Take One (Oct 1976)

. EEE INI I EN TE Ph OS ES EET SINS UR TER TAR REO Ble PGES PR Beware of a Holy Whore, we flew in to Sorrento. There were ten of us, and we got into a VW bus and started driving into the night. | asked the driver to stop because l’d been drinking a lot and | wanted a piss. So | got out and pissed against a tiny house on the outskirts of Sorrento. When I’d finished pissing, a policeman who’d seen me from across the street came over and arrested me. | had no passport on me. The driver had to go to the hotel to fetch it. And meanwhile | was held by the police. _ “After my passport arrived, the police held me and made me walk 3 km, with my passport, to the police station. Where they interrogated me. During the 3 km. walk, the rest of the crew drove slowly behind me in the bus, yelling at the cops. Suddenly, the police decided it was a conspiracy. So, suddenly they had their pistols in their hands, and they kept them on me all the way to the police station. “When we finally got there, | had to wait while they got hold of the Chief of the Sorrento police force, who finally arrived in his pyjamas. And they questioned me for a long time, because the other policemen thought they’d uncovered a political conspiracy against the Italian State. Because I’d pissed on a police station! A little one! But then, after some more questions, the Chief of Police noticed that | was extremely drunk. So then he started laughing, and set me free. And the day after, we started shooting. “Tenderness of the Wolves got made because Rainer gave us the money, and therefore the possibility of filming it. | wrote the script in about 1970, long before Rainer thought of making Fox. It was lying around, but nobody wanted to do it. Anyway, we were all in Denmark, shooting Effi Briest — Ulli Lommel as an actor (playing Major Crampas), and me because | was the art director. And we decided that Ulli should make it. “| really enjoyed the shooting. Not just because | wrote the script and not just because | was playing the main part, but because we used to meet every day to discuss the movie and change things and prepare for the next day. Lommel is also a very good friend, and I'd like to work with him again. Though | wouldn't want to work that way all the time. Fassbinder is a much more serious director. With him, everything's always prepared, and it’s done his way. “| didn’t work as assistant director on Tenderness, though normally | do everything. On Gods of the Plague, for example. It's not unusual, because we’re a small team, so everybody gets involved in everything and we change around a lot. Except that | always do the sets... Well, yes, Fassbinder was credited with the sets on Petra. But there was only one room. Whereas, | did all the costumes. “The up-dating of the story in Tenderness happened because it had to be set 36 in Bonn, where our theatre company was playing at the time. It was wrong from the start, because it was the wrong part of Germany. So we thought we might as well change some other things as well, like the costumes, which should have’ been entirely Twenties. But it was easier to get stuff from the late Forties. And | think that the period after World War II is another period, like the Depression, in which a Haarmann could actually have existed. Anyway, it’s not a documentary, it’s a true crime story. “My family are working farmers, and where | come from, acting is still very suspect. To this day, my _ sister still worries that | don’t have a proper job. Recently, she phoned me up specially, because the papers were saying that the bottom had fallen out of show business. And she thought they, at least, might convince me.” a RECORDINGS Buckle and Swash cont. ROBERT FIEDEL This month’s column is a continuation of Mr. Feidel’s discussion of Delos Records’ release of two important albums, produced by film historian Tony Thomas. In our last issue, he covered The Adventures of Robin Hood, and this month discusses Captain from Castile. Captain from Castile. Orchestral suite composed and conducted by Alfred Newman. Delos Records DEL/F25411. $6.98. Delos’ second release is Alfred Newman’s score for Henry King’s 1947 opus Captain from Castile, also in the costume adventure genre. This score is a striking example of that composer’s renowned ability to lend greatness to an otherwise mediocre project. It never fails to amaze me how Newman found the inspiration in a string of uninspired 20th Century-Fox productions to compose some of his greatest scores. On the surface, Captain from Castile seems to have all the ingredients necessary for success: a rousing adventure story; lavish Technicolor photography; Robert D. Fiedel has taught film courses at Queens College, CUNY since September, 1972. His article “Music by Max Steiner’ appears in Ronald Gottesman and Harry Geduld’s The Girl in the Hairy Paw: King Kong as Myth, Movie and Monster, and he is currently in negotiation with The Library of Congress and The American Film Institute to establish a national archive of film music. and spectacular location settings. But veteran director Henry King was just unable to compensate for the deficiencies in his cast and script. The result is a ponderous (two hours and twenty minutes) and philosophically confused “spectacular” in the derogatory sense of the word. Thankfully, Newman’s music helps to erase from one’s mind the inadequacies of the film and forges an experience far more profound than the visuals, alone, can support. Newman’s approach to film scoring was to write fully developed themes with set harmonic patterns for his characters, rather than using brief, fragmented leitmotifs. He would then take his themes, with harmonies intact, and vary the orchestrations and tempos to create the desired dramatic effects. On occasion, he would extract a theme fragment to be used motivically, but his was the exception rather than the rule. | can think of no better introduction to Newman’s music than his Captain from Castile score, over forty minutes of which are included on the Delos release. Though the liner notes imply that this recording is a reissue of the old Mercury LP of the score’s excerpts, it is, in fact, a carefully edited version of the original music tracks (the actual recordings heard in the film). This makes the recording of even greater value because it allows us to hear the full spectrum of Newman's musical idiom in its proper context, unobscured by Muzak arrangements. Captain from Castile chronicles the adventures of a young Castilian nobleman, Pedro De Vargas (Tyrone Power), who runs afoul of the local Inquisition administrator and seeks asylum with the Cortez expedition to the New World. Newman, always a master of the poetic modulation, finds an easy rapport with the Phrygian mode traditionally used to represent Hispanic culture. From this mode, Newman derives principal themes for Pedro De Vargas; the lovely Lady Luiza; and a sensuously chromatic theme for Catana, the peasant girl whom Pedro eventually marries. In a more conventional tonality, the New World is depicted by a broken major sixth chord (after Dvorak); the Church by a Newmanesque chorale passage; and the renowned “Conquest” march accompanies. the Cortez expedition’s relentless progress. No one has been better able to conduct Newman’s music than the composer himself — a fact to which this recording testifies. The delicate sonorities of Newman’s octave string effects, for example, magnificently realized here, have always eluded other less sensitive conductors. The disciplined performance Newman elicits from his orchestra speaks highly of his legendary ability as a conductor. The. sound quality is quite good, considering the age of the original masters, and should not interfere with anyone’s appreciation of this fine score. &