Prisoner Of Zenda (1952, Limited Edition CD Soundtrack)
Sound:
B- Music: B+
Alfred
Newman is always thought of as the big conductor at 20th
Century-Fox, but he worked at other studios and that led to an interesting
situation with his music for The Prisoner
Of Zenda for MGM. In 1937, Newman
did the score for the David O. Selznick version, the master recordings of which
are gone, then M-G-M did a remake in 1952 and used Newman’s score again. This was when Newman went to Fox.
Not
giving up that easily, the studio hired Conrad Salinger and others to update
and rerecord the music and this limited edition CD soundtrack is the result of
that work. The always informative
booklet Film Score Monthly Magazine’s FSM label always supplies to their CD
releases is especially valuable here, intricately listing each track, cue, and
person involved. To make things even
more complicated, since the music was as remade as the film and the older
recording no longer exists outside of its use in film copies, FSM has added the
names of actors from the previous film to further show where the music went in
the original film. The music itself is
layered out in interesting ways that now make me want to see both film
versions, which we will get to when Warner Bros. has the DVDs of both issued.
The
choir-like music is the low point and a narratively necessary pause from what Newman
achieves here. The influence of the
music is without doubt, even to cartoon shorts (Warner Bros. in particular)
that mocked these kinds of films. The
only issue is that the PCM 2.0 sound is monophonic because this is one of a
series of M-G-M films that was the victim of an idiotic policy that replaced
first-generation stereophonic masters with inferior mono ones, so we only have
the music left that way. That is always
frustrating, but FSM has done a nice transfer job here and the sound is less
distorted than those inferior mono copies tend to be. The CD is limited to only 3,000 copies, so
those who want this key title should go to www.filmscoremonthly.com and look
into more information on this (and other great titles for that matter) to order
before they run out.
- Nicholas Sheffo
