Cover for CD booklet.

Silva Screen Records’ scheduled release of the CD “Music from the Films of Marlon Brando” on March 20, 2006, includes the premiere recording of a suite from Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for The Men (1950). The post-war drama, directed by Fred Zinnemann and written by Carl Foreman, stars Brando as a paraplegic dealing with life in a wheelchair and his relationship with his girlfriend, played by Teresa Wright. This new digital recording was produced by James Fitzpatrick, who conducts the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on the Tiomkin track. Orchestrator Patrick Russ arranged the seven-minute suite from material in the Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the University of Southern California (USC). The original orchestrators were George Parrish, Herb Taylor, and Paul Marquardt. An instrumental arrangement of the film’s theme song, “Love Like Ours,” written by Tiomkin with lyrics by Johnny Lehmann, is part of the suite.

Silva Screen has issued a number of actor-themed compact discs. Previous compilations include those for Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, and Sylvester Stallone. “Music from the Classic Films of John Wayne,” released in 1994 and also produced by Fitzpatrick, featured Tiomkin’s “Prelude” from The High and the Mighty and the “Overture” to The Alamo. The Brando compilation is the latest in this wide-ranging series. In addition to Tiomkin, a pantheon of composers who wrote film music is represented—among them John Barry, Leonard Bernstein, Hugo Friedhofer, Alex North, Nino Rota, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, and John Williams—comprising a collection of some remarkable film music from the latter half of the 20th century.

In theory, the music from one Brando film to the next is unrelated. Upon closer examination, however, one might wonder: Was Alex North’s music near the end of the “Revelation” cue for A Streetcar Named Desire influenced by Tiomkin’s chromatic-tinged music for Brando’s previous film, The Men? An earlier Brando-themed compilation, “Bernstein’s Backgrounds for Brando,” was issued on the Dot label in 1958. This was composer Elmer Bernstein’s first LP of film music arrangements and included a three-minute track of Tiomkin’s theme for The Men. A Blue Moon reissue, “Backgrounds for Brando,” made the rounds in 2005 and is currently available from various soundtrack dealers.

The two-disc set “Music from the Films of Marlon Brando” (SILCD1166) can be pre-ordered from Silva Screen.