Invitation/A Life Of
Her Own (Limited Edition CD
Soundtrack)
Sound: B-
Music: B
The more I listen to the work of Bronislau Kaper, the more
I realize that he is one of the most underrated composers of all during the
Classical Hollywood period. The latest
CD soundtrack release from the FSM label of Film Score Monthly.com (were you
can hear excerpts of the score at www.filmscoremonthly.com,
among other great soundtracks) offers all of his score for Invitation
(1952) that reused the score for his earlier MGM film score for George Cukor’s A
Life Of Her Own (1950) though it is ironic that the earlier score has not
survived. What has survived outside of
the final film mix is also offered here.
Both films were outright melodramas, the forerunner of the
soap operas of dramatic radio and its successor, television. Many of these films are now camp classics,
but a few have some distinctive elements.
In this case, both films were from the biggest studio of its day and are
classics of the cycle. Both scores,
what little variances they may have, are also considered classics of the genre
and pairing them was an easily great idea.
Besides their diversity and richness, the most interesting
aspect of all this work is that Kapar will not play the genre or cycle
game. He will not simply do the kind of
expected, violin-obsessed, "weepie" score that was an obvious target
anytime the likes of The Carol Burnett Show would send up. Instead, it is an intelligent, thought-out
piece that has great implementations of Jazz and a sense of Film Noir that
reminds us of the interesting connection between the two film movements of the
time. Noirs were black and white 99.9%
of the time, while the “women’s films” were sometimes in color, but often black
and white for a very long time and they outlasted the movement by a few
years. The original Noir movement ended
in 1958, while the Melodramas in the classical sense lasted into the late 1960s
when they became unprofitable, color TV came into being and the world changed.
In this, Kaper made all the right calls. There are also one bonus track from Invitation
and five from A Life Of Her Own used as additional music, plus the
always color-rich, text-loaded and nicely illustrated booklet with the always
reliably well-researched fact and technical specs for all fans as relevant to
film history as the work at American Cinematographer and a small handful
of publications and sites still serious about film without it being fickle and
star-driven.
The PCM 2.0 16Bit/44.1kHz sound is essentially monophonic,
with background hiss on both scores, though A Life Of Her Own is a bit
more hiss. With that said, these are
second generation copies from the MGM archive on 1/4th-inch magnetic
tape, a bad idea that keeps haunting those who deal with the catalog all the
time. This is not to say the scores
could have been remixed for stereo (or something like it) for this CD, though
we’ll never know. A fine job has been
done here in transferring the material with the highest fidelity CD can
provide, but this edition is limited to only 3,000 copies, so go to the website
above to find out how you can order this and other great limited edition CDs
before its too late.
- Nicholas Sheffo
