My remarks are motivated by having recently picked up Paramount's DVD of GUNFIGHT and NIGHT PASSAGE, a western I have always found to be a guilty pleasure. No, it's definitely not MAN FROM LARAMIE. However, the incorporation of 50s social motifs and pop psychology usually amuses me in NP. But Tiomkin's theme song, particularly when it is rendered by the strings, has always moved me. Often whistle it. I enjoy the Laurie Johnson re-recording, despite the limitations of the miking.

I guess it's almost obligatory that I end this with... a digital re-recording [only done by Messrs. Morgan and Stromberg, as they have a handle on Tiomkin's musical voice], or the original tracks, would be nice.

I really prefer the epic Tiomkin scores like "The Alamo" and "55 Days at Peking." I have the former and have berated myself profusely for not buying the latter when it was available.

Ironically, a Tiomkin theme that I find myself whistling alot is decidedly NOT epic: "The High and The Mighty."

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THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY is, indeed, epic, at least in that its makers and defenders have always tried to make it seem bigger and more important than it really is.

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wouldn't this have more to do with the fact no one ever gets to see the movie anymore, due to whatever legal troubles (or what have you) surround it?

I enjoy GIANT, as well. I have both CDs of the score - the Capitol release and the archival recording, with extra music, I picked up from SAE.

Warner's initial DVD release of GIANT included a Gig Young interview with Dimitri Tiomkin. There is a rumoured 2-disc Special Edition of GIANT coming, sometime this spring. It would be nice if it included an isolated score.

As a youngster, I recall seeing Dimitri Tiomkin in a guest appearance on the TV show 77 SUNSET STRIP, from Warners. He seemed to have celebrity status beyond his compositional skills, and his biography contains a photo of a theatre marquee promoting the film OLD MAN AND THE SEA by referencing Tiomkin's music. Prior to John William's shark motif, there was Tiomkin's menacing brass for the shark attack in OLD MAN. More frenetic than Williams, but still effective. Both scores, incidentally, won the Oscar for original score. I guess the Academy likes fish stories...

Without a doubt, I consider THE ALAMO to be Tiomkin at the top of his game as a film composer. All of Tiomkin's dramatic tricks, and musical genius, crystallized in that one score. My collection has 31 Tiomkin CD/CDRs. Looking forward to adding RED RIVER and SAE's upcoming release of THE BIG SKY.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

An expensive Universal Western with grand Colorado locations and big stars, Night Passage comes close to being a classic, but not close enough. An excellent story builds up to an exciting midpoint, but corny thematics and a tendency to indulge James Stewart's 'family entertainment' values takes a toll.

On DVD, however, it's a glorious experience, with those Technirama vistas in the high country, much of it shot from a moving train. Savant's never seen this one widescreen until now, and it's a bargain for Western fans.

Synopsis:

Disgraced railroad employee Grant McClaine (James Stewart) saves young castoff Joey Adams (Brandon De Wilde) from a beating by a thug named Concho (Robert J. Wilke). They ride into a railroad town, and a complicated adventure. Railroad bigshot Ben Kimball (Jay C. Flippen) hires Grant to sneak some money up to the workers, who are threatening to quit after two payrolls have been robbed en route, by the gang run by Whitey Harbin (Dan Duryea). Charlie Drew, a waitress in town (Dianne Foster) and Verna Kimball, Ben's wife (Elaine Stewart) both have an interest in Grant but for different reasons: Verna is bored in her marriage, and Charlie wants to sneak up to Whitey's hideout, to get an outlaw named The Utica Kid (Audie Murphy) to marry her. Grant takes the job, but the train is robbed anyway, and the payroll money ends up in Joey's shoebox, right in the middle of the thieves, who have also kidnapped Verna. Grant arrives to clean house, but more complications appear: he and The Utica Kid have a common past.

The tendency among Western addicts is to say that Night Passage could have been great if Anthony Mann had directed it, but after a long list of collaborations, James Stewart and Mann had outgrown each other by this time and each moved on to bigger shows. In the second half of the fifties, Stewart split his time between acting for top directors like Alfred Hitchcock, and making his own pictures that tended toward conservative content.

