Bullseye

The cities that mocked the very name of God...The vengeance that tore the Earth asunder!

2006-11-16T02:22:00.000-08:00

SODOM AND GOMORRAH - Miklos Rozsa (1962)

Here’s one that’s sure to please everyone! Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the last Rozsa epic scores and I think it’s great, very much in the vein of his earlier efforts in the genre: modal writing giving it an exotic touch (even more so than his other epics), great catchy themes and a big sound. The film was an Italian production and wasn’t as prestigious as the ones Rozsa had been used to work on at MGM, maybe that’s why he was so harsh with it in his autobiography:

Sodom and Gomorrah was a super production costing seven million dollars, with the biblical story decked out with all sorts of absurd and gaudy extras. The director had left already [I believe the film was finished by Sergio Leone], so we never met. The film was like a parody of the genre: a wretched script, bad acting, some passable battle scenes, some interesting photography; but I was stuck with it, and with close to two hours of music. However, the producer was a friend, the studio was paying me well, and I hoped I might be able to help a bit; but the cards were stacked[…] The film was a sad flop, and the studio closed down. However, the record album of my music is again available.

This is the expanded two disc release from the Italian label Legend. It was issued as a 2-LP set and someone (not me) made a 2-cd boot from it. It sounds rather good in stereo (although not as good as the more recent reissue of the original album on Collectables records). One thing that we still miss is the complete Main Title: one of the best cue of the score: on this release, it just fades out before it’s finished!

http://rapidshare.com/files/1579287/sodom_and_gomorrah_CD1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/1153946/sodom_and_gomorrah_CD2.rar

What if you had no right to read?

2006-11-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

FAHRENHEIT 451 – Bernard Herrmann (1966)

Bernard Herrmann was one of the few golden age composers (Miklos Rozsa is another name that comes to mind) who enjoyed a second career in their later years when younger filmmakers who were fans of their previous work hired them to score their movies. But before Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese there was François Truffaut.
Truffaut is best known as an important figure of the French ‘Nouvelle Vague’ but was also an influential film critic who wrote several important books among them his legendary book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock that should be required reading for any lover of the cinema – for any human being, actually! As a great admirer of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Truffaut was well aware of the importance of Herrmann’s music in some of the master of suspense’s best films. He was making his first English language film with his bleakly realistic adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel and probably jumped at the occasion of working with the great composer. Apparently the two enjoyed collaborating on the picture although communication could be difficult at times since Truffaut couldn’t speak English very well and Herrmann wasn’t so good in French either.
However, Herrmann shows his perfect understanding of the material in his music that alternates sections of great coldness and brutality with heartbreakingly beautiful themes and ‘valses tristes’ that sound like a dirge for a lost humanity. The use of harps is a highlight throughout the score either representing the destructive power of fire (with ferocious glissandos) or the bleakness of this dystopian future (with obsessive unresolving arpeggios – a Herrmann trademark).
Truffaut and Herrmann would go on to work together on one more film, the director’s adaptation of William Irish’s The Bride Wore Black, but this time the experience proved to be disappointing for both men: Truffaut wasn’t getting what he wanted, so he replaced portions of the score with classical pieces by Vivaldi (a Truffaut favourite). Herrmann was understandably upset and bitter and the film marked their final collaboration.
This is ripped from Tsunami’s cd. I know that another boot label (Soundstage Records) released a more complete version but I don’t have it. This one comes with a bonus track from The Snows of Kilimanjaro soundtrack.

http://rapidshare.com/files/2471607/fahrenheit_451.rar.html

Thunderous! Tender! Touching!

