All the Brothers Were Valiant

by Bruce EderAll the Brothers Were Valiant was to have been one of the prestige films from MGM in the year 1953, gathering together many of its top stars and utilizing its most opulent production facilities and top creative personnel, including composer Miklós Rózsa writing the score. Alas, the movie was to suffer from a massive amount of post-production tinkering, and in the end, in a very rare -- indeed, almost unheard of -- instance at MGM, much of the music that Rózsa wrote would never be heard in the finished film. This CD rectifies that mistake, presenting for the first time the composer's complete score as written and recorded for the original pre-release cut of the movie. What you get, following a dazzling and ear-catching main title theme, is a surprisingly subtle and lyrical body of music at times, in between the sections devoted to rousing acting and adventure -- Rózsa's love theme here seems to intersect with both his work in The Thief of Bagdad but also with his more ominous music for such crime film classics as The Killers and Naked City. Nothing is predictable here, however, and even passages that evoke those earlier movies take a new, lighter -- or, at least, different -- cast here, in new scorings and modes, in a period setting without the same dark psychologies at work. As the section named "High Sea" reminds you, Rózsa could make a violin section "sing" like nobody's business, and horns announce themselves better than in the work of almost any composer this side of Anton Bruckner. The four-decade-old source material, which was never meant to be heard fully exposed and free-standing, sounds astonishingly fresh and crisp, and the first-rate production has been accompanied by nicely detailed annotation about the production itself as well as the scoring of the film.