Even though Mann reportedly passed on the film for script reasons, the lively story has a number of similarities with his last Western, the strangely pessimistic Man of the West - a criminal gang of misfits preying on decent society, and a hero who finds himself in a no man's land between respectability and outlawry. Chances are that with its 'dark' title, this show started out as a more serious story, only to develop in a wholesome direction with the combined participation of Stewart and Audie Murphy.

Most of Night Passage is smoothly structured, especially the introduction of the characters and their interesting relationships. Everyone Stewart meets is tied in with the crooks in one way or another, and half of them are hiding their true natures. Elaine Stewart is cleverly positioned as a kidnap victim who was once engaged to the hero. Hugh Beaumont has a nice bit as a railroad detective who gets locked in a boxcar just when he thinks he's going to foil a train robbery. 1 The clever script provides a number of neat surprises and clever ironies. But first-time film director James Neilson, who previously worked on Alfred Hitchcock's TV show and later became a Disney house director, doesn't seem to have been strong enough to keep his powerful stars focused on the story.

The best-introduced character is Audie Murphy's Utica Kid, who everyone talks about for half an hour before he's finally revealed running after a speeding train. Murphy made a lot of klunker movies, and a number of cheap Westerns, but his pairing with Stewart in this picture shows him trying for something better. He's both likeable and capable, overcoming his limitations in the acting department. Of course, he always carried an appeal for men who knew him as the most-decorated GI of WW2 ... if that babyfaced short guy was the USA's toughest warrior, then we all have a chance.

Night Passage has some excellent exterior vistas (the views from the moving train are a pleasure) and a nicely-orchestrated spectrum of good guys and bad guys. Audie Murphy's smart-talking tainted hero is matched by Dan Duryea's greedier outlaw boss. Veteran villains Robert J. Wilke and Jack Elam both do what they do in every picture, get blasted down, but we get to see Wilke walk atop and climb over a very rickety-looking train as it chugs through a steep mountain pass. He started as a stuntman, and apparently had to keep it up to make a living.

What lets Night Passage passage down is the corn factor. I'm showing my prejudices, but it's almost as if James Stewart reached into what was a morally conflicted story and cleaned it up with a bar of soap. The females are in very compromised situations, but there's barely a kiss or an embrace in the picture. The railroad workers are all idiotic complainers, fighting over the late payroll and henpecked by their wives, namely Ellen Corby. The only female with some normal ideas in her head is the gritty muleskinner played by Olive Carey, a grandmother type who openly suggests to Stewart that he drop by when it gets cold in the winter, so they can keep each other warm!

Both Stewart and Murphy's characters are typical Borden Chase western heroes, as in the Stewart-Mann films, who exist in a social limbo between absolute virtue and despicable villainy. Stewart plays his defamed character as if he's expecting to be vindicated any moment, thus robbing the character of its depth. Murphy is a full-blown baddie with a heart of gold, who probably secretly wants to reform but knows there's no hope for him. His last-minute noble gesture, changing sides and coming to the rescue, completes his character arc, but isn't well-enough directed to make a maximum impact - we're expecting just such a twist. The great borrower of classic Western situations, Sam Peckinpah, possibly had this conclusion in mind when he filmed the end of Ride the High Country. In that film, Randolph Scott's isolation and regret are more deeply felt; when he rides to the rescue, it's a glorious atonement for a real Western hero.

The politics we see are rather simplistic. The railroad may be the only employer in the territory, but the story places too much emphasis on Stewart's desire to square himself with it. As with other Stewart Westerns, big business and the Army can do no wrong. The railroad boss may be a cuckolded dunderhead who hires losers like Hugh Beaumont and accuses good men like Stewart of thievery, but Stewart remains loyal. The way he grabs at the offer of a lousy railroad job at the end, isn't very flattering.

As soon as a certain relationship is revealed in the story, we have to listen to too many Author's Messages: Murphy and Stewart do a lot of lame talking about Good and Evil and people's souls. Stewart becomes the protector of the womenfolk and the okay kid played by Brandon De Wilde, and the complicated network of relationships built up earlier in the story is dropped, with several loose ends left untied.