2006-11-07T16:24:00.000-08:00

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS - Victor Young (1943)

Orchestrations by Leo Shuken and George Parrish
Ray Heindorf conducting the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra (1958)

Victor Young suffered the fate of most film composers who are better known for their themes (and the songs based on them) than for their scores as a whole. The reason might be that melodic music seems for some reason to sound dated to a modern audience. It has a lot to do also with the fact that, contrarily to Dimitri Tiomkin and Max Steiner, for example, Young’s scores aren’t very well represented on disc, except for the countless cover versions recorded by Young himself or others that often sound much more sappy than the film soundtracks’ originals. But since he composed most of his best work for Paramount, a studio that has shown very little interest in releasing classic soundtracks from their vaults, we’ve had few occasions to hear his music away from the films.
All the more reason to appreciate this brilliant recording conducted by Ray Heindorf in 1958. Heindorf had been the head of the Warner music department for years when the studio launched their new record label: Warner Bros. Records and the very first album they released was this one. Why they would choose to re-record a score for a 15 year old film made at another studio, we’ll never know, so we’ll have to believe the original album notes when they say that “for Ray Heindorf, the conducting of this score was a delightful and privileged experience. It was the chance to record one of his favorite scores, a score written by a dear friend. […] This recording takes on an additional tenor as one composer conducts another man’s work. It’s not only a sign of respect for the work, but for one of film music’s leaders, Victor Young.”
Whatever you may think of this blurb, the quality of this recording shows the great care that went into it, at a time when it was possible to produce a film music re-recording performed by first class L.A. musicians. Though the film is quite long (by the standards of the time, anyway), this is a rather complete and very faithful presentation of the score’s thematic material and developments. In fact the complete score as it is heard in the film sounds rather repetitive, so the 40 minute running time is just right for this one.
This was ripped in 320 kbps from the beautiful stereo version released in 1991 by Stanyan Records remastered from the original 3-track masters (fortunately they kept these ones! – see my previous post for more info about the fate of many early stereo recordings at Warners). Stanyan added 3 unrelated bonus tracks that I chose not to include here.

http://rapidshare.com/files/1591565/For_Whom_The_Bell_Tolls.rar

Its towering wonders span the age of titans!

2006-11-05T07:49:00.000-08:00

HELEN OF TROY - Max Steiner (1956)

I always tended to prefer Steiner’s scores from the thirties or the early forties to his later works. I guess they sound more imaginative and less formulaic. But I make an exception for his mammoth score for Robert Wise’s not so great 1956 epic. Flawed as it is, the movie is still better than Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy thanks in no small part to Steiner’s inspired score. It contains so many themes and motives that it would take pages to analyse it properly so I’ll leave this to your appreciation and only point out a few highlights. The action music is exceptional in its brutality showing Steiner at his most ferocious. But my favourite section of the score deals with Paris’s first encounter with Helen up to their elopement and subsequent arrival in Troy. These scenes contain some of Steiner’s best writing for harps. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to write many scores for swords and sandals epics such as this one. His approach is more traditional than Rozsa’s (who used modal writing to convey a sense of antiquity) or Waxman’s and North’s (who relied on modern composing techniques such as polytonality to create an approximation of primitive sounding music).

A note about this recording: I read somewhere that in the early days of stereo recording, Warners were so stingy that they stored their music masters in the following fashion: after they had used the original masters for the film’s stereo mix, they re-recorded them on 3-track tapes but instead of using the tracks for stereo effect they used each individual track to store a portion of the recording as a mono mixdown! That way, a one hour 3-track tape could store 3 hours of music! That’s why even legit issues of this material (such as the beautiful BYU discs of Battle Cry or Marjorie Morningstar) are mono only. I guess they had no idea then that this material could be used for anything but the occasional use as stock music for lesser productions or TV shows that would not get a stereo mix anyway. Well, that’s too bad because if their early stereo LPs are any indication, I’m sure these recordings sounded fantastic.
Anyway, this rip was made from the Mythus 2 cd boot. It’s almost complete but always frustrated me because it presents the score in the form of long suites rather than individual tracks. Well I’m all for presenting this kind of scores as a continuing music narrative but when I hear a 20mn+ suite I kind of loose track and when I’m listening to a music score that’s as screen specific as Steiner’s tend to be, I like to figure out whether what I’m hearing is Hector’s death or Achilles’. So, using the film and Bill Wrobel‘s excellent rundown of the score (available here) I indexed each track.
In the process of doing this (listening to the Mythus discs against the region 1 dvd of the movie) I noticed that the pitch was wrong (almost by a whole semitone) so I fixed this as well. I guess the tape Mythus used was either recorded or played at the wrong speed, so this version is a few minutes shorter than the cd. Even so, the sound quality is far from flawless, some portions containing a lot of distracting mag wow. I also cut the ‘overture’ from the program since it’s a fake that was put together by Warner Home Video for the Laserdisc release (it also appears on the dvd). It’s mono even on the 5.1 dvd release, indicating that they probably used the same master as the Mythus boot (they also made a ‘fake’ overture for East of Eden).

