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.     
    
 

Bernard Herrmann at 20th Century-Fox   
 
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH/THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR    
    
Bernard Herrmann worked consistently, if somewhat intermittently, at 20th Century Fox between 1943 (when his association with Orson Welles led to his work there on JANE EYRE), and 1962 (and a sad waste of his talent on a fitfully fascinating, if otherwise undistinguished adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT). 

Herrmann’s Fox oeuvre includes both well-known scores, including such genuine classics as THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (now a collector’s item among the first batch of Fox CD releases), and lesser-known efforts on such films as Joe Mankiewicz’s fact-based modern espionage thriller, 1952’s FIVE FINGERS, and the virtually vanished ‘Scope adventure yarn, KING OF THE KHYBER RIFLES, from 1953. During Fox’s mid-’50s CinemaScope era Herrmann produced some of his least known compositions, among them scores for GARDEN OF EVIL, and an Edwin Booth bio-film, PRINCE OF PLAYERS (both 1954), the latter one of Herrmann’s more rousingly energetic and theatrical scores.
    
In 1959, the same year he scored both Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST at MGM and Fox’s BxW ‘Scope film, BLUE DENIM (one of composer’s rare forays, along with A HATFUL OF RAIN, into scoring Broadway theater adaptations), Herrmann also scored his first Jules Verne property, Fox’s JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. A film neither terribly good nor terribly bad, and certainly not lacking in a certain innocent charm, JOURNEY ultimately seems a Harryhausen movie without Ray Harryhausen. 

The wholesomely sexy cast, headed by Disney’s Captain Nemo himself, James Mason, and including Pat Boone (as a young Scotsman!), Arlene Dahl, and Diane Baker, (not to mention Peter Ronson as a hunky blond Icelander with a touching attachment to the personable if ill-fated  Gertrude the Duck ), do their best with the modestly effective, if somewhat illogical screenplay.

Pat Boone & Arlene Dahl

But the wonderful jolts of energy and excitement which Harryhausen’s legendary efforts bring to his similarly plotted (and sometimes equally mundane) projects are sorely in absentia here, replaced instead by several cosmetically altered pet-shop lizards (a species more distasteful than terrifying, and obviously related to those who would be seen the following year terrorizing Jill St. John, she of the hot pink Capri pants, in Fox’s even tackier Irwin Allen opus, THE LOST WORLD) and some obviously soundstage “bowels of the earth” settings. 

    
Herrmann’s score for JOURNEY to a certain degree reflects the “can’t get started” pace of the film itself. Scored primarily for ponderously heavy brass and low woodwinds and augmented by organs, harps, and percussion, though highly effective in the film itself, the score on CD somewhat suggests a Herrmann pastiche, often more than a tad monotonous, and bringing to mind far more listenable moments from other scores, notably the spare triadic harmonies exploited in DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, and the harp effects from BENEATH THE TWELVE MILE REEF (which effectively and sensually plunges the listener into the depths of the ocean rather than the earth). 

A good deal of the JOURNEY score is based on a droning progression of Herrmann’s always effective but by now familiar triads, often just two in this case, the primary interest of which lies in the composer’s always fascinating orchestral permutations on such spare and rather static material. Highlights include the “Main Title” with its wailing electronic organs and glowering trombones which seem especially emphasized in this new stereo remastering, and the main set-piece in the score, the Wagnerian “Sunrise” followed by the fantastical descending harp passages reminiscent of 12 MILE REEF as Mason’s team first descends into the subterranean passageway of the Icelandic volcano’s crater.
    
Herrmann’s droning mode continues pretty much throughout the entire score, extending even into his patented “creature” cues, notably for the “Giant Chameleon” track featuring Herrmann’s introduction of the serpent, an ancient (ill)wind instrument that Spike Jones would have loved. Ethereal vibraphone passages, quite similar in sound to the deleted “Space Diamonds” cue from DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, add a welcome touch of lightness to the cumbrous goings-on, and one of the final cues, “The Lost City/Atlantis,” is scored solely for vibes and organ, a simple and haunting track (one of the few in JOURNEY where you feel Herrmann that was actually inspired to push his imaginative envelope). 

Three innocuous tunes (two deleted from the film) written by Jimmy van Heusen and Sammy Cahn for Pat Boone, are also included (if anyone is interested) as well as the vocal/accordion march heard as the expedition first starts down the underground passageway, certainly the jauntiest cue on the entire CD. Obviously both the film of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH and Herrmann himself would have profited by Harryhausen’s input, given that Bernie concocted a much more powerful ambiance for the Columbia/Harryhausen Verne adaptation, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, in 1961 (recently and beautifully re-issued in stereo in the recent Silva Screen CD of the nearly complete score).Though the film of JOURNEY concludes with the odd effect of an a cappella student chorus underscoring the “End Title,” the CD also provides the deleted instrumental finale.
    