But the most obvious gripe is Stewart's constant singing and playing of the accordion, as if he were envious of crossover performers like Burl Ives. He sang once before, briefly, in an MGM musical, but here he keeps pulling out that damn accordion and warbling inane ditties like 'It takes all kinds to make a railroad', or something to that effect. It's supposed to be how he makes his living, but you get the idea that Stewart is trying to use his Glenn Miller association to pretend he plays another instrument. The show stops dead every time he sings, and I can imagine audiences cheering the closeup that shows the instrument ablaze in a cabin fire. But I guess it's better than seeing him play a trombone atop a railroad flatcar.

Otherwise, the music is tops, with an exciting Dimitri Tiomkin score ringing across the landscape. Short at 90 minutes, the story's interesting elements only come together for a few minutes, before being resolved with a predictable gunfight. My remarks above should be taken as reasons why Night Passage isn't a classic Western. It is still a very entertaining one, especially for those who like their shoot 'em ups on the lighter side. I certainly recommend it as strongly as any of the 'respected' Anthony Mann sagas.

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Universal's DVD of Night Passage is a beauty, where we can finally appreciate the Technirama photograpy of William Daniels at its widescreen best. The picture has a great texture and sharp look. It's the first movie in Technirama, which was essentially squeezed VistaVision, and the main titles interestingly mimic the Technirama logo. The sound is also very clear, great for Tiomkin fans and not so good for trying to ignore Stewart's accordion.

Tiomkin is not well represented on CD, and I hope more of his music will be released.

The film is ok, not great. I'm sure it might have been better through Anthony Mann direction, but you can only do so much with a story that doesn't have great bits in it.

The TCM intro said that Mann walked just before or possibly on the first day of shooting (hard to believe since a contract would have to be broken). Certainly, he left to go make Men in War which probably excited him more than doing yet another James Stewart western. Stewart was very angry at Mann's departure and they didn't talk after that.

I have to agree with everything said about Tarzan and the Mermaids, The High and the Mighty, etc. There isn't too much poor Tiomkin out there in my book.

I have the Cinema lp, transferred to CDR. Also included TOWN WITHOUT PITY - a completely new direction for Tiomkin, to my ears.

BTW, did you find the Malcolm Arnold [EMI] you were looking for? I have seen it around - reasonably priced - in Toronto. Tried to send you an Email, but it got bounced back.

Someone mentioned, 55 DAYS AT PEKING. I recall that the 'Boxer' theme, was a recycle of a theme used earlier in the Gary Cooper film, BLOWING WILD.

Of Dimi's smaller scores, I am fond of COURT MARTIAL OF BILLY MITCHELL [available from SAE].

Of course, there are many other goods ones, too!

I do hope that Elmer Bernstein gets around to reissuing his Filmmusic Collection re-recordings, on CD, so that we can again have access to his Tiomkin re-recordings [HIGH AND THE MIGHTY, SEARCH FOR PARADISE, LAND OF THE PHARAOHS - and especially GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL].

But then few rerecordings of Tiomkin have managed to come up to the energy level of the originals and
evidenced any of the requisite skill in knitting together the complex, disparate elements of his
wonderfully dense orchestrations.

When Tiomkin was on his game, his music truly deserved the description of "rip-roaring."

While acknowledging having a certain nostalgic affection for the title song, the score for TOWN WITHOUT PITY is the only one by Tiomkin that just totally leaves me cold. I appreciate his wanting to attempt something "contemporary", but just endlessly repeating the song melody was a complete washout for me. (I'm almost more forgiving of the notorious, cringe-making wolf whistles in D.O.A.!)

I also must confess to harboring a nagging feeling that RIO LOBO, much as I love the Goldsmith score, might have actually come off better with one of Tiomkin's energetic, wall-to-wall efforts--unfortunately, he was two years deceased at that point.

Nevertheless, I love the vast majority of his output, as he is the one who, with THE ALAMO, made me aware that there were such rare talents as FILM COMPOSERS who worked on our emotions with such skill and cunning.

[Message edited by Vinylscrubber on 05-08-2003]

Hi Mark:

Can't see Dimi as manic-depressive... so maybe not lithium... he was, more often than not, unipolar... so maybe one of the new seritonin uptake medications to level his mania. Of course, that feeds terribly into the Tiomkin stereotype of his not being able to do subtle.

"Undernourished" is an apt description of Bernstein's re-recordings, but they are less undernourished than his reading of Steiner's HELEN OF TROY.

