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Posted: |
Apr 22, 2014 - 2:09 AM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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MARGIE is a delightful film, full of warm nostalgic moments representing (even then) a bygone era and a much simpler world.
I'd love to have a CD of this score, with its interpolations of so many songs of the period. Alas, that is perhaps a major problem.
It costs money to clear these songs from various outside (non-TCF) composers and publishers, and this can add a great deal to the slim budgets for a CD release of limited sales potential. Pair that with the reality that a lot of filmmusic fans today simply hate old musicals---even ones where the songs are part of the underscore---and essentially won't consider buying a CD of this sort.
Still I keep hoping that "Bruce Kritzerland"---the logical and probably ONLY one---might tackle some of these Fox musicals one day. There are so many we'd all like, I'm sure, and if you could hear more Betty Grable and Alice Faye and Alfred Newman and Charles Henderson in stereo, so much the better!
On another topic entirely, one of my old industry friends, Charles G. Clarke, shot MARGIE. Because he wanted to try some new things with the old 3-color Technicolor process, he staged several dramatic moments of the film in silhouette. Natalie Kalmus and the boys at Technicolor screamed about this, but it was already done, and when the film was released it got great acclaim for its lovely, but also in spots, daring, color photography. I also seem to remember that he said it wasn't supposed to snow in Reno during the location shooting there, but it did, and then they had a major matching problem from sequence to sequence! Ahhhh, the magic of the movies. But I think the snow helps the film.
The opening shot, where the camera is on the exterior of the Jeanne Crain home (on the backlot) and then slowly dollies toward the house and cranes to the upstairs attic window and then inside was very difficult to do in these days.
Since you can't control the outside light by reducing its power you must boost the inside light within the practical set which had been built into the attic. It required an enormous amount of brute arc-powered interior lighting to balance the outside daylight even with a slight camera exposure stop change at the moment of entry into the room. This kind of heavy-duty lighting is tremendously hot on the actors in costume and makeup, and will fry them if they must perform in a long scene without a break. It's really tough on everyone, but very effective if you can pull it off.
Even without a soundtrack CD, I'd recommend that everyone take a look at this charming, and now little-known film.
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