Elmer Bernstein Concert / January 24/25, Gene Autry Museum, Los Angeles                               

by Ross Care

It was emphatically worth braving the grueling Los Angeles Friday gridlock for this unique, “once in a lifetime/only in LA” event. I prefer films of the studio era and its ensuing transitional period as American cinema gradually freed itself from decades of censorship and underwent a radical shift in style, content, and scoring in the 1950s and ‘60s. It was also the period in which Elmer Bernstein was to emerge as a key composer who would musically define this new era in both films and film music.

There was, however, a difficult early period.  According to a New York Times obituary Bernstein once stated  “I wasn't important enough to be blacklisted, so I was put on a gray list,'' but that did not end what had been a promising start in film scoring in the early ‘50s. He persisted by composing for documentaries and B-pictures (such as Robot Monster). In 1955 he introduced an intense, jazz-influenced sound for Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm, and in 1956 took on a more traditional (and intimidating) assignment when he replaced an ailing Victor Young on Cecil B. DeMille’s ultimate epic, The Ten Commandments.  
 
These two major scores proved that Bernstein could score virtually any genre, and not only was he versatile but amazingly prolific. Which must have made it a challenge to organize a representative program of his prodigiously varied work. However, with an ensemble of A-list instrumentalists and vocalists, concert producer, Henry Stanny, and host, Bruce Kimmel, succeeded in doing just that.

 

The concert was divided into two “acts” and included both instrumental and vocal performances. The instrumental ensemble brilliantly captured the duality of Bernstein’s various styles which draw on both symphonic/orchestral and jazz/pop influences. As did the idiomatic arrangements by William V. Malpede who was also music director and keyboardist.

I was curious to hear how some of Bernstein’s primarily orchestral scores would fare with this smaller instrumental combination and was amazed when a “chamber” suite from Ten Commandments evoked a whole new lyrical perspective on that epic score. And it was certainly thrilling to hear dynamic live performances of jazz main titles such as Man with the Golden Arm and Walk on the Wild Side, the latter accompanied by a clip of Saul Bass’s famous credit sequence of a black cat prowling the back alleys of the film’s seedy New Orleans setting.   

 

In a more delicate mode the chamber sound was perfect for what may be Bernstein’s most revered score, the magical To Kill A Mockingbird which provided a lyrical showcase for flutist, Sara Andon, violinist Nathalie Bonin, and cellist Circe Diaz. 

Bernstein is also well-known for his western scores and the concert ended with his “greatest hit,” the rousing theme from The Magnificent Seven.  Also included were excerpts from the big Cinerama comedy/western, The Hallelujah Trail, its gospel-tinged title song showcasing the choral ensemble. The choir was also called upon at various points during the evening, including for a more serious symphonic epic, Hawaii.

With the popularity of Dimitri Tiomkin’s “High Noon” in 1952 movie songs became a definite trend in the ‘50s, though not all film composers were capable of turning out hits. Bernstein’s songs were handled by Maegan McConnell and Robert Yacko whose varied vocal stylings reminded that Elmer could be a successful song composer as well, with several commercial successes.

A lesser-known gem was “Hello and Goodbye” with poignant lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, from a Charles Bronson film, From Noon to Three (1976). Bernstein’s Broadway work was represented by a rousing show-stopper, “Step To The Rear” from How Now, Dow Jones (1967), and the dynamic “It’s About Magic” from 1982’s Merlin. 

I was personally pleased that one of my favorite title songs (and a best-selling single for Glen Yarbrough), Baby, the Rain Must Fall, was included, in an appealing vocal performance by guitarist, Gene Micofsky. Bernstein composed both pop songs and a minimal but moving background score for this sensitive and under-rated Robert Mulligan film. 

Lee Remick & Steve McQueen - BABY, THE RAIN MUST FALL

 
This remarkable tribute was a bit like sitting in on one of the most remarkable and constantly surprising studio sessions ever. The substantial evening zipped by and I’m only sorry I could not get back to experience it for a second time on Saturday.

It truly was about magic.

+++++
 
Ross Care has written about film music for the Library of Congress, Film Score Monthly (articles and liner notes), and the book, Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier. 

As a composer he scored Academy Award-winning animator John Canemaker’s  documentary film, Otto Messmer and Felix the Cat.

