Library Music, Part 1

The release of the 3-disc set The Prisoner: The Complete Chappell Recorded Music Library Cues pretty much completes the grand quest fans wanting every note of music used in the original 1967 series starring Patrick McGoohan, but it’s also a rare instance where vintage, unedited material from a music library is commercially available for listening purposes.

Stock or library music is what a production buys and can used and reuse within a film or TV show. It’s pre-scored according to themes – shocking music, romantic music, lounge music, etc. – rather than actual film scenes, and some of the most successful series have made use of material that was never written for a specific series.

The Prisoner benefitted from great talent on the production line, McGoohan’s vision for his series, and excellent music editors who edited cues into scenes and made the marriage natural and dramatically functional.

I’ve uploaded a review of the new set (available only from the Unmutual website, and limited to 1000 copies), plus an interview with the set’s producer, Derek Lawton.

In May I’ll have a review of another 3-disc set produced by Britain’s Network label in 2008, which focused on all the original music composed as underscore and source music by the series’ main composers. (That set will be compared with the three volumes released by Silva Screen, which contained original and some of the Chappell library cues.)

I’m still waiting for the day someone obsessive (or crazy) will release the stock music from the animated Rocket Robin Hood and Spider-Man series, and maybe some of the music used in oddball feature films no one particularly remembers except me (like, oh, The Fat Black Pussycat, and Hideout in the Sun. The jazz music in Herschell Gordon Lewis gory Colour Me Blood Red is another, but some of the cues were tracked over the deleted scenes gallery in the Image DVD. See, I pay attention to these things. Ahem).

It has happened before, so don’t laugh.

When opportunity yields some lucky break, you get something like Monstrous Movie Music’s The Blob (and other creepy sounds). Producers David Schecter and Kathleen Mayne dug into the Valentino Production Music Library and assembled cues from The Green Slime, Terror from the Year 5000, and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

It’s taken a while to get my hands on those film (Green Slime is STILL unavailable on DVD, but luckily it appeared on TCM, albeit fill frame), so I’ll have reviews of that fine trio of cinematic schlock, plus comments by Schecter regarding the Valentino cues he secured for CD release in Part 2 of this series.

Coming next: three Hollywood-related films that played in the recent Toronto Jewish Film Festival – Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood (2009), The Brothers Warner (2008), and Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (2009).

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Four Days. Classic Films.

Sunday marked the end of TCM’s Classic Film Festival, a four-day event spread out over a handful of movie palaces in Hollywood that premiered with a digital screening of the restored Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born (1954), and closed with Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959).

Being about classic films, the festival was, in some ways, a test as to whether a brand name (TCM) could be used to not only showcase (mostly) film print screenings at premium prices in theatres, but help publicize the latest film restoration by studios prior to home video releases.

Star is a high-profile work headlined by one of cinema’s major icons (Garland), whereas Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) is an oddball work by a little-known director, originally distributed on DVD by indie label KINO.

In the past, restoration of classics such as Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Anthony Mann’s El Cid (1961), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi noir Blade Runner (twice), Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo / The Leopard (1963) toured the world as regal, limited run engagements in major cities. And on the big screen.

Less glossy reconstructions and restorations – Erich Von Stroheim’s silent classic Greed (1924), or Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) – more or less slid straight to cable TV and video, respectively, if indeed they were given film festival or limited runs in select cities.

Flip to 2010, and as the major chains continue to devote screen time to blockbusters and 3D escapism, it seems likely that, unless there’s a local film society in your home town, you may not see the latest crop of restorations – even the high profile gems – on the big screen.

The Varsity Cinemas in Toronto did a series of ‘test’ screenings this past winter in which a handful of classics were digitally screened from reportedly Blu-ray discs, but it’s not the same as catching film prints of Jaws (1975) at the now-dead Uptown Backstage with a packed house, Alien (the original 1979 theatrical version) at the now-dead Uptown 1, Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (1971) and Black Sunday (1960), as well as The Brood (1979) and Phantom of the Paradise (1974) at the Bloor Cinema.

