Topic: Dimitri Tiomkin
Born May 10, 1899, near Poltava, Ukraine - died Nov. 11, 1979, London, England... For a composer who hailed from the Ukraine, Dimitri Tiomkin sure loved the old west. Like the great concert hall composers who blazed a new musical path in the untamed wilderness of Hollywood, Tiomkin had been fed on the operatic strains of Wagner’s demigods and dragons - a melodically muscular sound that he capably transferred to such purely American heroes as the brave sheriff, daring cowboy, and stand-by-your-man farmwife. It was an epic sound that filled such memorable westerns as DUEL IN THE SUN, RED RIVER, RIO BRAVO, THE UNFORGIVEN and GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K CORRAL. But perhaps none of Tiomkin’s western scores has had the epic cache of HIGH NOON. Gary Cooper was the lawman left alone by a cowardly town to face off against a villainous posse - a huge metaphor at the 1952 time for leftie film intellectuals abandoned to the anti-Commie witch hunts. But never mind all that, as Tiomkin’s score for HIGH NOON is concerned with the western here-and-now of a stalwart sheriff faced with impossible odds, a tremendously suspenseful sound that’s now heard in its original glory on this Screen Archives release.MORE | WEB LINKS | SHOP Dimitri Tiomkin
