On The Beach/The Secret Of Santa Vittoria
(Limited Edition CD
Soundtrack)
Sound:
B-/B Music: B-
Ernest
Gold takes two very different approaches for his scores to two of Stanley
Kramer’s films, On The Beach (1959)
and The Secret Of Santa Vittoria (1969)
during Kramer’s reign at the original United Artists. In the former, a story about nuclear
annihilation, he purposely underplays the music to belie a grim situation. In the latter, an amusing interplay in
another grim situation has its mix of celebration and suspense as a small
Italian town will do whatever they need to do to hide their greatest product
from the invading Nazis: wine.
On The Beach was issued on DVD by M-G-M in
early 2000 in a basic monophonic edition, but the music is here in a better
stereo presentation, if second generation.
The soundtrack had the misfortune of being issued on the infamous
Roulette Records label, a label that eventually was found to have organized
crime ties that involved violence against some of their hit music artists. All master tapes from their archive are long
gone, but a three-track stereo version survives and that is what is here. When M-G-M gets around to doing a special
edition of the film, they ought to use this material to do even a simple stereo
remix of the film sound.
PCM CD
2.0 Stereo can also be found on The
Secret Of Santa Vittoria, which has the benefit of being cut ten years
later and a surviving album master (the one used for the original United
Artists Records vinyl release) is the source here, which sounds good. More details on both films are in the always
outstanding booklet found in all Film Score Monthly Magazine FSM CD
soundtracks, but Vittoria has yet to see the day of light
on CD. The vocal songs I could do
without.
I am not
the biggest Ernest Gold fan, but these are decent film music scores and FSM has
limited the pressings to only 3,000, so check out more about it and how to
order at www.filmscoremonthly.com
for details.
- Nicholas Sheffo