The Ontario Cinemathque has themed director retrospectives, but catching a bit of vintage sleaze, gore, or seventies disaster flicks seems dicey, since the product within those genres doesn’t quite measure up to a month-long tribute to Godard, Sirk, Bergman, Kurosawa, or Ozu.

What was screened at TCMCFF was decidedly mainstream and non-chi-chi, and the selection was aimed at the average classic film fan who also spends a fair time watching TCM for a daily/weekly classic film fix. That’s not a bad thing, because the program featured a balance of foreign, silent, cult, previously lost, and AFI-listed films.

Basically something for everyone, including standard classics as Casablanca (1943), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and North by Northwest (1959), not to mention Godard’s Breathless (1960), Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), and the epic Good Earth (1937), a pseudo-Asian drama with white folks hidden under politically incorrect makeup.

Some of the screenings included guest appearances (check out the TCMCFF website for blog and show details) and some related lectures, but by early accounts, the event was a success (see Variety’s just-in report), and a validation of vintage Hollywood fare.

Here’s a question: Can something like TCM’s festival happen in Toronto, outside of the TIFF umbrella?

Are there enough fans willing to bypass a DVD rental just to catch classics on the big screen?

Is it worth a theatre’s gamble to rent a print of Joseph Mankiewicz’ Cleopatra (1963) – all four hours of it – for a one-time screening?

TCM’s festival include Cleopatra on the big screen, not to mention the 1930 widescreen Grandeur version of The Big Trail (which is simply stunning), Elia Kazan’s Wild River (a neglected drama with exceptional colour lighting), 2001: A Space Odyssey (which never came to Toronto during the film’s touted anniversary / restoration run prior to the DVD and Blu-ray launch), a cleaned up North by Northwest, a print of the 1945 blazing Technicolor noir thriller Leave Her to Heaven, the newly restored The Red Shoes (1948), and the recently restored Metropolis (1927).

Those are the film’s I’d have caught, since some are likely once-only screenings.

Studios have a tendency to reissue classics in theatres to publicize the looming home video release, but there are looming issues: unless it’s Casablanca, widescreen and stereo sound trumps an old 1.33:1 black & white film. Why? Because grain is visible in HD, the image is square, and some Luddites do not like black & white when they’ve spent a few thousand dollars on a HD home theatre system designed to bring out the crisply rendered audio and video nuances of a movie.

As studios slowly shift their classic film catalogues away from DVDs towards their own cable channels and digital download venues, they should realize some of the films screened at TCM’s festival could and should be used to publicize film libraries currently emerging as digital broadcasts and downloads.

By making these films available – as prints, or as HD theatrical masters – it keeps the Hollywood catalogue alive, much in the way the Cinematheques around the world reprogram Godard, Sirk, Bergman, Kurosawa, or Ozu. Those films remain draws because the themed screenings keep those films within the consciousness of film fans.

If HD masters were created for broadcast, then they should also be available for rental. Blade Runner, as screened at the Mount Pleasant Theatre in November of 2007, looked and sounded grand in HD, and I can imagine how great The Big Trail, Leave Her to Heaven, Argento’s 1970 debut Bird with a Crystal Plumage (Storaro shot that one, you know), or Rollercoaster (1977) would look in that theatre.

As reported at in70mm.com, The German city of Schauburg will hold a Sensurround film festival, June 5-6, this summer. Battlestar Galactica (1978), Rollercoaster (1977), and Midway (1976) will be digital projections, whereas Earthquake (1974) will be from a 70mm print. The German audio will be accompanied by English subtitles, and the 40 Hz audio will blast from vintage Sensurround gear.

This is happening not in Hollywood, not in New York, and certainly not in Toronto. And people will trek across borders because it’s a unique event, which begs the question again: Can something like TCM’s festival – be it classic, horror, cult, widescreen, or blasted Sensurround – happen in Toronto?

Four days. Rarely screened classics. In Toronto.

Anyone?

