Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea : 50th Anniversary Edition

Sometimes, even when viewers -- including professional critics -- know a movie, a play, or a piece of music, there are elements that elude them. This release, part of Film Score Monthly's Silver Age Classics series and limited to 3,000 copies, is a case in point -- this reviewer is extremely well acquainted with the movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as well as the TV series of the same name thanks to having watched them innumerable times on television. But this CD of the complete score from the feature film, composed by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter and orchestrated by Max Reese, is still a serious revelation. The exposed music tracks are a lush, rewarding listening experience in their own right, showing an astonishing degree of sophistication and care not just in the composition but in the Reese orchestrations as well. Sawtell and Shefter reveal their debt to Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss as well as to Miklos Rozsa and, to a tiny degree (one suspects), Bernard Herrmann, among others, while Reese employs every reasonable music device of the post-Romantic era in realizing this material -- which, in stereo, will sometimes make your head spin picking up certain effects. Ironically, some of the material here was so effective that it came to be reused elsewhere (including on the subsequent series) in nearly unaltered form, and so may be too familiar (and seemingly cliche-ridden) to be fully appreciated on first listen. But in 1961 it was fresh and new, and if one keeps that in mind, the interest is intense, in seeing just how well Sawtell and Shefter got their jobs done. They not only did a superb job of underscoring the seemingly nonstop action, but they wrote material that uses the literal sound of the music to great effect, the pizzicato basses and cellos, the glittering harp glissandi, and the horn calls and brass growls making the action seem larger than life, and the music a riveting experience to hear on its own. The entire score is represented here, except for a few seconds of the finale that were too damaged to utilize. The producers even retrieved the scratch track for the title theme music sung by Frankie Avalon (which, when heard in the context of the entire score, holds up surprisingly well) and the temporary main title music tracked into the movie in pre-production, which is unintentionally funny. The music is also appended with the one significant damaged section, a piece called "Nervous Hysteria" which, despite its title, is one of the more introspective sections of the soundtrack. The annotation is extremely thorough, though the notes tend to wander over to the film production and the series spinoff slightly too much and too often, rather than holding focus on the score itself. ~ Bruce Eder