Julius Caesar (1953/Limited Edition CD Soundtrack)
Sound: B-
Music: B
Still considered one of the best films on the subject,
writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was at his height when he delivered his Julius
Caesar for MGM back in 1953. The
film had a great cast led by Marlon Brando as Marc Antony and also had a great
score by Miklós Rózsa,
released here for the first time in its original version by Film Score
Monthly’s FSM CD label. A re-recording
was issued back on CD in 1990, but this original has never seen the day of
light outside of original film and video prints.
The story is based on William Shakespeare’s work,
something Hollywood had not touched for about 20 years. The producer would be the late, great John
Houseman, who went from working on Orson Welles on Citizen Kane (1941)
to going out on his own. Later, he
became a character actor and star of the feature film and constantly revived TV
series The Paper Chase, followed by playing the evil creator of the
killer Fembots on The Six Million Dollar Man & Bionic Woman
series. Besides a classic “We make
money the old fashioned way, we eeeeurrrrrnnnnnnn it” TV campaign for a famous
financial advising firm, he took over from Roald Dahl on later seasons of the
great British anthology series Tales Of The Unexpected (reviewed
elsewhere on this site) and continued his cameos until his death in 1989. We look forward to reviewing a DVD and/or HD
version of the film later, but not, on to the soundtrack.
As noted in past reviews, Rózsa
is one of Hollywood’s greatest composers, with FSM already having issued his
scores for Diane, Knights Of The Round Table (with his King’s Thief on the same CD), Lust For
Life, Moonfleet, Plymouth Adventure, Tribute To A Bad Man, The World, The Flesh & The
Devil and The
Green Berets (all reviewed elsewhere on this
site), which just begins to cover his 150+ feature film scores. As noted before, Rózsa has a way of taking
the kind of music expected but he audience, digging deep into his music and
historical literacy, then delivering genius compositions that are at the same
time purely cinematic and progressively musical. They serve the narrative as few composers ever have. He does it here again with this exciting
enhancement of this surprisingly pulled-back production. The film was shot in black and white, though
still featuring stereo sound; something we realize is rare combination now.
The PCM CD 2.0 Mono is second-generation, as MGM had done
a horrible thing by taking a series of their old stereophonic music masters and
transferring them to monophonic dupes so they could save room. The stereo versions were destroyed and lost
forever. These mono versions also do
not hold up as well, but Warner/Turner and FSM have been doing their best to
preserve these and issue them on CD.
Despite that setback, this sounds good for what is here, also perhaps
because these mono copies did not get replayed much. We should note that Rózsa
orchestrator Eugene Zador once again set up his score for a film. The film itself was a stereophonic release
and the saddest thing of all is some collector might have a stereo copy of the
film on film and not trusting the studio, holds on to it so this possible copy
will not get “lost” as well. The bad
relationship between serious film collectors and studios is a big setback for
preservation efforts and is a separate essay, especially in this era of digital
copyright battles, but we cannot assume we will never hear the original stereo
score (at least to some extent) down the line.
For now, you can go to www.filmscoremonthly.com
and read more about track order, download some sample tracks and find out how
to order this and other FSM CD soundtracks.
Like a vast majority of the others, this one is limited to only a 3,000
copy run.
- Nicholas Sheffo