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Hidden Tales from 1936

Mention the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the first thing that comes to mind is Jesse Owens’ Gold medal win, and then perhaps Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 documentary of the big sports competition that Hitler used to propagandize Nazism as a great nationalist movement under the fancy banner of the Third Reich.

Mounting a global sports event within the walls of a racist state was only possible if the state pretended to be inclusive, and two cases were recently dramatized in a pair of 2009 productions.

The most widely-known – and making festival rounds in North America right now – is Berlin 36, a docu-drama of champion high jump athlete Gretel Bergmann, who was living in Britain when the German government called and asked her to represent the country at the upcoming Olympics.

Problem #1: she was Jewish.

Problem #2: the Nazis needed her to participate just long enough for the Olympic bigwigs of the IOC to grant the games a Go, after which Bergmann could be dumped, and the national team could be headlined with Aryanesque athletes.

Premiering in Canada last night as part of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, Berlin 36 was also recently released on DVD in Germany (Warner Bros.), and in addition to a film review, I’ve also included details of the Region 2 DVD’s extras.

A related film is Semyon Pinkhasov’s documentary What If? The Helen Mayer Story, which chronicles the case of fencing mistress Helen Mayer who won a Gold medal at the 1928 Olympics, and was an ideal candidate for the German team in ’36 with one issue: she was half-Jewish.

As Pinkhasov covers in his detailed film, allowances were made that eventually permitted the athlete to represent her country, but the film’s title begs a question whose answer can only be hypothetical: Had Mayer refused, would the Olympics have occurred, or would her refutation of participating for the Nazis have been a major humiliation on the international stage?

The Olympics were a grandiose opportunity for Hitler to unfurl his propaganda plans, but it was just one event within an overall scheme to reacquire /steal land and kill a few million people, and one doubts a low medal haul at the Olympics, had the event occurred in spite of Mayer’s refusal to participate, would’ve mattered in the long run.

The big goal in the coming years was World Domination, and a sports event seemed inconsequential when the Nazis would in fact invade Poland, France, and chunks of north Africa, to name a few sovereign states.

Pinkhasov’s question, however, also extends to Mayer’s motivations for agreeing to participate, to the point that, upon winning a Silver medal, she gave the Nazi salute. Was it to protect her family’s safety, or something else?

What If? is still doing the festival rounds (director Pinkhasov participated in a brief but helpful Q&A after the screening this past Wednesday), but hopefully the film will be available on home video, if not as a digital download, because it’s a story that also provokes a number of questions, and inevitably smart discussions beyond the Berlin Olympics.

That said, in addition to the above reviews, there’s also a prior review of Riefenstahl’s Olympia. The film was released in North America on DVD in a rather mediocre transfer from Pathfinder Films in 2006. The better edition from Criterion, released on laserdisc around 1996, has yet to appear on DVD, whereas the German Region 2 version is available on two dual layer DVDs, albeit with no English subtitles, and the German dub track.

Also related to the 1936 Olympics is the odd propaganda film Wunschkonzert (1940), about a couple whose meeting during the Berlin Olympics starts a friendship and romance, only to have it mucked up by WWII. The film actually includes some footage of Riefenstahl’s doc, and it’s an interesting take on a more blissful view of the Olympics, free from the cruelties of the Greta Bergmann saga, and the controversy of Helen Mayer who, unsurprisingly, had gone from celebrated national sports heroine to non-person.

I’ll have three more sets of reviews related to this year’s TJFF (which ends tonight) this week, spanning comic art, exiled German Jewish filmmakers in Hollywood, and a rarely seen documentary about the concentration camps supervised by Alfred Hitchcock.

Coming next, however, are some thoughts on TCM’s own Classic Film Festival, followed by some reviews of those rarities available in Region 2 land.

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Soundtrack Release Tally

Here’s a quick tally of the latest soundtracks announced for release over the past two weeks, plus a few titles now available for pre-order from local online merchants.

Note: if you’re a soundtrack label and have information regarding an upcoming release, please use the email address (see About Me) to email press information.

