Kino Video released Native Land onto VHS and its score, the only major film score by Marc Blitzstein, is a real surprise gem.

Blitzstein, of course, is best known as the composer of The Cradle Will Rock, the notorious WPA musical from the 30s.

The first Blitzstein in my collection came with the CD reissue of his Airborne Symphony, narrated by Orson Welles, which was wonderful. Native Land follows in the same dramatic-documentary style to be found in that symphony and in like-minded scores of the period by Grofe, Thomson, Kubik, and Greunwald.

Native Land is a curio to be sure. A US film from 1942 directed by famous photographers, it's a blend of documentary footage and re-enacted scenes that presents a leftist view of America at the start of WWII.

If anyone has seen Frank Capra's Why We Fight Series, especially the last film in that series, War Comes to America, you'll have some idea of what to compare Native Land with, except that, here, the heavy-handed propaganda element is pink rather than red, white, and blue.

The film suggests that hearty men built America through their farming and labor but that banks and union busters now threaten to destroy this decent world built by the common man.

You can smirk or cheer as you will.

In any case, the scoring by Blitzstein, was wonderful and suggests, as does his Airborne Symphony, that he would have made a great film composer if he'd done more in that direction.

I don't know much about what Blitzstein did for a living instead. Obviously, he was left-leaning and may have wanted to avoid Hollywood or ran afoul of HUAC and couldn't work there.

But atleast there's this one score by him, another odd surprise discovery, another good work out there that fell through the cracks into obscurity that you yourself might want to check out sometime.

Mark--I love the Why We Fight series despite its propaganda aspect (you can't really call them straight documentaries). The first one of the 7 films won the Oscar but it was quickly overshadowed by the others. For me, the highlights of the series are the Siege of Leningrad sequence from Battle of Russia and the Building of America montage that begins War Comes to America although there are many great moments and ideas in all the films.

You mention the Liberty Bell trademark (it also shows up in It's A Wonderful Life) and I've always taken it as a symbol of the entire war effort. If you ever see Peter Cohen's remarkable documentary Architecture of Doom, a film I've mentioned in my posts often, you'll realize that Nazism worshipped anal values, clean grooming, clean houses and factories, clean health, clean racial purity. If you look at the Liberty Bell in the Capra image as it moves close and away from the camera, it says Liberty but it also shows a part of the smaller language that wraps around the bell (....of the association of free men....) and when the bell swings forward the entire image reads 'Liberty of the ass' and that was basically what the war was fought over, retentive vs expulsive life styles.

The scores to the Why We Fight series are uncredited but some cues are unmistakably by Dimitri Tiomkin. Alex North worked on the series, probably Gail Kubik as well among others. A lot of the scores rely on familiar music--Gershwin shows up, folk material, and an amazing sequence in Battle of China depicting the mass migration of Chinese inland is scored to a theme from Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky.

Everyone else--As for Native Land, it's visually brilliant, shot after shot, it's just a tremendous looking film. The content may be naive and dated but the compositions still shine. The film's politics are confusing being pro-America and anti-business at the same time. Most of the sequences deal with business types killing leftists to the point of overkill. Instead of feeling outrage, if I was pink and keeping a body count, I'd turn Bircher by the time the film was done just to save my hide. The score includes 2 songs as part of the background scoring and a wonderful opening montage cue. The film has stretches that aren't scored. Some old union songs show up. The scoring returns, all of it good, but the titles and opening montage make the biggest impression. Finally the film is narrated by Paul Robeson who had the James Earl Jones voice of his day and his narration over the music in places is just sublime. The scoring doesn't quite reach the heights of say The River and The Plow That Broke The Plains but I still recommend a look and listen.

I'm intrigued by the following (from David Meeker's book "Jazz In The Movies"):