January 2007 CD Release: "Film Score Monthly's definitive edition -- on the eve of the movie's 50th anniversary -- features a comprehensive chronological program of Green's masterpiece (containing many previously unreleased cues and passages), along with a bonus section of alternate and unused cues. The entire score (save one-half of one cue) has been remixed and remastered from the original 35mm stereo master tapes for vastly improved sound quality."
--From FSM publicity materials
Performing Arts--Motion Pictures, The Library of Congress, 1998, 268 pp, hard cover (ISBN 0-16-049237-8) with cover photo of the Forth of July foot race between John Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift) and Flash Perkins (Lee Marvin).
"Composer-writer Ross Care presents an in-depth and entertaining analysis of Johnny Green's score for the film version of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s great American novel Raintree County. Having interviewed Green, Care is able to provide behind-the-scenes stories about the development of the score and the making of the film. One cannot help but agree with Care's conclusion that the film is somewhat failed, but the music captures the intent and sensibilities of the author and remains as the real tribute to his novel."
--Excerpt from: "Editor's Note", Iris Newson, Performing Arts--Motion Pictures, The Library of Congress, 1998, p. 9.
[This analysis by Ross Care (Title: "The Great (Almost) American Novel Becomes The Great American Film Score"] also contains many photos from the movie and portions from the score(s), including the "Song of Raintree County Theme", "Johnny and Nell's Theme", "The Great Swamp motifs", "Flash Perkins' Theme", "Susanna's Mad Theme", "Mystical Raintree Chords", and several others. --24 pp.]
". . . Johnny Green's ecstatic, pantheistic score, a sensual and highly empathetic evocation of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s unique, multifaceted novel, made it all palpably real and possible, and in a manner much more haunting and visceral than the film itself." p. 30
". . . . I have never really stopped listening to Green's score, and when I was a guest on my local PBS station's . . . radio program a few years ago, I had no qualms about including a track from Raintree--the beautiful and self-contained "July Picnic" cue which had so struck me on my original viewing of the film--as a sample of one of the eight discs with which I would choose to be shipwrecked. And of course Green's score, and the film which occasioned it, led me to the original novel which the music so vividly evoked, and to the curious, quintessentially American and conflicted life of the novel's author, Ross Lockridge, Jr." p 32
"Perhaps
only Alain Resnais or some such auteur of the European New Wave
(or now a television miniseries), could possibly do justice to
the original Lockridge novel, a book 'written by a modern for
moderns,' as the dust jacket also announced." p 32
"Gigantic MGM also encompassed the Arthur Freed unit, with its own musical staff headed by Roger Edens (1905--1970) who pioneered the Freed sound, a lush, Franco-Broadway manifestation of the overall MGM sound which was otherwise pretty much defined by the supraepic Euro style of Rosza in the 1950s, though Green's one major film score, Raintree County in 1957, is perhaps the Americana classic of the decade."
--From: Ross Care, Twilight's Last Gleaming--The Americanization of Hollywood film Music 1950 - 1965, Performing Arts--Motion Pictures, The Library of Congress, 1998, p. 201.
"1957's greatest score remains, however, Johnny Green's for Civil War epic Raintree County from MGM."
--From: Ross Care, Twilight's Last Gleaming--The Americanization of Hollywood film Music 1950 - 1965, Performing Arts--Motion Pictures, The Library of Congress, 1998, p. 224.
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