So here is Max Steiner's Helen of Troy in all its restored glory :
http://rapidshare.com/files/1141312/helen_of_troy.rar

His sword carved his name across the continents - and his glory across the seas!

2006-11-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

CAPTAIN BLOOD - Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1935)

I’m back with more Korngold today. Captain Blood is the composer’s first original film score. The year before, he had been brought to Hollywood by Max Reinhardt to work on the great director’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. For that film, Korngold was asked to adapt music by Felix Mendelssohn that would be used as underscore. Though Korngold’s work went beyond the simple editing of existing pieces, he was only an arranger. On Captain Blood he composed what would become the blueprint for his classics to come such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk.
In fact, when you come to think of it, it’s a pretty amazing accomplishment for a composer that was rather new to the film medium. Original scoring had been pioneered by the likes of Max Steiner and Carl Stalling only a few years before. Yet, when you listen to Captain Blood or other scores from 1935 (like The Bride of Frankenstein by Waxman or She by Steiner), all the conventions and tricks of modern film scoring are already in place.
Korngold was working under such a tight schedule on this film that he was forced to use extracts from Listz’s symphonic poem Mazeppa for some of the action sequences. These borrowed sections were only a few minutes long and although most of the score was original, Korngold asked to receive the following credit: “music adapted and conducted by” rather than “music composed by”. There’s a lesson for James Horner!
Before Tsunami released over an hour of music from the film, only suites existed most notably under the baton of Charles Gerhardt. This is the original soundtrack conducted by the composer and recorded in 1935.

http://rapidshare.com/files/1164768/captain_blood.rar

A movie about those who appreciate the finest things in life... for free!

2006-10-29T03:00:00.000-08:00

HOW TO STEAL A MILLION – Johnny Williams (1966)

I know some soundtrack fans who don’t even want to hear about Johnny Williams’s comedy scores. Well, they don’t know what they’re missing. Once you get over the fact that they may not be on par with The Empire Strikes Back, they can be in many ways fascinating. Thanks mainly to FSM, we now have access to many of the composer’s early scores and it’s quite interesting to see the evolution of the man who would go on to compose so many soundtrack favourites.
Williams then followed in the footsteps of Henry Mancini, composing songs that would lend themselves to a variety of lounge arrangements. His neo-classical writing (the one you still hear in later scores such as Jaws and The Eiger Sanction) also shows up (most notably in Fitzwilly) as well as his more lyrical style in love scenes. In short, you hear a composer experimenting rather freely in different idioms within the limits of the era’s aesthetics. These soundtracks may not be the most cohesive and dramatic listening experiences but they’re certainly fun!
One other reason why these scores are not as appreciated as they should be is their often dreadful original album presentations (try and compare the original Penelope LP with the complete score presentation on FSM and you’ll see what I mean). How to Steal a Million may not have been expanded, but it’s a good presentation of the score although it’s quite short. This was ripped from Tsunami’s CD edition.

http://rapidshare.com/files/994776/how_to_steal_a_million.rar

Thief... Liar... Cheat... she was all of these and he knew it!

