Upcoming CDs

Timmer wrote
TORA! TORA! TORA! is the only FSM cd you have?

not a criticism, just wondering

justin boggan:
I guess MainTitles is just a worn out old shoe; nobody wants to come here to make announcements except the PR lady.

LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING/THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH

Music Composed and Conducted by Alfred Newman

Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing was a big, glossy, uber-romantic tale of an illicit interracial love affair back in the days when that sort of thing was rather scandalous. The screenplay was by John Patrick (from the novel by Han Suyin), who had won a Pulitzer Prize for adapting The Teahouse of the August Moon for Broadway. To direct, producer Buddy Adler hired the wonderful director Henry King, a Fox regular who’d helmed such pictures as The Song of Bernadette, Captain from Castile, A Bell for Adano, The Gunfighter, David and Bathsheba, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, King of the Khyber Rifles and many others. The stars were starry indeed – William Holden and Jennifer Jones. The film was a box-office and critical success, and audiences loved the story, the performances, and the lush cinematography of Leon Shamroy. The film was nominated for a whopping eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress, and it won for Best Costume Design, Best Song (by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster) and, best of all, Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic of Comedy Picture.

Alfred Newman’s score is one of the most romantic and beautiful scores ever written. Newman’s stunning variations on the Fain and Webster song, along with his own gorgeous secondary themes creates a unique atmosphere with a swirling tenderness that’s almost indescribable. The music for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing aches and roils with love, loneliness, lost feelings, and confused hearts. It’s a glorious listening experience and one of Newman’s crowning achievements in film scoring, and that’s saying something given the number of masterpieces he wrote during his long and illustrious career.

Just a few months previously, before audiences would swoon to Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Billy Wilder’s film version of George Axelrod’s hilarious play, The Seven Year Itch, had audiences rolling in the aisles. With original star Tom Ewell repeating his Broadway role and the incandescent and stunning Marilyn Monroe as “The Girl,” The Seven Year Itch was a huge hit, due in part to the iconic image of Monroe standing on a subway grating with her dress (designed by Travilla) blowing up – it was not possible to escape that image that year, and it’s been hard to escape it ever since. As the tagline to the poster read: It TICKLES and it TANTALIZES, and boy did it ever. And equally as tantalizing is the score by Alfred Newman. Newman’s score is monothematic, with many variations on the same theme – “The Girl Upstairs.” It also has a classic Newman main title that gets things off to a rousing start.

Love Is a Many Splendored Thing was released previously by Varese Sarabande and was a quick sellout. For this release, we’ve remastered it and moved two early source cues, one of which is by Leigh Harline, to after the film score proper, giving the actual early score cues a bit more prominence. The Seven Year Itch is making its world premiere on this CD. We’ve included the main title, and several variations on “The Girl Upstairs,” which represents most of what was usable from the somewhat problematic original materials. The entire program is presented in that unparalleled Fox stereo sound.

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing/The Seven Year Itch is limited to 1000 copies only. The price is $19.98, plus shipping.

CDs are in stock and will ship within a day or two. To place an order, see the cover, or hear audio samples, just visit www.kritzerland.com.

SHANKS
Music Composed and Conducted by Alex North

Alex North was one of Hollywood’s most versatile and renowned composers, with many familiar and justly celebrated scores to his credit (Spartacus, A Streetcar Named Desire et al). However, our latest Quartet Records release, in collaboration with Paramount Pictures, sheds light on an unfamiliar corner of the composer’s work: Shanks (1974).

Produced by the composer’s son, Steven North, Shanks was the last film directed by William Castle, and the only feature to star celebrated French mime artist Marcel Marceau. Virtually unknown today, the film defies categorization: part fairy tale, part silent movie, part comedy, part horror flick. Marceau plays Malcolm Shanks, a deaf-mute puppeteer whose work for an eccentric old inventor (also portrayed by Marceau) leads to some of the most bizarre scenes in any Castle film. Like the film, North’s score is a genre-bending enigma—a profusion of styles in which early 20th-century musical expressionism rubs shoulders with Dixieland, and classic horror picture tropes coexist with passages of tenderhearted lyricism.

Well over an hour in length, North’s score was brilliantly orchestrated by Henry Brant for two different ensembles (one comprised mostly of winds and the other consisting primarily of strings). It includes a jaunty theme for Malcolm and a sweetly gentle melody for his friend Celia. Both humor and pathos can be found in the music, as well as passages of unnerving suspense.

We are delighted to finally release a true gem—one of the least-known works of Alex North. This unusual score was awarded a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Original Dramatic Score in 1974.

This premiere CD release of Alex North’s complete score for Shanks, mastered from ¼? monaural tapes housed in the Alex North collection in the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, features a 12-page booklet with notes by Frank K. DeWald and numerous film stills. Limited edition of 1000 units.


WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN?
Music Composed and Conducted by David Raksin

Legendary David Raksin thriller score gets premiere CD release to commemorate the centenary of the composer's birth!

Curtis Harrington's What's the Matter with Helen? (1971) is a film that was clearly inspired by the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, as well as other movies from the hagsploitation subgenre. Starring Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds, the film tells the story of two mothers whose sons have committed a horrible murder back in their Iowa hometown. After receiving a threatening phone call, Helen and Adelle leave for LA to start a new life and make a living through their dance school for little girls. Adelle seems to have it all: she finds a suitor who accepts her past and gets a taste of upper-class life. Meanwhile Helen starts to see ghosts from the past and tries to battle the shadows through the power of religion. The different choices of the two women lead to an inevitable tragedy.

David Raksin's memorable score (featuring ingenious quotations of the chillingly incorporated "Goody, Goody") was previously released on a gray market LP shortly after the film's premiere. The LP had no track titles on it, mixed up the program and had several problems - the most noticeable being a missing saxophone overlay from the main title march!. During our two years’ research we managed to put together the most complete and best sounding release possible from the surviving elements, in a true labor of love. The original tapes being largely lost and Raksin’s personal copy decidedly useless (as it was fully impaired and was used for audio experiments in sound studios), our only option was to restore several copies of the infamous bootleg LP, incorporating an incomplete music stem in mono, courtesy of MGM, with good quality.

This release may be short but contains over 90 percent of the score in addition to unused cues. Because of its running time and the only possible elements used, we offer the product at a special price.

The CD is accompanied by a generous full color 20-page booklet with a preface by Raksin’s archivist Marilee Bradford and further details about the film, the composer and the score by Gergely Hubai (including a track-by-track analysis). Limited edition of 1000 units

FalkirkBairn wrote
Certain members of our little forum may be pleased to see the release of this little title:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Witchfinder-Pau … amp;sr=1-1

Paul Ferris' Witchfinder General, scheduled for a December 10th release from De Wolfe.