The View from Pompey’s Head/Blue Denim
(Limited Edition CD
Soundtrack)
Sound: B Pompey
music: B Blue Denim music: B
Elmer Bernstein is getting his best press in a while from
the soundtrack for Todd Haynes’ impressive film Far From Heaven (2002),
but he was scoring for Melodramas and their hidden darkness back in the
1950s. The View from Pompey’s Head
(1955) is one such film, included as part of a single CD double feature with
Bernard Herrmann’s Blue Denim (1959) on this FSM label release limited
to only 3,000 copies.
As I have noted before, the two types of filmmaking that
addressed the dark side of America at the time were Film Noir and
Melodramas. Bernstein has hints of the
darkness in his scores for these types of films that become more explicit in
other genre works he scored. Herrmann
was always offering romance in his scores, even if they were not strictly so,
making Blue Denim an interesting isolation of those tendencies and
signatures in his work. Both scores
never get silly in the “what can go wrong now” mode of bad Melodramas. It is safe to say they brought the
credibility of such films up a notch.
The PCM CD sound is stereophonic and nicely mastered, with
only a very rare moment of distortion.
The scores debut here for the first time, have no bonus or damaged bonus
tracks, and play back very well for their age.
The Herrmann work is a few years newer, but that does not make much of a
difference between the two in
sonic quality.
Philip Dunne actually directed both films, and they are
both in the same genre, yet these two very distinct musical auteurs deliver two
different types of scores for the same material. There are less moments of beauty in the Herrmann piece, plus much
more anxiety. For Herrmann, he was
continuing a personal musical journey that was even riding over the types of
films he was scoring for. B-level genre
films (Day The Earth Stood Still, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, Ray
Harryhausen films) were offering freedoms that Alfred Hitchcock took advantage
of in their relationship. Bernstein
seems to complete what he is doing, withdraws from any opened ends, then comes
back to do whatever his next soundtrack is with an undying power as if he had
not stopped to begin with. That was
demonstrated again with his incredible music on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of
New York (2002).
If you are interested in hearing more about this, you can
order the CD from www.filmscoremonthly.com
and enjoy both the music and the well-written booklet inside.
- Nicholas Sheffo