2006-10-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

MARNIE - Bernard Herrmann (1964)

Marnie was Alfred Hitchcock’s last film to be released with a Bernard Herrmann score. Their collaboration remains one of the most successful in cinema history, yet it lasted only ten years (between 1956 and 1966) and comprises the scores for only seven films (Herrmann was also credited as a sound consultant on The Birds, but that doesn’t really count as a musical score). Two years later, Hitchcock would reject Herrmann’s score for his ill-fated Torn Curtain and the two would never speak to each other again.
This professional and personal break-up was a tragedy for the history of film music: Hitchcock had found a perfect match in Herrmann: a composer that would understand the underlying anguishes and phantasms within his films better than any other he worked with before or after. For film historians, it also coincides with the beginning of the last period of his career. The rejection of Herrmann’s score also showed the insecurities of a director whose greatest pride was in successfully manipulating an audience’s emotions through the powers of cinema. His greatest success in this regard was certainly Psycho in which he had shocked audiences like never before–with a little help from Bernard Herrmann’s score!
But Marnie proved to be a box office disappointment and it apparently shook the director’s confidence. Although it’s far from being as good as Hitchcock previous masterpieces, it would be hard to blame the director’s collaborators for it. The often unsubtle script is actually salvaged by Robert Burk’s exquisite cinematography and Herrmann’s unabashedly romantic score. This may not be Herrmann’s most innovative work, but it shows how in tune he was with Hitchcock’s tormented heroine.
This is the original soundtrack recording which is far superior to any re-recording I’ve heard. It was first released as a boot on LP, then by Tsunami. I’ve worked a little on it and put the cues back in chronological film order using the film and the Varèse re-recording track titles as a reference.

http://rapidshare.com/files/952820/marnie.rar

If you want to learn more about this and other Bernard Herrmann scores, check Bill Wrobel's Film Scores Rundown site.

She gave men a taste of life that made them hunger for more!

2006-10-26T06:10:00.000-07:00

THE SANDPIPER - Johnny Mandel (1965)

Today’s score is quite a departure from my previous postings. The composer, Johnny Mandel belongs to a generation of composers that emerged in the early sixties. They were influenced by a variety of musical styles ranging from the most modernist forms of writing to jazz and the pop idiom of the era. They used all these techniques in an attempt to set a unique mood to a film rather than simply carry the story along. Mandel certainly succeeds in that by creating a score that seems to be floating above the ground, inviting the listener to an introspective journey within himself.
Mandel was a well established arranger with a very distinctive sound. It’s hard for me to describe it but I would say that his choice of orchestral colors favours the woodwinds and the brass, while the strings are used as a mellow accompaniment. His use of flutes is particularly inspired and recognisable. But what I like the most about his sound is the way he treats harmony. His progressions are not about sudden shifts but one chord sort of dissolves into the next one, each line carrying the melody with infinite grace. Well, If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m a great admirer of Mandel’s work and I wish he’d made more film scores. The few that have been released are all outstanding (I love his modernist approach to John Boorman’s Point Blank), but The Sandpiper may be considered his masterpiece.
This score consists basically in a series of variations on a single musical theme, the classic “Shadow of Your Smile”, one of the best film songs ever written. But apart from the quality of the melody itself, with its shifts from minor to major mode, I think the arrangement and the quality of the playing really set this one apart from the other song-based scores of the era.
Unexplainably, this album has been out of print for years. I ripped it from the 1996 cd reissue on Verve in 320 kbps so you can appreciate the qualities I mentioned above. I hope you’ll like it!

http://rapidshare.com/files/769133/the_sand_piper.rar.html

An impregnable fortress... An invincible army... and the unstoppable commando team.

