A spicy mélange.

If you have ever been exposed to the stereo type of the long suffering Jewish mother, oy vey, she has nothing on Mother India (1957), whose saintliness is shown by her willingness to suffer the indignities and usury of her oppressors, even to the point of shooting her errant son who foolishly thought to revolt against the injustice. This kind of anti-communistic drivel went far at the height of the cold war (who can argue with a mother?), so this film was nominated for an Oscar. But it is not even in the same ballpark as Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali trilogy. The score by Naushad, curiously a mix between classical Indian (for the emotional lows and highs) and very typical western film style (for the comic relief and larger action kind of scenes) works well.

Paris nous appartient (1961) for the first time, was a treat admist the hard diet of Hollywood films I have been seeing. The paranoidal underpinning to the story is kept at a level of a mildly bad acid trip, it is not until the end that you suspect things might be as bad as the characters in the film take on. But what characters, each wonderfully owned by the actors, that it is constantly a joy to watch. The young star, Betty Schneider, is an unlikely but yet so natural pleasure. The music, by Philippe Arthuys and Ivo Malec, is very modern and angular (even concrete!) and works gangbusters, which makes me really happy.

From sublime to... ? Victory at Sea (1952), twenty six half hour television episodes, was to fifties and sixties television what modern day A&E war documentaries are. Constructed from film clips taken by various Navies, each episode tells about a different area of important sea battles in WWII. Long into the sixties, the soundtrack album lived on in people's collections. Each half hour was scored from beginning to end with the NBC Orchestra, credited and highly trumpeted to be by the Richard Rodgers of so much great music fame. But it seems he wrote a bunch of two minute themes, and it was left up to (credited) orchestrater and conductor Robert Russell Bennett to fit the themes to the picture and he does a bang up job of it. It is a rare situation where you have thirteen hours of full on film score sans diagetic or production sound (other then some occasional added gun fire at a low level). The narrative voice over is the only other sound. For the small amount of money it sells for, if you are into film music, I would say this is a must have.