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I like this score. I didn't have the CD, but I made my own not-so-perfect CDR transfer from the old album. The main theme is a waltz, but it works, a sort of waltz through history, or if you like a Hindu 'dance of creation'. The whole score has a sombre modern feel, quite classical, but also post-impressionistic when it needs to be. The film was to have been scored by various people, including Miklos Rozsa who allegedly disliked the result, but the blend that Mayuzumi uses is just right. A totally leitmotif score would not have worked here: 'order out of chaos' needs not just that, though there are good themes, notably a horn fanfare repeated at various points. One track on the album is an abridged version of the film's 'Creation' sequence played under Genesis narration by Huston himself. Huston played Noah too, and his comical march as the animals enter the ark is a bit reminiscent of Williams' 'March of the Villains' in terms of irony. The treatment of the Sodom and Gomorrah tale was perfect in terms of 'message' ... a mushroom cloud says it all as the city goes up. But critics hated its episodic feel as a movie, as though it should conform to some predictable 'creative writing 101' formula of plot development. O'Toole plays all three of the anthropomorphic 'angels' in archetypally correct colour-coded costumes. Huston intended a whole series of Bible films, and I suspect O'Toole was to have been Christ in the last, but this first offering was as far as they got. Very nice art-direction throughout. Huston got around the slow genealogical passages by the clever visual device of having 'ancestors' seem to stand on each other's shoulders in a sort of ziggurat formation! He tries a lot of psychological stuff too ... Abraham has a dream sequence where the 'flaming pot' swings between the split halves of the sacrificed bull, as in the episode in Genesis. Lesser directors would never even have attempted a shot like that. He liked challenges.
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I've only ever heard the LP version of this score, although I never owned it, but I was fascinated. The music has a very heavy feel to it, the harmonics to the early portion having a "primitive" feel similar to that of The Rite of Spring. Was the LP culled only from Mayuzumi's contribution, or was there any of Morricone's music on it as well?
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The music has a very heavy feel to it, the harmonics to the early portion having a "primitive" feel similar to that of The Rite of Spring. Was the LP culled only from Mayuzumi's contribution, or was there any of Morricone's music on it as well? No, just the Mayuzumi. I remember some folk on the Rozsa forum discussing Morricone's contribution somewhere.
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Posted: |
Oct 15, 2008 - 3:02 PM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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.....There was a cover version of 5 cuts from the score issued by MGM Records (SE-4417) in 1966 with the Metropolitan Pops Orchestra, conducted by Henri Rene I believe. The tracks were: Theme from The Bible, Cain and Abel, Abraham, Noah;' Ark, and Eve. The second side of the LP had music from The Ten commandments, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, and The Greatest Story Ever Told."..... Gee.....I haven't thought about that or listened to it in 40 years. I'll have to dig it out and listen again, Bob. When balanced against the soundtrack recordings, these kinds of cover LPs (including DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, LOST HORIZON-The Musical, HAWAII, THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS and more) almost always come off as second best, but some are fairly listenable.
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Mayuzumi's score for THE BIBLE is one of my all-time favorite scores. He succeeds in creating an epic musical accompaniment to the visual wonders of the film without sounding like any other Biblical or Religious Spectacular. In fact, he creates an appropriately awesome effect, awe in the sense of alien and somewhat scary. The movie accomplishes something usually lacking in many films set in antiquity by imparting a sense of how much the ancient past would feel not just like a foreign country to our modern sensibilities but like another planet. The Noah's ark sequence is easily the best segment of the film with director John Huston playing the role of Noah in a quizzical, humorous manner. Mayuzumi's music really shines here both as a companion to Noah's leading the animals into the ark and for the subsequent flood. The Tower of Bablyon vignette is another good sequence, Stephen Boyd decked out in odd eye make-up as Nimrod. I found a laser disc of THE BIBLE many years for $3.00. I bought it just so I could use it to listen to the complete score. I wouldn't even turn the TV on, just ran the LD through my stereo for the listening experience.
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