Lastly, two interviews floating around web and print media: Randall Larson interviews Jessica De Rooij, the talent composer (Far Cry) behind the untalented Uwe Boll; and sliding completely under the radar, composer/jazz pianist/shrink Denny Zeitlin was interviewed in the March issue of Fangoria.

Here’s the tally:

BSX Records

John Beal’s Terror in the Aisles
Dennis McCarthy’s Letters from a Killer

DigitMovies (Italy)

Francesco De Masi’s Macist nelle miniere di re Salamone + La rivolta delle gladiatrici + Il figlio dello sceicco
Enrico Simonetti’s Kid il monello del west / Kid, Terror of the West
Bruno Nicolai’s El Cristo del oceano / Christ from the Ocean + Canossa
Nico Fidenco’s 2+5 Missione Hydra

FSM (Film Score Monthly)

Michael Small’s Marathon Man + The Parallax View
2-CD set of Leigh Harline and Bob Merrill’s The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm
Ennio Morricone’s grim White Dog
The 5-disc omnibus The Cincinnati Kid: Lalo Schifrin Scores Vol. 1 (1964-1968)

GDM (Italy)

Ennio Morricone’s Oceano / The Wind Blows Free
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino’s Sfida a Rio Bravo / Gunmen of Rio Bravo

Pre-order:
Giovanni Fusco’s La guerre est fini / The War is Over
Ennio Morricone’s L’avventuriero / The Rover

Intrada

An expanded release of Basil Poledouris’ Robocop
Jerry Fielding’s Straw Dogs
A double-bill of Dominic Frontiere’s Billie + Popi
The song/score CD of Michael Mann’s Manhunter, with one extra cue

Kritzerland Records

Fred Katz’ The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

La-La Land Records

Nelson Riddle’s Batman: The Movie (1966) (previously available as an isolated score on Fox’ Blu-ray DVD)
Christopher Drake’s music for the animated Wonder Woman film
Marc Shaiman’s Speechless

Pre-order:
An expanded 2-disc edition of David Arnold’s Independence Day
A newly restored stereo version of John Williams’ The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

MovieScore Media (Sweden)

Fernando Velazquez’ chilling Shiver on CD and digital download
2 releases by Erwann Kermovant: IMAX score Un ticket pour l’espace / A Ticket to Space, and Big City

Pre-order:
Conrad Pope’s In My Sleep

Perseverance Records

David Newman’s The Runestone

Quartet Records (Spain)

Maurice Jarre’s Tokyo Blackout
An expanded release of Michel Legrand’s The Happy Ending

Varese Sarabande

Michael Giacchino’s Fringe

Pre-order:
Edward Shearmur’s Mother and Child
Marc Streitenfeld’s Robin Hood (2010)
Michael Giacchino’s Lost music for Season 5
Harry Gregson-Williams’ Shrek Forever

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

TJFF and TCMCFF

Thursday April 22 marked the midpoint between the Toronto Jewish Film Festival and the Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.

TCM’s festival (Thursday April 22 – Sunday April 25) marks another evolutionary stage for the specialty TV channel that boasted (and still does offer) classic movies, uncut, commercial-free, and in widescreen. From books to merchandise and tie-ins with Warner Home Video as well as the Warner Archives Collection, it seemed natural that the channel (which has domestic variants in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Spain, France, Latin America, Asia, and Germany) would take a stab at a film festival.

There remain countless neglected films, unrestored classics and rarely seen gems to discover, and certainly one advantage is to see them on the big screen in classic Hollywood movie palaces. Including film prints.

For TCM, it shows them to be a patron of the commercial arts, and that’s not a bad stance, since TCM’s offerings are essentially classic Hollywood fare, and their film festival is the perfect launching pad for recent restorations to make their international or North American premieres, which in turn help publicize the DVDs and Blu-ray releases coming soon.

