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Blu-ray Review Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing Blu-ray Review (1 Viewer)

Nick*Z

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This seminal heart breaker has been given its due - exemplary color, gorgeous sound - pluperfect and affecting as ever. Bill Holden - what a great guy and a magnificent star. Jennifer Jones too. Still can't get the Alfred Newman main title out of my head. Not sure I even want to try.
 

Charles Smith

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The scoring and the playing of the main title theme are so stupendous, it immediately brought to mind the openings of Zhivago and Lawrence, and that's not a comparison one gets to enjoy very often.
 

Lromero1396

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Charles Smith said:
The scoring and the playing of the main title theme are so stupendous, it immediately brought to mind the openings of Zhivago and Lawrence, and that's not a comparison one gets to enjoy very often.
I dare not mention this film's score in the same breath as Lawrence. The score to Splendored-Thing feels repetitive and sappy in comparison. In my opinion, it's not one of Newman's best works from the era. Perhaps it's just the title song that irritates me.
 

Cineman

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Lromero1396 said:
... In my opinion, it's not one of Newman's best works from the era. Perhaps it's just the title song that irritates me.
It seems the song does effect some people that way, including one of the greatest popular music vocalists of the 20th Century, Frank Sinatra. I've never been able to track down the exact details, but it was fairly common knowledge that Sinatra declined to record the song initially and only came to regret it when it became a very big hit by others. He even jokes about having passed on it on his Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music double album.

Not sure what he had against it. My guess is it had nothing to do with the music but something to do with the lyrics, Sinatra being one of the best lyric "readers" of all time, there must have been something in there that rankled him, that he thought sounded hokey or unsuitable for him at his then age or whatever. That "golden crown" line, perhaps. Or maybe the idea of describing love, about which Sinatra sang from virtually every aspect imaginable in his life, as "a many-splendored thing" felt too awkward to him. Don't know. But even that supposition by me doesn't really jell since Sinatra was able to turn a lot of clunky lyric lines into either something much, much better or at least something non-obtrusive throughout his career.

However, he did get around to recording it in his 1964 album, Sinatra Sings Days of Wine and Roses, Moon River, and Other Academy Award Winners. Does a fine job of it, too, imo.

As for me, I love the song, can't get enough of it in the movie or other recordings of it and think it adds immeasurably to the movie's emotional punch.
 

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