The Best Of Everything (Limited Edition CD Soundtrack)
Sound:
B- Music: B-
Alfred
Newman had already had an all time soap opera melodrama under his belt with Love Is A Many Splendored Thing (1955)
when 20th Century-Fox got their in-house music genius to score the
1959 soaper The Best Of Everything. With Hope Lange, Diane Baker, Suzy Parker,
then-actor Robert Evans, Louis Jordan and Joan Crawford, you know the audience
was in for it.
What is a
lonely working woman to do? Well, they
have to all be lonely and they all need men, right? So goes the mentality of the melodrama. We will save a film review for when Fox gets
this one out on DVD, but the score is what you would expect from Newman and
Fox. Instead of the constantly lush
melodrama scores you would hear in Douglas Sirk films, the Fox variations had
something more antiseptic going on in the world and the music. The feel was like that of modern (at the
time) soulless furniture for happy city living, the kind of thing Andy Warhol
built his looks at American culture around.
Part of this was a sense of the post-WWII modern woman who may or may
not make it into this supposed future.
This is the world of defrost refrigerators and better ovens that Joan
Crawford’s characters could have only dreamed about two or three decades
earlier.
The title
hints at that and having the latest fashions, and the “best men” to make them
happy. Ironically, one of the
conveniences was television, something this film was doing everything top
counter. This not only included the
DeLuxe color (from Fox’s own lab) but the wide CinemaScope frame, which offered
more freedom (another “best” to consider) and Newman’s stereophonic score
enhances these attributes all the way.
The
problem is that these types of scores are necessarily repetitious to exploit
the soapy narrative, so things get keyed-up throughout for emphasis. Like the Film Noirs which just ended their
reign the year before this film’s release, of which Crawford was one of its
greatest stars, Melodramas had their own wacky way of showing the dark side of
American Life. When read in that
context, Newman’s score makes much, much more sense.
The PCM
CD 2.0 Stereo has separation, but the soundmaster material did not survive like
it might have, so we have occurrent warping in spots, unfortunately. This especially happens in some of the
somewhat glissando string sections typical of the genre. That it survived at all is a plus, and better
this than mono. Another hit title song
is also attempted; this time with romance music heavyweight Johnny Mathis, but
it did not do as well as Love Is A Many
Splendored Thing’s title theme. This
CD is limited to only 3,000 pressings, so fans of the singer, composer and
these kinds of films can order exclusively from Film Score Monthly and their
FSM CD label at www.filmscoremonthly.com
and check into other such exclusives, including Newman’s Demetrius & The Gladiators and A Man Called Peter, reviewed elsewhere on this site.
- Nicholas Sheffo
