Above & Beyond (Limited Edition CD Soundtrack)
Sound:
B- Music: B-
In my
review for Hugo Friedhofer’s scores of Between
Heaven & Hell and Soldier Of
Fortune reviewed on this site, I said it was an example of how the composer
could exceed genre. For Above & Beyond, he is not as
successful, though all three films could be placed in a War genre. As compared to his more successful pop
culture endeavors noted in the previous review, he has to deliver more
compelling music for more serious situations.
The 1952 M-G-M production focuses on the pilot of the man who piloted
the plane that atom-bombed Japan to end World War II, Paul
Tibbets.
The
result is that melodrama gets in the way, despite the lush, rich scoring
Friedhofer comes up with. He obviously has
no choice but to score the film he is given, so some pitfalls cannot be avoided
and I will not comment on the film until Warner Bros. issued a DVD, but this is
a music score that holds up well to Ennio Morricone’s more recent score for
Roland Joffé’s Fat Man & Little Boy
(1989), just issued on DVD itself (finally).
André Previn
actually conducted the music and did a fine recording, but it only survives in
mono as part of a dark period in the old M-G-M where they threw out their
stereo scores as long as they had mono dupes.
Despite vinyl records being big seller and the company having its own
label, could all they were thinking about was television and a monophonic
television forever at that? Either way,
it is inexcusable because it is easy to imagine the kind of depth this score
could have had in its original stereo and we have to wonder if some collector
or archive has a stereo film print. What
we get is a PCM CD Mono that shows some brief warped points and makes you wish
for stereo. At least the booklet is as
top-rate and informative as usual.
Like the
previous CD, as well as Never So Few/7
Women and The Bravados, Above & Beyond is only available
from Film Score Monthly’s FSM label as a limited edition CD with only 3,000
pressing available. All four and many
more can be ordered exclusively by going to www.filmscoremonthly.com and more
information is readily available.
- Nicholas Sheffo
