among others.
“Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger” was scored by Roy Budd. Budd’s reputation was largely that of a jazz musician and composer. He wrote scores for over 50 films, including “Get Carter” and “The Wild Geese,” before his early death of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 46, in 1993.
Walt Disney created a modern classic in “Aladdin” (1992). The music was by Alan Menken, with lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice. “Aladdin” won Academy Awards for Best Original Score and Best Original Song (“A Whole New World”). Menken has a whole shelf full of Oscars for his work for Disney. Need I say, Robin Williams was the voice of the manic, freewheeling Genie?
Rex Ingram’s Genie steals the show in “The Thief of Bagdad” (1940). Ingram emerges from his magic lamp and looms over a cowering Sabu, whom he addresses as “Little Master of the Universe.” The beach resounds with his maniacal laughter. There had been an earlier, justly celebrated, silent version of “Thief,” with Douglas Fairbanks. The remake splits the thief and the prince into two separate characters. Sabu plays the incorrigible Abu (the thief), and Conrad Veidt is his nemesis, the treacherous vizier Jaffar.
The score is by three-time Academy Award winner Miklós Rózsa. Rózsa was in London, in the employ of Alexander Korda, when the lavish Technicolor production was moved to Hollywood on account of the Blitz. Rózsa would go on to become one of Hollywood’s greatest composers. His music for “Ben-Hur” alone has earned him a place in the film music pantheon. He never wrote a more charming score, however, than he did for this.
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of cinematic enchantments. It’s “A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies,” on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
