The Keys of the Kingdom

by Bruce Eder Alfred Newman's score for The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) has been given the CEDAR noise-reduction treatment on this Tsunami release, which has cleaned up a lot of the defects inherent in the original materials. There's still some noise, and a bit too much compression on the denser string passages, but the score's impassioned lyricism does come to the surface more easily. A distant but more interesting cousin to Newman's music for Song of Bernadette, the writing evokes elements of exoticism as well as the hymnal, and the mix is a bracing one, calling up excitement, reverence, and devotion in different sections, in keeping with the content of the script.