SFT

The quality of the film, itself, is irrelevant; I never miss an opportunity to criticize the movie, but I hold the score, and the new Rhino 2-CD set very, very dear.

But, why pay $30.00, when you can get for $26.22 (+ free shipping) from www.deepdiscountcd.com?

The Rhino release is fantastic, but there are probably a few too many source "dance" cues here for my liking. Just skip by them and enjoy that gorgeous main theme.... That became the "Pyramids" theme from THE MUMMY RETURNS!

1. Jeffrey Hunter's Christ. Ray daringly lavished on Hunter's blue eyes some of the great extreme close-ups of cinema. (To the point where Scorsese visually referenced Ray in his shots of the Dalai Lama in ECU in Kundun.) But Hunter has a manner that is simultaneously all four gospels - God, man, savior, healer, theologian, preacher. It's a wonderful performance, and stands well alongside that of Max Von Sydow (who along with Alfred Newman was the only forgivable participant in The Greatest Story ever told).

2. An accomplished supporting cast that is not so famous as to be distracting. Siobhan McKenna's voice is beautiful, and her Mary is a wonderful performance for the Irish actress. Robert Ryan's performance has been criticised by many as difficult to swallow - this actor was more often associated with outlaws of the wild west. But I find his wild unkempt features are perfect for John, and I've not seen enough of Ryan's other roles for him to become typecast in my mind. Hurd Hatfield is a suitably officious Pilate. Ron Randell puts in a lovely performance as the fictional Lucius, who seems based in part on Richard Burton's character in The Robe. Best of all the supporting cast is Judas Iscariot, played by Rip Torn. While there's little to support the zealot motivations of Judas, the performance is so genuine that one cannot but feel for the man.

3. Superb technical credits.

4. There is something of the awe of a miracle in this film that I can't see in any of the others. And here it is Rozsa that makes all the difference. BUY THIS SCORE. Guaranteed to climb high into the top 10 scores in your collection.

5. Philip Yordan's script is a brilliant condensation of the four gospels into a well structured screenplay. Straight after the prologue that serves as exposition on the political backdrop, we are given the setpiece sequence where Jesus, Barabbas, Herod, Pilate, Lucius, Salome, John the Baptist, Claudia, and Judas are all found within close proximity to eachother. The use of real time to deliver so much of the set-up characterisations has always been a lesson in story structure for me.

Anyway, so I like the film and I think it's underrated.

Many people, including me, also feel that EL CID is also a greater epic score than KING OF KINGS, and not just because it's a much better film. KING OF KINGS's true triumph can best appreciated by considering the circumstances under which it came into existence: composed in the shadow of BEN-HUR, with similar locale, time period, religious themes, characters, and dramatic requirements, Rozsa had to find a different approach, one that distinguished it from its predecessor.

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Originally posted by perfpitch:
[B]Wellll...the obvious and, little-contested, reply is that BEN-HUR is the finest film score he ever composed, an observation with which Rozsa, himself, concurred.

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The beauty of being a filmscore lover is that we can agree to disagree; you, Avie, and I, the countless others and I, and yes, even the master, Rozsa, and I. Music is, after all, a very personal thing, and something that each individual holds dear for different reasons.
If it was possible to sit down with Mr. Rozsa today, I would love to discuss the circumstances around which he composed 'King of Kings,' and describe to him the profound passion I have for the beauty of this particular score. I would hope that he would be appreciative of my admiration, and nothing less than extremely flattered.
Fondly...CAT

"Just before I left for my summer holiday in 1959 the studio asked me to go to Madrid. It seemd that an independent producer, Samuel Bronston, was producing a picture thre, and MGM thought I should do the music. Having just done a picture in which Jesus played a supporting role ["Ben Hur"], I was dumbfounded to learn that the new film was 'King of Kings', in which he was the star! But as by this time I had apparently become the musical expounder of the Ancient World par excellence, I agreed."

"I had never been to spain, and my family was very excited. We would be there for about two weeks while I did the music for Salome's dance. This was quite a challenge after Richard Strauss. I could hardly hope to surpass his, but I knew that mine at least would be different."

"The studio had told me not to try to discuss the dance with Bronston, as he wouldn't know anything about it. When we got to Madrid I tried the writer, but he was very evasive and quickly left town. The director was even more vague. When pressed, he told me that the choreographer was his wife. She had once been a dancer with Hermes Pan, who had staged many musicals, and, though she had never done any choreography before, felt she could do this. Bronston had found his Salmome in Chicago. She was a schoolgirl of about sixteen, a bit plump, who, somewhat surprisingly, had never acted or danced before."

"I was almost in tears. Here was a choreographer who had never coreographed and a dancer who had never danced. I finished my piece, about six or seven minutes long, and was practicing it on a piano in the basement of the Hilton where we were staying, so as to be able to play it for the lady choreographer. When I finished there was a huge burst of applause. The kitchen staff had all come in to listen. This was to be my only popular success in Madrid."

