Ride The High
Country/Mail Order Bride (Limited
Edition CD)
Sound: B Music:
B/B-
George Bassman is a fine composer and has been lost to
history, especially the dark age of the Hollywood Witch Hunts for Communists in
the late 1940s and into the 1950s that went so well and far beyond what it was
supposed to do that it destroyed several generations of the best and brightest
talents in filmmaking. It also helped
bring down Classical Hollywood, though not sited as often as the 1948 Supreme
Court decision for the studios to divest of their theater chains, the arrival
of television, and never getting it back together after the strain of World War
II. In listening to this new limited
edition CD of two of his most prominent scores, Ride The High Country
(an early Sam Peckinpah film) and a carbon copy of that film, Mail Order
Bride.
They are good scores and to Bassman’s credit, he tries to
do interesting variations on between the two.
They were also filled with a certain edge, having come from a man who
had been Blacklisted in 1947 after key work on classics like The Wizard Of
Oz, The Clock and the 1946 Lana Turner The Postman Always Rings
Twice. To hear his music again is
not unlike the series of Jewish composers from the Holocaust era who were lost,
but whose music survives, a silenced artist speaking again.
Ride The High Country falls somewhere between
the Classic Hollywood idea of a Western and something more naturalistic. Bassman’s music is broken down into 16
tracks in this case, and they are all good.
It is not as compatible as Jerry Fielding’s scores would be later with
his films, but still has the strength to back the film. Mail Order Bride wanted to copy the
film with more of a comic sense and commercial longing, so it is odd Bassman’s
music is longer. Either way, his later
scores would be rejected, as the studio system he worked in faded away. These were his last works. With The Western itself changing and fading
away in another 15 years, the match up is uncanny.
The PCM 2.0 CD sound is an acceptable transfer from the
original three-track magnetic 35mm master material and is simple stereo at
best. They were made at a point when
Hollywood started to cut back on using stereo sound as generously as they had
in the mid-to-late 1950s, when competing against TV seemed more possible. At the time of this posting, we do not know
what sound the films were issued in, though Bride was issued in
three-strip dye-transfer Technicolor under the Metrocolor name. I should note that Robert Armbruster
conducted a good number of the latter Bride tracks. This key release is limited to 3,000
production copies, so be sure to go to www.filmscoremonthly.com to see
more details about this and many other exclusives form their FSM soundtrack
label.
- Nicholas Sheffo
