Intrada Soundtrack Forum

INTRADA Announces:



THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES
Composed and Conducted by RON GOODWIN

INTRADA Special Collection Volume 161

When Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines was first premiered as a “roadshow” feature in 1965, the album taken from the soundtrack contained less than 30 minutes from a score running close to two hours, with dialog highlights spread throughout the record as filler. It was less an album of the score and more a concept project -- simply a half hour audio souvenir of the movie experience. Adding insult to injury, though issued in both mono and stereo versions, many of the selections appeared in mono only, no matter what their respective jacket covers stated. But the packaging at least offered that great Ronald Searle campaign artwork.

Now some 46 years later, Intrada has completed a complete restoration of the lengthy score that spans two CDs. The energetic score Ron Goodwin provides an expansive musical landscape with a bent towards“national portraits”: motifs that underscore the film’s amusing and unabashed stereotypes. To do so, Goodwin often quotes from familiar sources—opera, anthems, marches, folk songs, pop songs—creating a musical collage of supreme liveliness and wit. There is plenty of mad, elegantly Mickey-Moused chase music on hand, complete with bells, whistles, car horns, and whoopeecushion blats. But here, too, is a soaring, string-led flight anthem; a gorgeous little love theme; and a fetching theme for the Lord’s winsome daughter.

Those Magnificent Men is the saga of a (fictional) 1910 London-to-Paris air race sponsored by a stuffy British newspaper magnate, Lord Rawnsley
(Robert Morley), with the encouragement of his speed-mad daughter (Sarah Miles) and her flyer-suitor, an upper-crust aristocrat (James Fox). As Rawnsley says, “The trouble with these international affairs is that they attract foreigners”—and sure enough, the race (with its £10,000 purse) draws the cream of global aviation, including a villainous English cheat, an easily distracted French lover-boy, an American cowboy, an excitable Italian Count, an inscrutable Japanese, and a couple of pompous, by-the-book Germans.

This release is limited to 2000 units.

INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 161
Retail Price: $24.99
AVAILABLE NOW
For track listing and sound samples, please visit
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.6927/.f