Knights Of The Round Table/The King’s Thief
(Limited Edition CD
Soundtrack set)
Sound:
B Music: B
The
original M-G-M helped 20th Century-Fox break in CinemaScope by
immediately supporting the format. Along
with Westerns and Biblical film cycles were the films we can generalize as
Costume Epics, but more specifically should be considered films of the Swashbuckler/Knight
cycle. Knights Of The Round Table (1953) was a big-budget version of the
often-filmed tale of King Arthur, so often that yet another big-budget version
from Training Day director Antoine
Fuqua simply called King Arthur. That is supposed to have a Hans Zimmer score,
a composer for film who has his clickity electronic formula scores, then the
great stuff that exceeds his usual like Rain
Man and The Thin Red Line.
Whatever
he does, the specter of Miklos Rozsa’s work in the genre as featured on this
limited edition CD will haunt it. Like
Zimmer at his best, Rozsa is one of cinema’s greatest composers, working from a
very music-rich position. His knowledge
of music is exceptional, but the grasp he has is so great, he can come up with
some of the fullest scores you will ever hear.
In both cases, the music was recorded for the widescreen stereophonic
presentations that CinemaScope offered, and having such a sound option was
incredible for its time. Beside the
usual traveling dialogue and sound effects that the system offered, there were
the orchestral-sized sound possibilities and the studios knew that was also
vital. They were lucky exceptional
artists like Rozsa were around, as they helped make the widescreen revolution
as possible as any actor, cinematographer, writer and director.
The King’s Thief (1955) was M-G-M pulling on their
British-born resources like they did occurrently, resulting in an interesting
combination of actors: David Niven, George Sanders, Ann Blyth, Edmund Purdom,
Roger Moore and Niven’s real-life cousin Patrick Macnee. Of course, Moore and Macnee would land the
most important roles of their life by the beginning of the 1960s on British TV
as Simon Templar (The Saint) and
John Steed (The Avengers), as the
Spy genre would supercede the historical adventure films for good on TV and on
the big screen.
Knights Of The Round Table meets the high watermarks of
lavishness old Hollywood was still capable of pulling off,
while the latter was a B-movie length of 78 minutes and not as lavish as it
could have been. With that cast, it
seems like many opportunities were missed, but Rozsa again delivered an
impressive score. In the era before Star Wars put far too much emphasis on
visual effects that are usually not that good anyhow, the scores were one of
their greatest assets and this set is a prime example.
For both
films combined an entire CD for each one, as Rozsa wrote so much music for
both. That also means many alternate,
expanded and unused pieces of music hear here for the very first time. Knights’
bonus tracks are on the space left over on CD 2 for the set that has all of King’s Thief fit on. The PCM CD Stereo shows off the better kind
of stereophonic sound that was being recorded at the time, and the master tapes
have somehow survived, likely in part due to how Ted Turner handled preserving
the M-G-M archive when it was his. Now,
in Time Warner’s hands, we can all reap the benefits of that work, though we
should not kid ourselves. All the
studios have tons of work to do, but when you can enjoy great scores like these
a half-century later, it is their obligation.
Knights was issued by the studio on DVD
mid-2003, with Dolby Digital 2.0 Pro Logic Stereo surround, not as effective as
this CD, while King’s Thief has yet
to be issued. This set will be only be
made at 3,000 copies and can be ordered at www.filmscoremonthly.com and is one
of FSM’s rare double sets. Visit soon to
see about this and other excellent soundtrack releases.
- Nicholas Sheffo
