Word: cinemas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Instead of casting a familiar Hollywood face in the role of Young (Spencer Tracy was considered, then rejected because of his frequent appearances as a Catholic priest), Zanuck "discovered" Dean Jagger, an able veteran of the Broadway stage, whose cinema appearances have been sporadic and inconspicuous. Jagger brings to his cumbersome, lengthy part such convincing dignity as to relegate to comparative minority the conventional romantic activity of Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell, two harassed lovers who string along on the westward trek...
...from "Juanita" for the love scene, and let it go at that. Historical settings would be sketched in by three or four tinkles of a harpsichord. Seeing the movie version of Our Town the other day brought home forcibly to me the tremendous recent advance in the quality of cinema music. Aaron Copland's score seemed to me every bit as impressive as the story itself, and people who heard the score done separately assure me that it is just as moving, though in a different way of course, off the screen as it is on. This should be enough...
...hard task confronting the cinema composer, that which Aaron Copland has solved so consummately, is to compose a score which fulfills the requirements of the action and at the same time stands on its own feet as a piece of music and an expression of the composer's self. Most screen scores, even the more recent ones, tend to stick pretty closely to certain standard formulae. To compose music for a comedy especially leaves little leeway for originality, although Prokofieff's comic score to Lieutenant Kije, now recorded as a separate suite, is a masterpiece of its kind. A couple...
...inescapable conclusion would be that cinema scores must be written with almost as much logic, creative power, and structural concern as a symphony or tone-poem. Unless the hundreds of musical notes used in a movie have some organic connection with each other, besides that of being in the same picture, unless they form a coherent unity by themselves, they will be no better on the screen than they would playd to audiences in the concert hall. Our Town was the revelation of a new approach, a significant step in the growth of American music...
...read the book and I don't want to spoil it by seeing the movie." That's the reaction of a great many people who see one of their cherished novels advertised at the local cinema. Too often does established fiction submit to a most exhaustive mincing in the name of "entertainment" on its way to the screen...