"Day after day Margaret Booth and I worked together on the film. What were we to do with this nonsensical biblical goulash? How were all these isolated episodes, some of them as poorly acted as they were directed, going to be shaped into a coherent whole? Finally it was decided to have a voice-over, explaining things which ought to have been in the film but weren't. This narration was to be written by Ray Bradbury, famous for his science fiction stories. The three of us lunched together repeatedly discussing our problems. We were more or less left alone to save the picture, which, to be fair, had its moments, though Salome's dance wasn't one of them. The poor Chicago schoolgirl simply ran about aimlessly from pillar to post making seductive movements. The first preview was so disastrous that Margaret boiled the entire scene down to a couple of minutes, which of course wrecked the music. Anyone interested in hearing it as I composed it should consult the record I made later."

"In the scene of Christ's forty days and nights in the desert, an Arab in a burnoose approaches Christ, looks at him, and goes away. This, I was told, was the Temptation. I did my best to explain it musically, and in spit of (or rather because of) my disbelief in Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, I wrote the only twelve-tone theme of my career for the Devil. For me twelve-tone music is a stillborn idea and thus naturally and admirably suited to the Devil, the 'Spirit of Negation', the 'Father of Lies.' This was an in-joke; I didn't expect a cinema audience to get the message but thought it might rehabilitate me with the avant-garde. No such luck."

"My main problem was to write new music to exactly the same themes and scenes as those in 'Ben Hur' - the Nativity, the Way of the Cross, Golgotha, the Resurrection. It was a tough job, but later a young man once told me that as a boy he had been sufficiently moved by the music to familiarize himself with the same events as recounted musically by Bach in the Passions."

"The preview was in Scottsdale,Arizona. Catholic priests had been invited and were outraged, and the audience wrote abusive comments on their cards. Nevertheless, despite the atmosphere of doom, the next day Bronston, who found my music very apropos, invited me to compose the music for "El Cid". This wasn't an MGM picture, but Bronston arranged matters with the studio - not without some difficulty, since I was wanted for 'Mutiny on the Bounty', which was to be a big, important picture. I had read the script of the latter and was appalled by its shallowness, and privately thanked God for Samuel Bronston. He persuaded MGM that as his picture was almost finished I would be able to do his music and still have time to return for 'Mutiny on the Bounty'. But I had already decided otherwise."

If you can find it, Rozsa's autobiography is an outstanding read. He pulls no punches about his disdain, and sometimes outright loathing, for producers, directors and others who continually told him how he should write his music. Rozsa's personality shines through and his anecdotes about the films and the people he worked with are fascinating.

For my money, FOUR FEATHERS is the greater film, despite the exquisite THIEF's wonderful reputation, due in no small part to the former's more cohesive story, its serious subtext about colonialism, imperialism, heroism, duty, and failure underlying what remains a stirring, brilliantly-written and directed adventure...and a typically marvellous performance by Sir Ralph Richardson, surely the most under-appreciated actor of the 20th Century.

As regards Rozsa's autobiography, Double Life, which is now out of print, I have a limited number of brand-new copies of the American edition (which has an additional chapter not found in the original British edition) for sale at $12.00.

Anyone interested may e-mail me at Originalthinkr@aol.com

Nevertheless, a real Philip Yordan's script?

That should count as one of the King of King's greatest miracles.

As such, I prefer to believe that you really meant to say "bio excerpts"...

The film is a mixed bag. Nicholas Ray got an incredible amount of money to direct this and 55 Days at Peking for Samuel Bronson, but he should have turned it down. These epics were not really his cup of tea, thematically and otherwise. Ray was already heavily drinking and had had problems on his previous films and the stress of 55 Days not only gave him a heart attack but ended his Hollywood career. KOK is the better of the two films. One nice thing about it is that Ray emphasized Christ's politics as a guy preaching peace to both the oppressive Romans and resisting Jews. Ray also insisted that there was nothing supernatural about Jesus. Christ could be seen throughout as merely a healer rather than as the Messiah. Even his confrontation with the Devil is done in voice-over like an internal confrontation. And, as acted by Jeffrey Hunter, Christ comes off more human or humanized than in more symbolic approaches.

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Originally posted by perfpitch:
You mean, as opposed to the countless and undocumented scripts Yordan farmed out to other writers (some blacklisted), and submitted under his own name?

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Precisely.

Which leads me to ask you, if I may, what has become of this project of yours you mentioned once, to produce a documentary about the Mankiewicz/De Mille confrontation over the control of the Directors Guild?

We've asked for them to put it into what's called "turnaround," which would allow us to take the project to other companies, but they've decided to hold onto it until the new head of programming takes office sometime this summer in case it's something that strikes his fancy.

Considering the current climate of fear and repression abroad in the land, our film is more timely than ever, so my partners and I are really eager to get it made -- if only so that we can have the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame call us unpatriotic, too.