Kritzerland Presents Special Edition Soundtracks for CARRIE, THE MATCHMAKER, & More

Kritzerland Records has just announced their plans to re-release special editions of some of Hollywood's classic movies. The full list of upcoming releases, are below:

HUD (Music Composed and Conducted by Elmer Bernstein) and THE LONELY MAN (Music Composed and Conducted by Nathan Van Cleave)
THE MAN WITH THE BARBED WIRE SOUL
Kritzerland is proud to present a world premiere limited edition soundtrack release - two great scores on one great CD:

Based on the 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment), Hud featured a powerhouse cast - including Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal and Brandon de Wilde. With a screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., direction by Martin Ritt, and striking black-and-white photography by the brilliant James Wong Howe, Hud leaps off the screen from first frame to last. Bosley Crowther's review in The New York Times was typical, trumpeting Hud as the year's "most powerful film." The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won three - for Best Supporting Actress (the superb Patricia Neal), Best Supporting Actor (Melvyn Douglas) and Best Cinematography (James Wong Howe).

Elmer Bernstein's score for Hud runs approximately six minutes, making it one of the shortest film scores ever. But what a six minutes it is - in fact, it's perfection and just right for the film. Bernstein recorded his six minutes twice: once with a 12-piece ensemble, and then, a week later, re-orchestrated (by Bob Bain) for three guitars. Presumably the revision was at Ritt's request for a smaller and even more intimate sound - which really was the right choice. The music is sparse, yes, but it's potent every time it appears. There's also some source music in the film - car radios, jukeboxes, records.

Nathan Van Cleave's score for the 1957 western The Lonely Man is paired with Hud. Starring Jack Palance and Anthony Perkins (with a supporting cast of character actors including Elisha Cook Jr., Robert Middleton, Neville Brand, Claude Akins and Lee Van Cleef), The Lonely Man is a stark and somber western about a former gunslinger and his attempts to do something for the son who hates him and from whom he's been estranged for years. Well directed by Henry Levin (April Love, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Where the Boys Are, The Wonderful World of The Brothers Grimm) and stunningly photographed in VistaVision and black-and-white by Lionel Lindon, The Lonely Man may not be well known today, but it's a solid film and one well worth seeking out.

For The Lonely Man, Van Cleave came up with a beautiful main theme, for which Jack Brooks provided lyrics; Tennessee Ernie Ford sings the song in the film. The score has real depth and its secondary themes are dramatic, elegiac and poignant, giving the film a strong spine. The Lonely Man is a world premiere release on CD and is presented complete from tapes housed in the Paramount vaults. A few cues were taken from the music stem. We hope you'll enjoy discovering this really terrific music.

Hud/The Lonely Man is limited to 1000 copies only. The price is $19.98, plus shipping.
CDs will ship the second week of February. To place an order, see the cover, or hear audio samples, just visit www.kritzerland.com.

HOT SPELL (Music Composed and Conducted by Alex North) and THE MATCHMAKER (Music Composed and Conducted by Adolph Deutsch)

How many women star in their first movie at age fifty-four - and win an Oscar for doing so? Well, that's what happened to Shirley Booth when she made her film debut for Paramount, reprising her Tony Award-winning role in William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba. Booth had already had a hugely successful theatre career and stage work is what she preferred, making only a total of five films before going on to become a TV star in the hit series Hazel. She made her final two films in 1958 and both of them are represented on this world premiere CD release.

The score for Hot Spell was by the brilliant Alex North. By that point in his career, North had been composing for Hollywood films since 1951, when he came out swinging with three incredible scores - The 13th Letter, A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman (he received Oscar nominations for both Streetcar and Salesman). North's Hot Spell score is all yearning, delusion and heartbreak. His music brilliantly illuminates the drama and the characters - their hopes, their dreams, their heartaches. Thanks to North and the actors (as well as the excellent writing and directing), what could have easily devolved into a melodramatic potboiler becomes a compelling character-driven drama.

Shirley Booth's other star turn that year was the polar opposite of Hot Spell: the delightful film adaptation of Thornton Wilder's popular stage success, The Matchmaker. Paramount brought it to the screen, starring Booth as Dolly Gallagher Levi, Paul Ford as Horace Vandergelder, Anthony Perkins as Cornelius, Shirley MacLaine as Irene, and Robert Morse reprising his stage role as Barnaby. The screenplay was by the great John Michael Hayes (Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much) and the film was directed by Joseph Anthony, who, the year before, had brought the play The Rainmaker to the screen for Paramount. Of course, it would be just a few years later when The Matchmaker would undergo yet another transformation, this time being turned into a big, splashy hit Broadway musical, Hello, Dolly!

Helping the fun immeasurably is the score by Adolph Deutsch, which captures the homespun Americana beautifully. His music includes quotes from traditional music of the era ("Buffalo Gals"), but is also filled with his own wonderful, melodic themes. Deutsch wittily underscores the monologues of various characters delivered straight to the camera, or budding love, and Dolly's machinations to bring everyone together in blissful happiness - including her own. Adolph Deutsch was a really unsung film composer, especially considering the large number of huge hit films he worked on. Although his name is not that well known today, he wrote some absolutely stellar scores during his long career, including the music for such all-time classics as They Drive by Night, High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, The Mask of Dimitrios, Father of the Bride, Tea and Sympathy, Some Like it Hot and The Apartment.

Hot Spell/The Matchmaker is limited to 1000 copies only. The price is $19.98, plus shipping.

CDs will ship the second week of February. To place an order, see the cover, or hear audio samples, just visit www.kritzerland.com.

CARRIE (Music Composed and Conducted by Pino Donaggio)
In 1976, director Brian De Palma had already established a reputation as a cult director of such films as Greetings, Hi, Mom, and more importantly, Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, and Obsession. But it was his film of Stephen King's classic, best-selling first novel, Carrie, that would catapult him into major director status.

Horror films are rarely nominated for Academy Awards, but Carrie was one of the exceptions with Sissy Spacek getting a Best Actress nod and Piper Laurie getting one for Best Supporting Actress. Over the years, the film has never lost on iota of its popularity, thanks to numerous releases on every home video format, most recently on Blu-ray.

Of all the decisions De Palma made, one of the most important was choosing Pino Donaggio as composer. De Palma had usEd Bernard Herrmann on two of his films - Sisters and Obsession, but Herrmann had passed away in 1975. In 1976, Donaggio only had one major film to his credit, but his score to that film was masterful - Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now. However De Palma came to choose Donaggio, it was a perfect marriage of composer and film. Donaggio's score hits all the right notes - he brings out every emotion and all the subtext, with great suspense and horror music, plaintive and yearning music for the character of Carrie, two songs for the prom sequence (with lyrics by Merritt Malloy) that help make that sequence so magical and memorable, and light and infectious music for the calisthenics sequence and the scene at the tux shop. It is, in fact, a perfect score, a masterpiece of film scoring, with unforgettable themes that capture every nuance of the film.

For this very special Encore Edition, we are pleased to present what was CD 1 of our previous 2-CD release (the second CD was simply the third release of the LP tracks and we are not including that disc in this 1-CD release) - the complete score to Carrie - every note of great music, in film order, remixed from the original sixteen track session tapes housed in the MGM vaults. We also found two instrumentals of the songs, which we've included as bonus tracks.

This release is limited to 1000 copies only. The price is $19.98, plus shipping.
CD will ship the second week of February - however, preorders placed directly through Kritzerland usually ship one to five weeks earlier.

To post a comment, you must register and login.