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Yes, you know I'm out here, Ray!
SABOTEUR was recently screened in Hollywood at an Art Directors Guild event honoring Robert Boyle, (whose first film was THE WOLF MAN), and there was much discussion remarking on the effective use of silence in that famous climax.
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How about somebody releasing Skinner's incredibly moving re-score to the excellent but rarely seen, but wonderful Russian cartoon THE SNOW QUEEN. I saw this a number of times on TV growing up and finally found the soundtrack album, all bummed up as usual, but a couple of intact cues remain. I always found this film and music would always have me sobbing uncontrollably, it was so beautiful. Just wonderful. Along with Baxter's ALAKAZAM THE GREAT my favorite orchestral animation score.
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John Morgan:
Please keep up you superlative work. Give me more Frank Skinner! By the way, are you familiar with Skinner heartrending rescore to the Russian animation classic, THE SNOW QUEEN, it is truly a lost masterpiece?
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Posted: |
Jun 22, 2004 - 4:37 PM
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By: |
John Morgan
(Member)
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No, Thomas. Tell me more.
Skinner has always been a favorite since childhood. A lot of my "growing up" films were produced by Universal Pictures...the horror films, the westerns, Deanna Durbin, Abbott and Costello, Olsen and Johnson, the action films of Richard Arlen-Andy Devine those Donald O'Conner musicals, the Technicolor Maria Montez vulgarities, and many others. I seem drawn to the forties output more than his fifties music, but I think the films themselves helped shape that opinion.
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This is what I know, John, in 1959 Univeral aquired a beautifully animated 1955 color version of a Soviet Cartoon (I think anime fans would love it) of H.C. Andersen's THE SNOW QUEEN, they added a silly prologue and epilogue with Art Linkletter, but otherwise the film is complete. I actually saw this film in a theatre in 1961 at the age of 6, and it literally blew me away. The images, the music, even the dubbing was very well done. This was the same year I saw MASTER OF THE WORLD at a theatre and it was the one-two punch of Skinner and Baxter that lead me to the love of film music and "serious music."
A soundtrack was issued on Decca with a lot of horrible narration, babble, etc., but a few (beautiful) Skinner tracks were left alone. The film was fairly popular at the time, but seems to have completely faded from existence, it is truly a lost masterpiece and if you like Skinner at his most heartbreaking your in for a real shock, it's that good. I'd rate it right up there with his best '40s work, and that's no joke.
Probably, not much help, but this music and film has haunted me my whole life and I had to at least mention it.
Ditto on Univeral, John, it was my favorite studio for many years, and I love all the films you've mentioned, also.
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Posted: |
Jun 22, 2004 - 6:01 PM
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By: |
Ray Faiola
(Member)
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Ray, do you know, if anything of the Skinner score is available on tapes, acetates? Would be a nice recording to own, maybe coupled with the German score which has some effective moments (I really like the "Rain", "Soda City" and "The Circus").
Discussing early Hitchcock: Wasn't there a LP of "Rebecca" at some time? Are these acetates still extant or did this LP go back to the m&e track used for the Criterion DVDs and lasers?
There are, reportedly, acetates to SABOTEUR. I assume they are at the midwestern University where the Skinner collection is on deposit. And, yes, there was a bootleg LP of REBECCA taken from very nice-sounding acetates. The flip side is OBJECTIVE, BURMA!
By the way, tonight's our Tuesday "off-the-beaten-track" screening. We're running FIREMAN, SAVE MY CHILD. This is another one from Universal (International) and features an early score by Henry Mancini (as well as Herman Stein).
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I'd go so far as to say this is one of the best scores ever written for a Hitchcock film...totally confused by the person who preferred the German version even though they said it isn't anything special.
On the other hand, I dislike most of Tiomkin's music for Hitchcock.
I'd be interested in ANY Frank Skinner releases from our beloved specialty labels, but this would be near the top of the list.
Yavar
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Yes, I think Heuser´s score was not bad. At least It was one of the few (the only?) German replacement scores which was right on.
On the other side the German versions of Cat People or The Maltese Falcon have some of the worst music, that I have ever heard in a Golden Age movie.
I wonder if anyone has noticed this before, but the Heuser "Saboteur" main title has been dubbed into the German version of "Lo sceicco bianco". Maybe this score has not been specifically written for "Saboteur", but was stock music after all. Maybe there are other examples?
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