Cinemaventure

Another chapter in Hollywood's history is closed. Charlton Heston, who epitomised larger-than-life characters on screen has now joined the greats like Cecil B. De Mille, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. There are now only a handful left who took part in Hollywood before it was taken over by the film school graduates and the Hate-America-First crowd. Charlton Heston played a wide range of characters, historical, mythical and archetypal. Moses, El Cid, Judah Ben-Hur, General Gordon of Khartoum, and even the greatest pirate of them all, Long John Silver. He worked in epics, westerns, science fiction, crime dramas; any genre that offered a part, because as an actor, work was the breath of life. There are no actor's in today's Hollywood capable of leaving such a vivid impression long after the movie has ended. For Moses, the best they could come up with recently was Dougray Scott. (Dougray?) As Norma Desmond said, it is the pictures that got small. Like John Wayne Charlton Heston l...

The Alamo (pictured to the left) is a four-CD set from Silva Screen Records devoted to the music of Dimitri Tiomkin. Like most Silva releases it is a mixture of the good and the bad (and in one case downright ugly). It also combines new material with tracks from earlier releases. Still, it is worth getting. Disc One is devoted to the Westerns and is primarily instrumentals and most tracks, performed by the City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, are excellent. The first track is "Follow The River" from Night Passage an excellent film with James Stewart and Audie Murphy. Unfortunately the tempo is too fast, rushing through the lovely theme. Tension At Table Rock is represented next then High Noon, an instrumental arrangement of the song. The Wild Wild West is next, the two tracks being composed for an earlier proposed version of the television series. The tracks are the Main Theme and The Ballad Of Jim West. Gunfight At The OK Corral is represented by a suite. Unfortunatel...

The concept of artificial life has existed for hundreds of years, such as the myth of Pygmalion and Galeta. The most famous story is Mary Shelly's Frankenstein . But before that there was the tale of the Golem; a man of clay brought to life. The Jews of the Prague ghetto were to be forced out on orders of the emperor. Rabbi Loew, using mystic arts, created the Golem as the protector of the Jews. But the Golem soon rebelled and threatened everyone. German director Paul Wegener filmed the story three times, in 1915, 1917 and 1920. Only the third film, The Golem and How He Came Into the World , remains and it is well worth seeing. Kino offers a restored print that is quite lovely. Rabbi Low (Albert Steinruck). aided by his servant (Ernst Deutsch), in an impressive scene, summon a demon who gives them the word needed to bring the inanimate statue to life. The Golem saves the Emperor from death and the greatful ruler rescinds his order of expulsion. But the Golem enjoys life and refuses...

The end of the Sixties pretty much ended the period of the Epic film, with a few exceptions. Disaster films became the rage. But one of the last of the big Epics came out in 1970. That was Waterloo , an Italian-Soviet Union co-production, produced by Dino De Laurentiis and directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, famous for his huge production of War And Peace . The film featured an international cast headed by Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Wellington. The exterior battle scenes were filmed in the Ukraine. Others in the cast included Dan O'Herlihy, Virginia McKenna, Jack Hawkins and Orson Welles. More importantly for lovers of spectacle the Soviet Army provided around 15,000 troops to portray the French and Allied armies. Jack Hawkins had lost his voice to cancer and was dubbed by Robert Rietty. I have seen a couple of sources claiming he was dubbed by his friend Charles Gray, and the egotistical Rich Little claimed he did the dubbing in an appearance on the Tonight Show...

Probably the earliest piece of movie music I became aware of was "The Song From Moulin Rouge" but that was because we had the 78 RPM recording and you heard it on the radio all the time. I certainly didn't see the movie until many years later. The first movie I saw where I became aware of the music and wanted a record of the theme was Giant (1956). I fell in love with the movie (at 8-years old) and the music. The next two movies to catch my ear were in 1957, Night Passage , scored by Tiomkin, and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad , scored by Hermann. Now, fifty years later, I still love these scores. I have also grown to appreciate many other composers such as A. Newman, Rozsa, Korngold, Steiner, Waxman, E. Bernstein, Goldsmith and Barry. However, I have come to the conclusion that my favorite film composer is Dimitri Tiomkin. It wasn't a conscious decision, but the realization that if I have the choice of a recording of Tiomkin or another composer I usually choose Tiomki...

Greetings to anyone who may stumble on this. I've been writing on Science Fiction related topics for a while and on film for another blogger, so I decided to use this forum for Movie and related topics. Growing up in the Fifties I got to see lots of great, near-great and pretty awful movies in my home-town theaters. House Of Wax, Them!, The Ten Commandments are only a few. I first started paying attention to the theme and background music with Giant, Night Passage , and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad . I got hooked by Tiomkin and Herrmann early on. Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Twenty Million Miles to Earth got me wanting to see any movie with the name Ray Harryhausen attached. I hope any readers will find this blog readable at the least, and maybe it will prompt some good memories of the time when movies were worth watching. So, check back soon.