Alfred Newman
The Greatest Story Ever Told

* Soundtrack album and original film recording

Uncredited orchestra/Alfred Newman
Ryko RCD 10734 Total time: 39:21 + 60:19 + 34:41

Summary for the Busy Executive:  Well, it's certainly a *good* story, but
have you heard the one that starts, "Two Jews walk into a bar"?

The three-CD set contains the original soundtrack album, plus at least
some of the cues as they were heard in the film.  Everything has been
remastered.  The first things that strike one, of course, are the pitifully
short timings on two of the discs.  The material could all have fit easily
on two discs.  Cost (at Amazon, at any rate) is perhaps a little over two
full-price discs, but even so it rankles.

Alfred Newman (related to Lionel, David, and Randy, but not to Alfred E.)
began as a prodigy pianist.  As far as I know, he never formally studied
composition or orchestration.  He was, as they say, a natural.  He wrote
music, arranged, and conducted on all kinds of movies, from stupid little
musicals and genre pictures to the top of the studio line.  He worked
for many years as head of 20th-Century Fox's music department and, to
his credit, encouraged young film composers.  His own idiom was rather
conservative, though not quite as conservative as Max Steiner's of Warner
Bros.  He won the Oscar nine times, mainly for superb arranging and musical
direction:  Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), Tin Pan Alley (1940), Mother
Wore Tights (1947), With a Song in My Heart (1952), Call Me Madam (1953),
Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing (1955), and The King and I (1956).  In the
film-music revival, his original scores tend to be overlooked, possibly
because he wrote over 250 of them.

On the other hand, he doesn't have within his output anything like a
breakthrough film score.  One looks in vain for something like Korngold's
Captain Blood, Waxman's Bride of Frankenstein, Rozsa's Thief of Bagdad,
Asphalt Jungle, Spellbound, or Quo Vadis, Copland's Red Pony and Something
Wild, Thomson's Plow That Broke the Plains and Louisiana Story, Andre
Previn's Outriders, Elmer Bernstein's Magnificent Seven and Man with the
Golden Arm, Moross's Big Country, and just about every film Bernard
Herrmann ever worked on.

I admit I'm no great fan of George Stevens's work, but The Greatest Story
Ever Told is positively dismal, with Max von Sydow as a Christ out of Munch
and El Greco, David McCallum as a pretty Judas Iscariot, and - in typical
Hollywood fashion - Van Heflin, Victor Buono, Nehemiah Persoff, Ed Wynn,
Shelley Winters, and Donald Pleasance as characters God *should* have put
in the New Testament, but for some reason did not.  Probably no experience
with screenplays.  Stevens directed, with the unacknowledged help of David
Lean and Jean Negulesco, who should have thanked their lucky stars for
their anonymity.  The credits attribute the script to James Lee Barrett and
Stevens himself (plus three others uncredited, including Carl Sandburg),
and it exemplifies the "creeping Jesus" religiosity that afflicts the
movies from time to time.  It's no worse than DeMille's Ten Commandments
(either version), but it's not significantly better either.  Fans may
remember it fondly as the source of a beloved howler:  John Wayne as a
Roman centurion grunting, as only he could, the line "Truly, this was the
Son of God." Fortunately, his career recovered.

After World War II, the Hollywood studios - particularly MGM - floundered
around.  The truly interesting pictures tended to come from small and
independent producers who hadn't a lot of money to waste, so they decided
to put what they had into the writing and direction.  The Greatest Story
comes up with nothing to challenge anybody, except the actors, who must
strive not to laugh out loud or simply give up.  Neither Stevens nor
Barrett has anything interesting to add to a tale that has fascinated some
of the greatest minds of the past.  Perhaps the greatest minds tend to keep
away from Hollywood studios.  The picture is a little Sunday-school lesson
brought to un-death.