 

Green Mansions - Bronislau Kaper/Villa-Lobos

GREEN MANSIONS (Score, FSM CD)

Composers: Bronislau Kaper, Special Music Created by Heitor Villa-Lobos Orchestrations: Robert Franklyn, Sidney Cutner, Leo Arnaud– Film Score Monthly vol 8, no 3, TT: 79.53, 21 tracks (stereo)  ***** 

Producer: Lukas Kendall Performed: MGM Studio Orchestra  Conductor: Charles Wolcott

 
Green Mansions is a 1959 MGM CinemaScope film based on the 1904 novel by British writer, W. H. Hudson. The classic fantasy concerns Rima (Audrey Hepburn), a mysterious “bird-girl” living in the unexplored depths of the Amazon forest (the “green mansions” of the title), and her ill-fated romance with Abel (Tony Perkins), a South American political refugee. 

These two leads are certainly photogenic, and the film has its moments, but some novels  just do not translate to a visual medium. Though director Mel Ferrer removed most of its overtly fantastic elements, Green Mansions remained one of these elusive literary properties and the film was a commercial and artistic disappointment at the time of its release.
 

GREEN MANSIONS French Poster

Today the film is best remembered for a lavish symphonic score with a controversial creative history. Brazilian classical composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, was originally signed to do the music but, due to a series of circumstances well documented in the liner notes, MGM’s Bronislau Kaper, himself a classically trained musician well-versed in concert techniques, was also brought in. Kaper both adapted and augmented the Villa-Lobos music and created a title song that is judiciously used in the underscoring. 

Villa-Lobos rearranged his music as Forest of the Amazon; his last great concert work for orchestra with soprano and chorus, and recorded it for United Artists Records. (It was recently redone with Renee Fleming as soloist). This, however, is the first recording of the original film soundtrack. A 5.24 “Main Title/Chase/River Boat” sets the tone and modus operandi of the entire score. An exotically mysterious Villa-Lobos opening (including dramatic statements of his “Rima” motif) is intercut with a brief phrase of Kaper’s title song that will also serve as the film’s love theme. Kaper’s wild “Chase” seems influenced by the “Dance of the Earth” from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, as do other minor bits of his work.
 
The restrained title song is more in the mode of a folk song than Kaper’s other great pop standards  (“Invitation,” “On Green Dolphin Street,” “Hi Lili, Hi Lo”). Tony Perkins, who had a moderately successful (but today mostly forgotten) secondary career as a singer and recording artist in the ‘50s, performs it in a substantial sequence in the film, but his version is not included here. 

One of Tony Perkins' LPs for RCA Victor

Orchestrally the song’s refrain (“Tell me, Rima, where are the meadows of June?”) is heard at various points in the score, notably the opening, of “It’s Gold” and “Is It You?” Villa-Lobos created the ethereal Rima theme, magically orchestrated in “At the Pool/First Visit” (the latter, however, submerged under real birdcalls in the film). The 79.53 score is allowed much time to develop, and builds to a series of profoundly moving final cues in which poignant new Villa-Lobos themes underscore revelations of Rima’s past and her tragic demise.
 

Green Mansions is (aside from its tumultuous, somewhat schizoid “End Title”) no conventional Hollywood offering of the period. It’s a sumptuous, expansively symphonic score that captures the magic and menace of an otherworldly, ultimately lost Eden with a power and mystery sorely missing from the often unpleasantly literal film itself. The sound is remixed in stereo from original 3-track recordings and beautifully showcases the impressionistic, opulently Ravel-ian orchestrations. 

Charles Wolcott, a Disney studio veteran who became a part of the MGM musical staff, conducts, and also had the delicate executive job of liaison between Villa-Lobos and Kaper while the score was being finalized.
 
Bill Whitaker and Jeff Bond’s notes discuss the film’s history and the score’s involved Kaper/Villa-Lobos issues, as well as providing a cue-by-cue description of the mostly seamless meshing of the two composers’ contributions. Kudos to FSM for making this magnificent score finally available in such a complete and definitive version.
 
Ross Care

Miklós Rózsa's SPELLBOUND Twice

SPELLBOUND (1945) - Alfred HITCHCOCK

Stereo ReRecording of Miklos Rosza's complete score for the romantic Hitchcock suspense classic.

Originally released on Warner Bros. records with Ray Heindorf conducting the Warner Bros. studio orchestra. ReReleased on a Stanyan Record CD.

Includes one of thde most beautiful love themes to come out of Hollywood and some incredibly intense psychologically suspense scoring.

