As promised, here are the two new Kritzerland releases - if you desire them, just go to the website to order - they'll be "live" at six.
THE BARBARIAN AND THE GEISHA and VIOLENT SATURDAY
Music Composed by Hugo Friedhofer
Based on a story by Ellis St. John, 1958’s The Barbarian and the Geisha recounts the story of Townsend Harris, who arrives in Japan in the 1850s as the first American to serve as Consul-General to Japan, and who was a key figure in opening relations between Japan and America. The film stars John Wayne, and is directed by John Huston. Much of it shot on location, the film is beautiful to look at and features Twentieth Century Fox’s usual top-notch production values.
One of The Barbarian and the Geisha’s strongest elements is its absolutely stunning score by Hugo Friedhofer. By that point, Friedhofer had already written several masterpieces, including The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bishop’s Wife, and, at Fox, such glorious scores as An Affair to Remember, The Boy on a Dolphin, The Rains of Ranchipur, Soldier of Fortune, Seven Cities of Gold, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, Between Heaven and Hell, and, the same year as Barbarian, The Young Lions.
Friedhofer’s score for The Barbarian and the Geisha manages to have Oriental color while remaining tonal in a completely American way. It’s a thing of sublime beauty and one of his best scores. His main theme is heartbreakingly beautiful and is repeated many times throughout the score, and the rest of his music complements and enriches every scene in the film – this is Golden Age movie music the way we remember Golden Age movie music – melodic, dramatic, tender, suspenseful, and evoking a different time and place through orchestral color and knowing how the orchestra can be utilized to also evoke Oriental textures without resorting to triteness.
Violent Saturday, based on the novel by W. L. Heath, was made three years earlier and is a taut and suspenseful film about a small-town robbery. Almost fifty after its release, it’s considered a classic (the DVD was recently released by Twilight Time and is a must-have), with terrific performances from Richard Egan, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and the large cast, excellent writing (screenplay by Sidney Boehm, who wrote the screenplay for the noir classic, The Big Heat), and great direction from Richard Fleischer,
Hugo Friedhofer’s score for Violent Saturday is perfection and a textbook example of how and when to use music. All told, the score is only about twenty minutes long, but it’s the perfect amount of music for this film. It does exactly what film music is supposed to do – propels the film, underscores the scenes that need it, and stays out of the way when music would serve no purpose. There are no classic Friedhofer themes to be found – just music that functions sometimes as subtext, sometimes as suspense, and sometimes as violent as the goings on in Violent Saturday.
Both The Barbarian and the Geisha and Violent Saturday had previous CD releases on Intrada, both long out of print and instant sellouts. The Barbarian and the Geisha was a standalone CD and Violent Saturday played second feature to Warlock by Leigh Harline. It’s great to be able to couple the two Friedhofer scores together, and make them available to those who may have missed out on the prior releases, or who’d like to have these two scores together on one CD. This release has been newly-remastered by James Nelson.
THE GOOD OLD BAD OLD DAYS
Original Cast Recording
Music and Lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley
On July 20, 1961, a new musical opened at the Queen’s Theatre in England. The musical was called Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, and was co-written, directed by, and starred Anthony Newley. The show was a smash, went to Broadway and Newley became an instant superstar. From there it was more shows (Roar of the Greasepaint, Smell of the Crowd), films, as writer, director, and actor, sometimes all three at once (Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness, Willy Wonka, Doctor Dolittle), TV (tons of guest shots on every variety show of the era), and concerts all over the world.
In 1971, while on tour doing concert dates, Newley and Bricusse began work on a new original musical entitled It’s a Funny Old World We Live In – But the World’s Not Entirely to Blame, a musical that Bricusse described as “a modst little saga about Man, Life, Death, God and The Devil, with the history of the world thrown in.” The show got as far as pre-production in New York at the end of that year. But then producer James Nederlander got cold feet and pulled out. Original Stop the World West End producer Bernard Delfont came to the rescue and the show, sporting a new title, The Good Old Bad Old Days, was slated for a short tour then a West End opening in December of 1972.
The reviews were lukewarm – some were okay, and some were blistering, however Newley the performer was well received by almost all the reviewers. The show would hang on for nine months. Being a Newley and Bricusse score, of course it abounds with catchy melodies and some genuinely good songs. Listening to the score forty years later, divorced from the show itself, the score is very pleasing to hear, and the performances are wonderful.
The Good Old Bad Old Days was released on LP on EMI in the UK. This is its first CD release.
Both CDs are limited to 1000 copies only. The price is $19.98 plus shipping for each.
CDs will ship by the first week of May – however, preorders placed directly through Kritzerland usually ship one to five weeks earlier (we’ve been averaging four weeks early). To place an order, see the cover, or hear audio samples, just visit
www.kritzerland.com.