The second Herrmann disk in the new Fox series is the complete score to THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR. Though the profuse array of brief cues, 33 in all, makes for somewhat fragmented listening, the score remains one of Herrmann’s most beautiful, a haunting fusion of mystical sea music laced with a sense of romantic yearning which pre-echoes the similar mood of longing and liebestod that would so consummately be evoked by Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock’s VERTIGO over a decade later. 

    
Fine as these first two batches of strikes from the rich musical lode of the 20th Century Fox musical archives are (along with the first series of CDs on Fox’s own now-defunct label), there is much more rare wealth to be mined there, and I certainly wish and hope for continued success with Kimmel, Redman, and Co.’s welcome exploration of one of the richest of Hollywood’s musical gold mines.
    
Long live 20th Century Fox!
                                                                           Ross CARE

****
Ross CARE has contributed two feature articles to “Performing Arts: Motion Pictures,” an anthology of essays from the Library of Congress in Washington. The first is concerns “RAINTREE COUNTY: The Novel, The Film, The Score,” and the second affords an overview of the music and composers of the Hollywood studio system during its peak and final days circa 1950/1965.

FINIAN’S  RAINBOW

Songs: Burton Lane (music); E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, (lyrics)

Arrangements/Orchestrations:  Albert Sendry (uncredited), Ken Darby - Rhino Handmade RHM 2 7857, TT: 46.54, 17 tracks (stereo) 

Film * * Score *****  

Producer: George Feltenstein, Performed: Warner Bros Soloists, Studio Orchestra & Chorus, Musical Director/Conductor: Ray Heindorf - 

Collectors' Choice Music released the original motion picture soundtrack on CD in 2007.

by Ross Care

Director Coppola was somewhere over the rainbow when he made this odd version of the Broadway classic. But the music is still GREAT.........

In his book Can’t Help Singin’ Gerald Mast describes the original theatrical version of Finian’s Rainbow as “a fanciful 1947 Broadway blast from the left.” The plot somehow managed to combine Irish characters and folklore (including an errant leprechaun) with some cutting social satire on American race relations in the mythical southern state of Missatucky. The show was a long-running smash, its score adding several classics (“Old Devil Moon,” “How Are Things in Glocca Mora”) to the American theater song repertory. But the 1968 film did not materialize until long past the golden age of the vintage studio musical, and when it finally did was directed by, of all people, Francis Ford Coppola. Cinematically Finian’s Rainbow is a stylistic mishmash of department store window studio sets and location shooting that makes Missatucky look suspiciously like southern California in drought season. 
               Concerning the direction Mast concludes:  “Coppola is a foreigner to the tongue in which musical is spoken.”      

 

            However, the Warner Bros. film was blessed with a perfect cast, including Hollywood veteran Fred Astaire, and British pop stars, Petula Clark and Tommy Steele, and the recent Rhino re-issue serves to remind us of just how good these performers and the show’s score are. The multi-talented Clark came to Hollywood after a series of Top of the Pops hits equally successful in America (on Warner Bros. Records, by the way), but unfortunately had less luck with Hollywood films of the post-studio musical era. But she acquits herself beautifully in Finian, bringing a beguiling Irish brogue to both her best role and her distinctive vocals, notably the touching “Look to the Rainbow.” Steele (as Og the leprechaun) had just had a transAtlantic hit with the West End musical, Half A Sixpence, which was also turned into a 1967 Hollywood film, and duets with Clark in a quaint gavotte, “Something Sort of Grandish.” 

            The lyrical and varied music for Finian is by Burton Lane, a master melodist otherwise known for his superb score for MGM’s Royal Wedding, recently also restored on Rhino. Lyrics are by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg who had previously found gold at the end of another rainbow with his lyrics for The Wizard of Oz. The team also worked (but not together) on DuBarry Was A Lady, another recent Rhino release.

And, speaking of DuBarry, MGM would probably have, as they often did, tossed out half of the Broadway score and turned Finian’s Rainbow into a truncated, but perhaps more enjoyable and cinematic version of the original. But fortunately, at least for the listening public, Warner Bros. didn’t, and this (slightly) expanded version of the original ST LP provides a complete version of the great Broadway score in beautiful stereo and under Warner Bros. maestro, Ray Heindorf’s impeccable music direction.

"Disney Unlocks the Music Vault" Part I

A feature overview of the first relatively complete CD releases of the classic Disney animation soundtracks.
In THREE Parts.

The films range from SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937), Disney’s first feature, to THE JUNGLE BOOK (1967), the last animated feature which Disney personally supervised.

This was written in 1998 for issue #27 of Scarlet Street, The Magazine of Mystery and Horror, for which I did a music column, The Record Rack, for over a decade.

PLEASE NOTE: Part III & SCARLET STREET cover at February 26 BLOG Entries.