CD of Stereo ReRecordings of the Film Music of Miklós Rózsa from the original 1974 LP.
   

Includes The Thief of Bagdad, The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity, The Jungle Book, Ivanhoe, and other scores.

DEEP IN MY HEART

Rhino MGM Download -  24 tracks (stereo)  ****  Film:  Warner Archive Blu-ray.

Performed: MGM Soloists, Studio Orchestra & Chorus , Conductor/Music Supervisor: Adolph Deutsch
Arrangers: Alexander Courage, Hugo Friedhofer, Robert Tucker (vocals).

by Ross Care

Deep In My Heart (1954) is one of the last big all-star musicals from MGM, and also the last of their (in)famous musical biographies, in this case one freely adapted from the life of Sigmund Romberg. Like its predecessors (Words And Music/Rodgers and Hart, Till the Clouds Roll By/Jerome Kern, etc.) it also showcases a broad cross section of the composer’s hits and rarities performed by most of the stars still glimmering in the MGM heavens.

The real Romberg was born in Europe and became one of the most successful American operetta composers of the early 20th century. He moved uneasily into musical comedy in the ‘30s and ‘40s, though many of his operetta favorites (such as “Lover, Come Back to Me”) had a contemporary edge which allowed them to remain popular into the Big Band era. Like many film composer émigrés, Romberg was able to fuse Old World lyricism and schmaltz with American popular appeal. He had a long-standing connection with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Several of his operettas (The New Moon, Maytime) provided hit vehicles for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the ‘30s, and in the ‘50s MGM remade his most famous work, The Student Prince, in CinemaScope.

Also like many film composers, Romberg had a secondary career as a recording artist. Thus RCA Victor released their own “Deep In My Heart” album with Romberg’s own recordings at the time of the MGM release.

              Helen Traubel and Jose Ferrer
 

Deep In My Heart, produced by MGM’s renaissance music man, Rodger Edens, stars Jose Ferrer as Romberg, and ex-Wagnerian soprano, Helen Traubel, as his platonic but supportative lady friend, Anna Mueller. There is also the obligatory transfusion of romantic interest, but anything resembling a plot is subsidiary to the on-going musical numbers that provide the substance of both film and this new “download only” Rhino soundtrack. MGM Records originally released Deep In My Heart as a deluxe boxed LP (a packaging format later followed by their Ben Hur and Mutiny on the Bounty releases). But like most of the MGM musical STs of the era, numbers were cut and edited to fit the track timing demands of the period. This new Rhino edition provides all the musical numbers in complete versions, plus a few incidental cues and out takes, and all in true stereo.

The angular Ferrer comes off as just rather odd as Romberg, especially in a virtuoso, if bizarre number in which he performs a one-man version of one of his shows (“Jazzadadadoo Medley”) to impress (?) his society sweetheart (Doe Avedon). However, the still golden-voiced Trauble is appealing and versatile, able to turn “Softly As In A Morning Sunrise”  - is there any other kind? – into a moving art song at one moment, then launch into an obscure bit of ersatz ragtime called “Leg of Mutton” with equal conviction. All this still leaves lots of room for a roll call of Romberg show excerpts performed by the likes of Howard Keel, Jane Powell, Vic Damone, Rosemary Clooney, William Olvis, and Tony Martin, right down to Gene Kelly and his brother, Fred.

                                Ann Miller Jazzes "It" Up

Ann Miller has one of her best production numbers with the frantic “It,” a lesser-known Romberg excursion into the Jazz Age. Dancers Cyd Charisse and James Mitchell perform a sensual “One Alone” from the popular Desert Song. While Charisse is voice-doubled by Carole Richards (who dubs Newman’s “Resurrection Song” in The Robe), no vocals are necessary to get the erotic charge emphatically across in this opulently staged and orchestrated (probably by Hugo Friedhofer) production number.

But then a spacious stereo mix and composer Adolph Deutsch’s conducting beautifully enhance all the lush orchestrations by Alexander Courage and Hugo Friedhofer. While I miss the informative liner notes that came with the Rhino CD releases, downloading seems like a convenient and effective process and I hope more new MGM releases will be forthcoming. And who knows, perhaps the entire catalog of MGM films (including such less familiar titles as Deep In My Heart) may eventually be available in this format as well.

Deep In My Heart was recently released on a gorgeous Warner Archive Blu-ray.

Into the future!

Ross Care