Anna and the King of Siam - perhaps better known in its later musical incarnation The King and I - was set in the Orient but filmed on the back lot of Twentieth Century Fox. The picture required music that would give it an Eastern flavour, and Herrmann provided what he somewhat dismissively called "musical scenery". Just as Max Steiner tried to make the Warner Brothers' soundstages seem authentically Moroccan with his percussion-tinged score for Casablanca, so Herrmann employed Siamese and Balinese scales and melodies to suggest the exotic locale that the plaster board sets and back projection could not convey on their own.
The movie was a box-office and a critical success, and several prominent reviews singled out Herrmann's contribution. The Academy took note and nominated the score for an Oscar alongside William Walton's Henry V, Franz Waxman's Humouresque, Miklos Rozsa's The Killers, and Hugo Friedhofer's The Best Years of Our Lives. This last picture - about the difficulties of servicemen returning home after the war - caught the mood of the time, and was the darling of that year's Oscar ceremony, walking away with seven awards, including one for Friedhofer. Herrmann would not live to see his next two and final Academy Award nominations, which came in the year after his death.
I'm listening to the original soundtrack on the Varese Sarabande label (VSD-6 091) - track 43 ("Montage") to be precise, which is a typical representative of the Siamese musical scenery. Aside from the travelogue music, there are cues of gloomy brass and woodwind for tension and drama, and some elegiac string writing (a particularly lovely cue called, in fact, "Elegy"). One of my favourite tracks ("3:00 A.M") is a piece of John Cage-like repetitive piano. As a bonus you also get some outtakes at the end of the disc, including a couple of chants for male voices and four takes on a growling short cue called "Anger" on which you can hear Herrmann's thick New York accent.
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