2006-10-25T16:23:00.000-07:00

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE – Dimitri Tiomkin (1961)

A bit of trivia, first : If you’ve read Steven Spielberg’s notes for the Jaws original soundtrack album, you know that this is one of the director's favourite scores. And the funny thing is that John Williams (then Johnny) contributed to this classic soundtrack : he arranged and orchestrated the film version of the title song, used as exit music in the picture (it's called 'Finale' on the album).
At the time, Dimitri Tiomkin was one of the most successful film composers in Hollywood. After the huge success of his score for High Noon that started the title song craze in the fifties, he almost always resorted to basing his scores on a big catchy theme that would be sure to become a hit song. Guns of Navarone is no exception and the theme is a classic.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Tiomkin’s music. His style as a composer was really one of a kind. He was a pianist initially and tended to write in a very florid idiom, with a lot of ornaments and often very short ideas and motifs designed to underscore the onscreen action in a very precise way. This mix of mickey-mousing and longer ideas (when he lets his long melodies develop) is a bit disconcerting at first and may not always work well within the context of the picture. So his scores were often used only partially: a lot of his music for Guns was cut from the movie. In fact, most of the longest cue on the album ('The Odyssey Begins') was almost entirely jettisoned. Tiomkin actually used two grand pianos in this score playing cascading arpeggios and thick chords to great effect, an unusual choice of orchestration.
The original album is a lot of fun, although it’s been put together in a strange way. The 'Main title' is in the middle of the program (at the start of side 2 on the original LP) although it’s supposed to come just after the last note of the prologue. Speaking of which, this track contains the voice-over narration by James Robertson Justice but it starts sooner on the album than in the film (I guess to leave the first statement of the main theme clearly audible), so that it’s not in synch with what the music is depicting.
Then there’s the song which, to put things mildly, doesn’t feature the greatest lyrics ever written (how many songs do you that contain the words "nitro glycerine"?). I'd advise you to listen to the Mitch Miller version with great caution. At least they didn’t put that one in the film! Paul Francis Webster also used this kind of ‘epic’ approach in the Alamo the year before using a choir which basically tells the story of the film as a legend. For you sing-along fans out there I even dug out the lyrics:

Islands of Greece are green and beautiful,
Green and beautiful,
Where the olive trees grow
In the field below,
But high on the cliffs the guns are hidden there,
Guns are hidden there,
In a cavern of stone,
Guns of Navarone

There is another isle as beautiful
Where the laurel once bloomed,
Here on this island known as Kheros
Two thousand soldiers are doomed.
Now is the problem how to rescue them
From a crushing defeat
When high on the cliffs
The Guns Of Navarone block His Majesty's Fleet

So in the face of odds impossible
Secret saboteurs in a fisherman's skiff
Headed for the cliff.
Six men come to save two thousand men
Two thousand men, the brave and the bold
For whom the bells have tolled.
Six men come to the scale the hills above
Here where the gods were,
Think what the odds were - six men.

Come from the sea with nitro glycerine,
Nitro glycerine and a ladder of rope
And a thing called hope.
Six flies climb the Nazi spider web,
Carefully set the charge and the fuse,
So little time to loose.
Tick-tock, swiftly tick the hands of doom,
Ev'rything reckoned,
Time to the second - contact!

Spark and a boom and flames are going up,
Guns are blowing up
Thru the thundering roar
Steam the men of war.
Yas-su, God speed to the gallant men, misson accomplished,
Farewell my friends,
And so the legend ends.

Yas-su, toll the bells of Navarone,
Safe be your journey,
Fair wind attends you. Yas-su. Yas-su.
Now on the island green and beautiful
With the morn again,
Hope is born again.
Free! We shall be free, live and be free! Free! Free!

Last year, Tadlow Records released a complete re-recording of the score. This recording is, for the most part very good but they somehow managed to ruin the main title. This is the original soundtrack conducted by the composer and recorded in London with the London Sinfonia.

