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Is the Columbia LP a re-recording or is the film tracks?
Is there much/any music in the film that did not make it onto the LP?
Has there ever been an expanded CD, or is the CD simply the LP presentation?
Regrettably, I can only answer part of your last question: There is no expanded CD. If I recall aright, La-La-Land was working on putting an expanded and restored edition out a few years ago, but they were met with insurmountable rights/licensing/whatever issues, and so had to put the kibosh on the project. I have no idea if that situation has since changed. Hope springs eternal, I suppose.
Sorry I can't address your other questions, I saw the film once many, many years ago, and remember very little of it - but I'm sure one of our resident Golden Age experts will chime in soon!
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Is the Columbia LP a re-recording or is the film tracks?
Yes, the Columbia LP was a re-recording done for album purposes.
The contents of this LP were reissued on a Japanese CD. (I own both and they are the same; not even one bonus track on that CD).
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Is there much/any music in the film that did not make it onto the LP?
I've only watched "The Old Man And The Sea" once, but my recollection is that there's not only more music in the movie that's not on the album - the music itself sounds different that what's on the album.
My guess would be that the original studio recording sessions were not done in a stereo sound that would be deemed suitable for release onto record. It's also possible that Tiomkin re-recorded his music for Columbia somewhere else if "The Old Man And The Sea" was recorded during the 1958 musicians' union strike.
By the way, this is my favorite Tiomkin score. It's also one of the few Academy Award/Oscar winners with which I agree should have gotten this award. 
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Posted: |
Jul 13, 2015 - 1:12 AM
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By: |
finder4545
(Member)
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Sorry to disagree with many, but I think OLD MAN is far, far more deep and interesting than the bombastic and rhetorical BIG COUNTRY. Good the central theme, but the treatment of the score not charming and compelling. At last for my money. I have anything of Moross, but have never repeated the listening more than 2 or 3 times in the years, for a lack of interest.
I find the music of Moross rather self referential, equal to itself even in subjects and contexts of different nature. So to my hear Big Country sounds the same as Cardinal or War Lord or Proud Rebel, and vice versa. No identity. Annoying. Sorry. Tiomkin is on the exact opposite with his inventive and ispiration, and goes into the heart with this OLD MAN AND THE SEA, track by track, theme by theme. The score deserves a complete release of the original.
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I don't think we have to dump on one score over another as both scores remain high points in Tiomkin and Moross' careers. And, remember, Herrmann's 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and VERTIGO didn't even get nominated. (Hell, I even think Waxman's RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP beats out the nomination for WHITE WILDERNESS.)
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Posted: |
Dec 22, 2016 - 4:59 PM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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Last night I turned on TCM in time to catch maybe the last fifteen minutes. Never seen even a snippet before. Anyway, the music was lovely but within seconds I said to m'self, "This sounds so much like Giant...did Tiomkin do this one, too?" What I mean by "sound" is not the same music as the latter, but the same acoustics or whatever. Perhaps the orchestrations did have something to do with it, though.
So my hunch was right. Eh. But I wanted to know more, and now I do; from the NY Times:
Hemingway; 'Old Man and the Sea' Stars Spencer Tracy
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: October 8, 1958
CREDIT Leland Hayward For trying something off the beaten track in making a motion-picture version of Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," and credit Spencer Tracy for a brave performance in its one big role. Also credit Dimitri Tiomkin for providing a musical score that virtually puts Mr. Tracy in the position of a soloist with a symphony. And that just about completes a run-down of the praiseworthy aspects of this film.
For the obvious fact is that the achievement of communicating in pictorial form the eloquence of Mr. Hemingway's minor epic of an old man's lonely battle with a fish called for supreme imagination and even luck on the part of the artists on the job. And those are favoring factors that the artists here seem to have lacked.
In making their basic estimations for this plainly expensive color film, which opened last night at the Criterion with a benefit performance for the March of Dimes, Mr. Hayward and his associates, Peter Viertel, script writer, and John Sturges, director, obviously agreed to go along with a literal re-enactment of the simple action in the Hemingway yarn.
And so they have briefly considered the feebleness of their Cuban fisherman by showing his touching dependence on a faithful boy before taking him out onto the ocean, alone in an open skiff, and there letting him go through the long business of catching, playing and trying to land a giant fish. Except for a few cut-ins of reveries and one sharp flash-back to a memory of his strong youth, they have kept the camera trained entirely on the grueling ordeal of the old man in the boat.
It is an impressive ordeal, as ordeals in catching fish go, and Mr. Tracy represents it in an admirably rugged, stubborn way. He looks convincingly ancient, with lank white hair and stubbly beard, and he performs with the creaky, painful movements of a weary, stiff-jointed old man. It is an affecting demonstration of primal fortitude, and one's heart may well bleed for this old fellow, as do his line-lacerated hands.
But that is the extent of the communication that comes out of this pictured ordeal, which runs uninterruptedly for two-thirds of the eighty-six-minute film. Whatever allegorical intimations there may be in it are not conveyed to any sensible degree in a voice narration that breaks in occasionally or in the mumblings of the old man.
"Now I have killed the fish who was my brother" is such a line as may have had poetic depth in the rhythm of the Hemingway novel but it lacks it in the prosy photograph.
And here is another short-coming: an essential feeling of the sweep and surge of the open sea is not achieved in precise and placid pictures that obviously were shot in a studio tank. There are, to be sure, some lovely long shots of Cuban villages and the colorful coast, and there is one sequence that develops a brief magic. It is of fishermen going to their boats in the rosy dawn. But the main drama, that of the ordeal, is played in a studio tank, and even some fine shots of a marlin breaking the surface and shaking in violent battle are deflated by obvious showing on the process screen.
Mr. Tracy is assisted briefly by a sensitive-looking Cuban lad, Felipe Pazos, who aids a suggestion of the ironic juxtaposition of youth and age. But his major support in emotional coloring comes from that Tiomkin musical score, which is full of dramatic thunder and melodic poignancy. It is the one element of eloquence in this extraordinary one-man show.
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