From Amazon.com
Sure, everyone's seen
The Sound of Music, but how about
Flower Drum Song? Or
State Fair, either the 1945 version (a remake of a 1933 nonmusical) or the 1962 re-remake with Bobby Darin, Ann-Margret, and Pat Boone?
Rodgers & Hammerstein: The Sound of Movies is a comprehensive and entertaining 97-minute documentary surveying the film career of the beloved songwriting team and how their screen work was interwoven with their stage work. (
State Fair was written directly for the screen before they began adapting their stage shows for film.) Host Shirley Jones (the ingenue in both
Oklahoma! and
Carousel) provides numerous trivia tidbits on most of the films, while segments on
The King and I,
Flower Drum Song, and
The Sound of Music are presented by those who appeared in them: Rita Moreno (Tuptim), Nancy Kwan (Linda Low), and Charmian Carr (Liesl), respectively. Also of interest will be original casting possibilities (James Dean in
Oklahoma!, Marlon Brando in
Carousel), rarely seen outtakes, live television performances, and clips from films that inspired Rodgers and Hammerstein's shows (including Rex Harrison as the king of Siam). Because Rodgers and Hammerstein's films were deeply involved in the development of widescreen techniques such as CinemaScope, this documentary is savvy enough to present its clips in letterboxed widescreen format, but that footage is occasionally grainy. Unfortunately,
The Sound of Movies was filmed in 1995, four years before the release of sumptuous remasterings of six of these featured films.
--David Horiuchi
Additional Features
The 2002 DVD rerelease of
Rodgers & Hammerstein: The Sound of Movies is a significant upgrade over the earlier DVD. That had no bonus features, but there are plenty here: trailers for eight of the referenced films, three Movietone newsreels, and, best of all, a variety of screen tests borrowed from
Hollywood Screen Tests, Take 1. You'll see, for example, a number of von Trapp children (whose tests were only glimpsed in the main program), Ann-Margret smoking up the screen with "Mack the Knife," Andy Williams wooing Barbara Eden before crooning "It's a Grand Night for Singing," "All I Owe Ioway," and "It Might as Well Be Spring," and a 20-second snippet of a young Mia Farrow singing "Sixteen Going on Seventeen." Also, the PCM stereo track has been upgraded to Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 and even DTS tracks; the sound, though, remains inconsistent due to the documentary's wide range of source material.
--David Horiuchi
