Word: tiomkin
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Friendly Persuasion (Anthony Perkins; Epic). A movie tune with lyrics in Quaker lingo ("Thee is mine . . . thee pleasures me") that make the canny Quakers look pretty silly. It has a mighty purty tune, by that old Quaker from Russia, Dimitri Tiomkin...
...days, when a Hollywood studio wanted a famous composer to write background music for a film, it had to play an expensive game of Haydn seek; nowadays, the film colony has a sort of Bach yard full of kept musical geniuses. The current favorite is a man called Dimitri Tiomkin, who has filled in the awkward pauses of High Noon, Cyrano de Bergerac and many other recent pictures with stuff that one critic called "Kaffee-Klatchaturian...
With Hajji Baba, Composer Tiomkin rises above all that. He has not written his score to fit the film; the film has apparently been written to fit his score. The compliment is a dubious one. Allegedly based on some 19th century picaresques about Persia by Author James Morier, Hajji Baba is all too obviously based on nothing but some old Bagdad sets that Producer Walter Wanger found around Hollywood. From there out it's silks of Ind. accents of Chi. on with the swarth and out with the nautch. A heavy navel bombardment in rich color is followed...
...this is trussed together by hundreds of yards of Composer Tiomkin's sound track-a sort of Faroukish turn ("Come to my tent, O my beloved") on the old snake-dance tune. It may not be much as music, but it's perfect as a truss...
...manages to generate a clumsy, convincing power. But not many ex-soldiers are likely to concede that 16 weeks of basic training -even under such a superman as Widmark-would result in the superbly trained and conditioned squad that marches offscreen, at the picture's end, to Dimitri Tiomkin's heroic music...