PITY has always left me cold, too.

As a youth, I can remember helping my [deceased] brother-in-law paint the exterior of his house, listening to Tiomkin's ALAMO and GUNS OF NAVARONE. That was when I learned that direct sunlight would warp vinyl.

I have been thinking about your comments regarding FMC's re-recordings of Tiomkin. Why do you think they were misses? Was it Chris Palmer's orchestrations, or Elmer's conducting, or the size of the orchestra?

The FMC recordings were my first exposure to some of these scores, until I was able to get archival copies of the Tiomkin originals. So they became my initial trace imprint of what the score should sound like.

The David Willcocks re-recordings were also a miss. As well, the Lawrence Foster re-recordings. The ALAMO Suite, on the latter, was a particular disappointment. I am assuming that Palmer was responsible for the orchestations/arrangements on the Foster re-recordings.

Tiomkin's orchestrators have noted how difficult [and sometimes, downright confusing] his music was to orchestrate. John Williams may know a little about this, as I believe he may have done some orchestration work on GUNS OF NAVARONE. Is it a case of C. Palmer not having successfully come to terms with Tiomkin, gifted as Palmer was, as noted by Elmer Bernstein, and others.

Currently, Silva seems to be sitting on releasing its 2 CD Tiomkin compilation.

Your thoughts?

I appreciate that the Bernstein versions go down a lot easier when you haven't heard the originals. I would have to say that their main problem was probably the size of the orchestra.
Bernstein and Palmer were no doubt doing these on a less than splendid budget, but the major characteristic of these Tiomkin scores was their sense of size and--dare I say it?--grandeur. Trying to do justice to LAND OF THE PHAROAHS and THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY with an orchestra even two thirds the size is
just not going to cut it.

Palmer, in his fine book on Tiomkin, speaks of his stuff having a kind of unashamed "peasant vigor", or words to that effect, and that's truly what Tiomkin brought to many of his scores. He sure wasn't afraid to go for the grand effect, and since he seemed so assured in his approach, for me, they usually worked.

For me, the best rerecordings of Tiomkin remain Laurie Johnson's fine WESTERN FILM WORLD OF DIMITRI TIOMKIN, Charles Ketchum's well done suite from STRANGERS ON A TRAIN on the Varese Hitchcock disc, and, of course, the great Gerhardt LOST HORIZON album (although his best Tiomkin track is his reconstructed, "alternate universe" suite from THE THING, on his RCA catchup disc).

The Foster European RCA/BMG disc is a real mixed bag, with CYRANO suffering from a way too slow performance--especially the fight sequence--but the added Chinese choral cues in the 55 DAYS AT PEKING suite are wonderful The prospect of a Silva 2 CD set, somehow, doesn't get my hopes up as they've had such mixed results in the past. Just try to deconstruct what's going on in the orchestration of a major Tiomkin score while listening and you get an idea what the problems are for even a supremely skilled producing and orchestrating team. The clips on the upcoming Morgan and Stromberg RED RIVER have really whetted my appetite for this new release--I can hardly wait!

Getting back to the Bernstein FMC albums, I have always been fairly accepting of the HELEN OF TROY disc, but, like yourself with the Tiomkin albums, this was my first hearing of the score. Having since heard the original, I now have a much harder time with the FMC versions.

Of course, Elmer even wreaked havoc on his own fine THE MIRACLE score, also suffering from a lack of proper orchestra size and, evidently, a just "okay" reconstruction by Palmer. (I'm really not inclined to knock Palmer, as he was a potent
force in the reconstructions of many scores and wrote sensitively about film composers and their work.)

By the way, I'm not aware of John Williams doing any orchestrating for Tiomkin, although
I have read that he did play piano on some of his sessions.

Anyway, It fun to be talking about Tiomkin midst all the fawning over the latest work from Media Ventures. Thanks for a great thread!

One of the problems for those doing rerecords was created by Tiomkin himself because he adjusted, modified and changed his scores during the recording process, so the existing materials used as the basis for rerecordings don't always represent what ultimately ended up on the final recording under the baton of Tiomkin. Sorting through what he wrote and what was recorded has been the bane of orchestrators and reconstructionists. Some have gotten it right - Laurie Johnson with THE WESTERN FILM WORLD OF D.T. - and some haven't quite captured the Tiomkin Touch - Palmer/FMS THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY, for example.