In the careerist world of Hollywood, however, this sort of tosh meant
Importance and Prestige.  The production bosses therefore assigned the
film to the composer with the big career.  The Greatest Story Ever Told
to some extent typifies the careers of many Hollywood composers.  To be
fair, Newman took all kinds of assignments (and sometimes got lucky enough
to work on classic films), even while he ran Fox music, and I suspect he
thought of himself as the supreme professional who could come up with
something at least tolerable, even on relatively short notice.  The score
is a good job of work, to echo John Ford, but it's not the equivalent of
a John Ford movie.  It's nice, it's pleasant, it helps support what little
drama the movie has.  But the music is not as powerful as, say, Rozsa's
for Quo Vadis - a far less tasteful and more successful flick, precisely
because it has the energy of garishly bad taste.  The claim made by the
liner notes that Newman's score stands "amongst the most important in the
history of cinema" either comes from somebody who knows very little about
the history of film music or can be put down to copywriters who let their
sales enthusiasm get away from them.  I particularly like the "amongst."
Newman's score certainly means less to film history than Honegger's
Napoleon, Milhaud's Madame Bovary, Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible, Walton's
Shakespeare trilogy for Olivier, Thomson's The River, Copland's The
Heiress, or Herrmann's Psycho.  I would also contend that it means less
than other Newman scores, particularly those for Street Scene and How Green
Was My Valley.

Newman's music, I hasten to add, far surpasses the movie for which he
composed it and doesn't have to be a masterpiece to be worthy of anyone's
time.  Mainly, it comes across as a kind of a superior noodling around.
The most memorable idea, associated with Jesus, may be an unconscious crib
from Barber's Adagio for Strings.  At any rate, it kind of leaps out at you
amid the genteel haze, and in isolation brings the other work to mind.  The
second big idea derives from the opening of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony.
Newman tends to resort to it when he wants to express Christ Militant.
Again, however, Newman does something of his own with it.  The choral
pieces as a whole I find the most successful, particularly the cue "There
Shall Come a Time to Enter," which adds some ecstatic percussion to evoke
the Middle East.  The most jarring parts of the score can't be blamed on
Newman.  Stevens insisted on the insertion of the opening of Verdi's
Requiem in the "Into Thy Hands" cue and the good ol' "Hallelujah" chorus
from Handel's Messiah at the end.  Both got a huge laugh from the audience
I saw the movie with, as well as here and there several groans.  Nothing
exceeds like excess.  It's as if Stevens rube-ishly wanted the imprimatur
of Genuwine Masterpieces on the movie, which points to his fundamental
artistic insecurity with the project.  Newman treats these intrusions
better than you might expect, writing a lovely continuation of the Verdi
without producing a stylistic jar.  Yet that continuation remains
recognizably Newman's own and of a piece with the original parts of the
score.  The original soundtrack album, however, with these two risibles
seriously misrepresented Newman's vision of the movie.  Sometimes it's
better not to receive credit.  For that reason, the archival material,
arranged into extended sequences, is particularly welcome.  For these, we
must thank Ken Darby, Newman's assistant and one of the most extraordinary
choral arrangers ever to take up a pen.

Most important, at least to Newman's historical vindication, we get
Newman's original opening, and the crucifixion sequence and ending
he would have supplied, had Verdi and Handel never written.  Newman's
lower profile undoubtedly would have served the drama better.  The cue
"Resurrection and Ascension" (with chorus) especially is one of the most
vigorous and affecting of Newman's career, and no theater audience ever
heard it.  The "And the Word was God/Trumpets announce the dawn/The three
magi" cues deal in poetic colors, particularly a flute ensemble backed by
chorus and muted trumpets.  The "Middle Eastern" music derives from Rozsa's
Quo Vadis, but it's still very well done.  The cue title "Hosanna" sounds
like a train wreck waiting to happen, but again Newman avoids the traps and
comes up with a lovely evocation of Russian Orthodox choir music.

The transfer to CD is quite fine, if a little constricted sonically, judged
by present-day standards, with a bit of tape hiss on the archival material.
However, Newman leads a band of studio professionals at the top of their
game.

Steve Schwartz