It's brought to you in glorious 320 kbps stereo : http://rapidshare.com/files/781558/guns_of_navarone.rar.html

If you want to learn more about this score, I recommand you check Bill Wrobel's rundown at his site: http://www.filmscorerundowns.net/tiomkin/index.html
Dimitri Tiomkin's official site is also very well made. The photo gallery is particularly impressive: http://www.dimitritiomkin.com/

Men, if you're willing to fight for our people, I want you!

2006-10-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Today I’ll answer to a request that was posted by Steve McC and Hooch on Steve’s great Scores of Scores blog with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s seminal 1938 score for The Adventures of Robin Hood directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn.
What a great score! And to think that Korngold felt was he would never be able to score an action picture! He initially turned down the picture but fate decided otherwise: when Germany invaded Austria, he had no choice but to send for the rest of his family and cling to his steady job at Warner Bros. In these tragic circumstances, he must have felt in tune with the rebellious Robin of Locksley, battling against an abusive power and produced one of his greatest scores if not his greatest (I’m partial to The Sea Hawk, myself). This score has it all and defined what a swashbuckler score would sound like from then on. This is the original 1938 soundtrack recording in mono as it was released on Tsunami. As is to be expected with this label, the sound is less than stellar but I chose this version over the others because it’s the hardest one to find and also for its historic significance. It’s also fairly complete although I would also recommend two other great versions: the 1983 re-recording produced by George Korngold on Varèse Sarabande (a great performance and presentation of the material although it’s not complete) and John Morgan and William Stromberg’s reconstruction of the complete score on Marco Polo. The latter is very faithful to Korngold’s original tempi and is highly recommended. But I offer you the real thing recorded in Burbank, California in April 1938.

This is a lenghty score (78 minutes) so it comes in two files :
http://rapidshare.com/files/616995/robin_hood_1.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/624845/robin_hood_2.rar.html

The cry was MUTINY... and the decks ran red!

2006-10-24T05:21:00.000-07:00

CLIFTON PARKER – DAMN THE DEFIANT! aka H.M.S DEFIANT (1962)

There’s been a discussion over at the FSM message board about this score, since they plan to release it as part of their next Colpix double-header. They were looking for a mint copy of the stereo lp to master from, so I pulled out my copy I got from ebay a few years back. Unfortunately it’s far from being mint as you’ll hear. Anyway it’s quite a nice score.

Clifton Parker may be best known for being the composer of Disney’s Treasure Island in 1951. He was kind of a specialist of sea adventure movies and thus was the perfect choice for this British Mutiny on the Bounty starring Alec Guinness, Dirk Bogarde, Maurice Denham, and Nigel Stock.

The ‘Main Title’ introduces the two main themes : a rhythmic sea-shanty melody in minor mode followed by a lush and triumphant theme for full orchestra somewhat reminiscent of Bronislau Kaper’s Bounty theme. The music is very elegantly written, with very English-sounding harmonies and nice modal passages in the suspenseful tracks (check ‘The Defiant Reaches Corsica’).

The sound is nice crisp stereo (you can even hear someone coughing in ‘Unrest Among the Crew’) but, as I’ve noted earlier, my copy contains quite a large amount of pops and clicks. The album sequencing is also a little bit odd since it repeats the same track three times under different titles. This makes side 2 a little repetitive. I haven’t seen the movie so I’ve no way of telling if it’s repeated the same way in the film but it might also have been made by the producer to have a longer album. Colpix producers apparently had no qualms about repeating identical tracks to make an album longer as they did on the Lawrence of Arabia OST. Even so, the album runs a brisk 27 minutes. But it's great music. Enjoy!

Tracklist :
1. Damn the Defiant! Main Title
2. Vizard Theme
3. Midnight on the Defiant
4. Sailing with the Tide
5. Unrest Among the Crew
6. The Defiant Reaches Corsica
7. Meeting at Rochefort
8. The Mutineers
9. Aboard the Defiant
10. Crawford at Vizard's Deathbed
11. The French Retreat
12. Damn the Defiant! End Title

http://rapidshare.com/files/479224/damn_the_defiant.rar.html