But when the FMS HIGH AND THE MIGHTY was released, it was the only THATM and I, and every other Tiomkin fan, I'm sure, was very glad to have it. And I find Elmer's take on GUNFIGHT AT OK CORRAL to be satisfying...again, because it's all we've got of this score of any length.

I think Ketcham nails STRANGERS ON A TRAIN about as well as is possible. It's 16 minutes of superb Tiomkin. And Gerhardt is right on the money, too, although I've seen some complaints posted here and there about his take on Tiomkin. Don't agree at all. Gerhardt did an excellent job.

I, too, have mixed feelings about the Foster/BMG disc, although CYRANO isn't the cause...it's THE ALAMO suite. This is music only the Big T could record effectively, especially the final battle sequence. It has to be, along with the stampede cue in RED RIVER, one of the most complicated and complex pieces of music ever written for film and I'm firmly convinced only Tiomkin himself could do it justice. Comparing the OST to Foster's version proves the point, I think.

However, the CYRANO DE BERGERAC suite is interesting because Tiomkin re-uses his score for the wartime John Huston documentary THE BATTLE OF SAN PIETRO. The two cues in CYRANO which are lifted almost note-for-note from SAN PIETRO are "Street Fight" and "Requiem", with "Requiem" being slightly altered. In SAN PIETRO the "Requiem" music with choir appears when the battle ceases and the townspeople come out to discover the terrible carnage and destruction of thier town. But it's not a complete note for note borrowing, as a violin solo for a man's grief and horror as he discovers his wife has been killed doesn't appear in CYRANO.

When I saw SAN PIETRO on TCM [can't recall exactly which movie channel it was, but it was probably TCM] having heard from more knowledgeable Big T experts than I about the similarities of the scores, I listened closely to SAN PIETRO and yep, there it was, the CYRANO music. So, with the Foster disc we're getting two scores for the price of one!

Back to Foster's THE ALAMO for a moment: What bothers me about it is the Rundfunk Choir's mispronunciation of Lisa in "Tennessee Babe". Thankfully, Stromberg/Morgan's spectacular RED RIVER doesn't have that problem. The Russian choir is perfect, as is the entire rerecording. Perhaps the best aspect of Bill and John's RED RIVER is that Tiomkin's incredibly detailed and intricate orchestratins and orchestral color can finally be heard in all their glory, elements which were almost completely buried, as is too often the case, beneath dialogue, sound effects and just plain low volume. This rerecording is truly a magnificent revelation of Tiomkin's genius at full throttle.

A preview of some of what will be included on the Silva 2 CD Tiomkin compilation appears on the Silva 2 CD extravaganza "Way Out West: The Essential Western Film Music Collection 2". The tracks are: The Alamo [Green Leaves of Summer]; Duel in the Sun [Main Title/The Legend/Orizaba]; Friendly Persuasion [Thee I Love]; Giant [Main Theme];Gunfight at OK Corral [suite]; High Noon [Do Not Forsake Me...]; Rio Bravo [Rio Bravo/De Guella] and The Unforgiven [The Need for Love].

However some caveats about some tracks:
The Giant main title concludes with a shouted "GIANT!" by the chorus which struck me as unnecessary...mainly because there's nothing like it in the OST. But what really dropped my jaw are the gunshots inserted into the middle of an otherwise pretty good version of GUNFIGHT AT OK CORRAL. And not just a few blasts but a fusillade of gunfire that completely destroys the flow of the cue.
Perhaps Silva was trying for an effect similar to that of the beginning of DUEL IN THE SUN when, after the Selznick Pictures logo and a couple of bars of Tiomkin's music, a gunshot and richochet are heard...but that lasts about 2 seconds. In the Silva GUNFIGHT it's as if the entire gunbattle takes place right there in your stereo.

Indeed, Palmer was a potent force in reconstructing and orchestrating film scores, and his book on Tiomkin is a must-have [as is the Big T's autobiography, "Please Don't Hate Me", if you can find it for a reasonable price] and his too-early passing was a great loss to the film music community. That having been said, he tended to...embellish his reconstructions somewhat, adding bits and pieces to form a more coherant whole and this is nowhere more evident than in the Gerhardt THE THING suite. While it serves a purpose as the single reasonably good representation of this score, when compared to the OST cues, it's way off. However, it is a suite, so I suppose Palmer can be cut some slack for this one.