TCMCFF isn’t a blatant commercial event, as it does bring attention to film preservation and the results of hard work and results from much-needed financial support. Theatrical runs also help sell physical home video product, and as digital downloads continue to erode the sale of hardcopies (and perhaps eclipse them), theatrical runs will be the deluxe presentation of a film.

Kind of like the old road show engagements of event films in theatres at premium prices, as was popular during the sixties, except with far shorter theatrical windows. Roughly $20 gets you the IMAX or 3D version, before it slides to home video.

In Toronto, there’s a problem with those deluxe theatrical venues; we don’t have enough centrally located IMAX screens (er, we have ONE), for example, and the bulk of the multi-screen houses have been relocated to the Dundas line, leaving areas like Bloor and Yonge weaker.

(That intersection, as well as a long stretch of Bloor, once housed several big screen theatres before they were razed and replaced by condos. Maybe the boost in density might prompt a rethink, but if the inhabitants are strictly property investors and seasonal inhabitants, a deluxe theatre centre ain’t gonna happen.)

In any event, in the case of TCM, they have the venues and audience base for classic films, whereas Toronto has been oddly ignored by the U.S. when it comes to premieres and touring classics. The norm of Los Angeles-New York-Toronto for premiere North American engagements is kind of gone, and the test will be whether we’ll get some of the goodies premiering at TCMCFF, or will have to wait for the home video edition instead of that one-time theatrical run.

Top-lining the first day of TCMCFF’s line-up is the restored version of A Star Is Born (1954), which was first reconstructed as close as possible to its original nearly 3-hour length in 1983, but given an overhaul using contemporary technologies. That film is joined by Monkey Business (1952), Casablanca (1948), the rarely seen Frank Capra adventure-drama Dirigible (1931), and the Janet Gaynor comedy-musical Sunnyside and Up (1929).

With the exception of the last two, everything else is available on DVD, in case you want to program your own selective TCMCFF. (Casablanca is also available on Blu-ray from Warner Home Video, who will release A Star Is Born on DVD and BR June 22nd.)

Also worth hunting down is Ronald Haver’s 2002 book, A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration for a detailed background of what was, at the time, one of the biggest archival hunts in film history – the missing footage of this once-maligned classic.

Over the weekend, I’ll have reviews of some of the titles still unavailable in North America, but released on DVD in Europe. For details of the goodies being offered, check out TCMCFF’s website.

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The TJFF began last Saturday April 17, but the big event was the Canadian premiere of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a 1948 documentary of the postwar trials that was designed as a de-Nazification tool for the allies. There exists Russian and German versions, but the English version was never completed, as it was thought the contents – which includes some concentration camp footage – was unsuitable for schools, and an American populace the government felt was better served focusing on rebuilding the economy than dour WWII horrors.

Reconstructed in 2009 from various sources with a new narration track, Nuremberg premiered to a sold out house, but the TJFF have slated a second screening this Sunday (the festival’s last day) at the Cineplex Odeon Sheppard Cinemas at Yonge & Sheppard. (Check TJFF’s website for further details.)

No word on whether the guest roster from the premiere - restoration project director Sandra Schulberg, restoration picture/sound editor Josh Waletzky, and CBC Journalist Evan Solomon - will be present, but those unable to get tickets the first time around will be able to catch the film on the big screen, and absorb its intensity before it inevitably makes its way to DVD. (More info on the film can also be found at the film's official website.)

This year’s offerings are quite diverse, and perhaps the two main strands that dominate the content are the consequences of the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic doctrines, and Jewish artistry and culture in comic books and humour.

Some of the films have repeat screenings, and the venues include the Al Green Theatre, the Bloor Cinema, Cineplex Odeon Sheppard Centre Cinemas, and the SilverCity Richmond Hill Cinemas.

I’m thematically grouping some of the reviews of films I’ve seen at the festival, and will have the first set up Saturday: The Brothers Warner (recently released on DVD by WHV), Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood (recently aired on PBS), and Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, a Canadian premiere.

Lastly, I’ll also have a round-up of this week’s recent soundtrack releases, followed by several CD reviews.

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com