Untamed - Franz WAXMAN
Orchestrations: Edward B. Powell, Leonid Raab – Film Score Monthly vol. 4, no. 4, Total Tracks: 65.43, 23 tracks (stereo) ***** (Absolute Tops)
Producers: Nick Redman, Lukas Kendall Performed: 20th Century Fox Orchestra - Conductor: Franz Waxman
by Ross Care
The 1950s were a great period for Franz Waxman (1906-1967). The composer won two back-to-back Oscars, for A Place in the Sun (1950), and Sunset Boulevard (1951), and the decade also saw the creation of some of his major scores for two giants of the late studio era, 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. His work at Fox included two certified masterpieces, Prince Valiant in 1954, and Peyton Place in 1957, but he also scored a number of lesser-known films for the studio that introduced CinemaScope in 1953. Among these epic scores for the wide-screen era is one for a somewhat obscure and mostly forgotten epic, Untamed (1955).
The film, hyped as “Africolossal!” in the never-understated studio ad campaign, stars Fox stalwarts Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward, and ‘50s discovery Richard Egan, and deals with the Dutch colonization of South Africa and its ensuing, inevitable conflicts with the region’s Zulu natives.
Waxman’s great score is both epic and memorably melodic. It’s composed of three major elements, a heroic Main Title theme, a determined traveling motif, and a lyrical love theme. The recent Film Score Monthly restoration opens with Alfred Newman’s extended Fox CinemaScope fanfare and immediately segues into Waxman’s thrilling Main Title (track 2) that opens with antiphonal fanfares from three choirs of French horns, these in turn embellishing the score’s heroic main theme. After a rather abrupt conclusion the horns, spread across left/middle/right channels in ‘Scope’s then-new 4-track stereophonic sound system, continue with track 3, “Fox Hunt” for the film’s opening sequences in Ireland. (Herrmann used similar stereophonic effects in his Garden of Evil ‘Scope score.)
The main theme and an ensuing traveling motif (introduced in track 7, “Vorwarts”) are then inventively developed in an on-going series of epic symphonic cues over the course of the one-hour-plus score. The beautiful love theme is held in reserve until the cue “Paul Finds Katje/Hoffen Valley” with its ecstatic climax at about 3.20 on track 11. Another (very) brief haunting, almost Wagnerian statement of the main theme for massed French horns with distant trumpets and tremolo strings can be heard at about 1.25 in the lengthy (7.04) “O’Neill’s Garden/Cape Town Street” cue. (The moody Main Title in horn solo is heard again at the conclusion of another extended cue, “After the Fight/By the River”). In a livelier mode track 10, “The Commandos,” suggests Waxman’s thrilling Cossacks music for Taras Bulba (1962).
Several source music cues vary the underscoring, these including a short polka by Johann Strauss, Sr., and “Zulu Attack,” the latter composed of “wild” percussion tracks supervised by Waxman. If you stay tuned after the “Finale” (track 23) you get some first-hand insights into the recording of these primal sounds. A 14-page booklet of interesting notes by Jeff Bond and Jonathan Z. Kaplan are included and feature comments about the prolific composer’s creative methods and the Fox music department in general from John Waxman. Waxman never wrote a score that is less than fascinating and his lesser-known Untamed is an excellent and dramatically epic companion piece to his later and more celebrated Taras Bulba.