We Tiomkin fans are being blessed with the recent renaissance of interest in his scores. RED RIVER's on the way, as is the beautifully elegiac THE BIG SKY and I'm hoping that at some point in the not too distant future John and Bill will turn their attention to rerecording the brilliant DUEL IN THE SUN. After RED RIVER it's obvious they are the only ones who will be able to do it justice.

I agree that those in the film music community who feel Media Ventures is the be-all and end-all of film music are missing out on some spectacular scoring if they ignore Tiomkin. But I grew up hearing Tiomkin first-run in theaters, so maybe you hadda be there.

Craig

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However some caveats about some tracks:
But what really dropped my jaw are the gunshots inserted into the middle of an otherwise pretty good version of GUNFIGHT AT OK CORRAL. And not just a few blasts but a fusillade of gunfire that completely destroys the flow of the cue.
Perhaps Silva was trying for an effect similar to that of the beginning of DUEL IN THE SUN when, after the Selznick Pictures logo and a couple of bars of Tiomkin's music, a gunshot and richochet are heard...but that lasts about 2 seconds. In the Silva GUNFIGHT it's as if the entire gunbattle takes place right there in your stereo.
[/B]

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Regarding the FMC re-recordings of Tiomkin, I had always thought that by the time Elmer got around to doing these scores, he was recording them with the full complement of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, unlike the much smaller ensemble used on HELEN/SUMMER PLACE, SILVER CHALICE, and MIRACLE. The sound was thin (anemic, even) on those recordings. The bigger orchestra seems to be an implicit recognition of Tiomkin's 'big sound', on Elmer's part. The Tiomkin scores were near the end of Elmer's (personally) costly endeavour to stimulate new public interest in classic scores. I know he was doing a lot of work, during this phase, with the RPO, such as using the orchestra to record scores for National Geographic, and live concerts. (I have a friend who claims one of the high points of his concert going experience was seeing Elmer conduct Aaron Copland's FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN, with the RPO, around this time, at the Royal Albert Hall.) I also assumed, at the time, that these events were helping to defer some of the costs. I could be wrong, as I am doing a lot of inferring here, without direct information.

Christopher Palmer always impressed me in his scholarly writings on filmmusic. The writings produced during his tragically, brief life nurtured my interest in filmmusic - during a period when information was not always easy to come by. However, in retrospect, I am getting the impression that his reconstruction of classic scores sometimes missed the mark. I feel this way with his CARDINAL suite, and also the orchestrations he provided for Elmer's re-recording of BIG JAKE. You have mentioned the shortcomings with THE MIRACLE. (I have never seen this film, nor have I heard the original performance of the score.) The only score, attributed to Chris Palmer, I have heard, is VALMONT - and parts of it [at least in the structure] sounded like Rozsa, with whom Palmer often worked. Now that we are some distance from Palmer's untimely death, perhaps it is time for a re-evaluation of just how effective he was as a reconstructionist. In my judgement, I think John Morgan and Bill Stromberg are the best talents to appear in this field. Charles Gerhardt, a close second. Palmer was prolific, but there are some nagging shortcomings...

My reference to John Williams working with Tiomkin, on GUNS OF NAVARONE, can be substantiated in Darby/Dubois (1990) - AMERICAN FILM MUSIC, p. 522. Their reference draws on an interview done with John Williams, in a FILMS AND FILMING magazine. I think the interviewer was Derek Elley (?). Not a hundred per cent sure, on that.

In terms of Tiomkin's music, in the context of the movies, themselves, this is a good period as a number of Tiomkin films are now being released on DVD. Currently, I am looking forward to picking up MGM/UA's release of John Huston's, THE UNFORGIVEN. I am also hopeful that the Warner's Special Edition of GIANT will have an isolated score. There have been rumours, to that effect.

Maybe Avie has something more specific, as I know he goes to the Warner's DVD shop, periodically, and he did provide a firm date for the release of the 2-disc edition.

Anyhow, thanks for sharing your passion for Tiomkin. It's been great!