Cyrano de Bergerac soundtrack CD
Screen Archives Entertainment, 2010
1950's Cyrano de Bergerac, despite netting José Ferrer a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the title role, is something of a forgotten film. Lost in the abyss of public domain status, the film could only be found at the time of this CD release on remarkably poor quality imported DVDs, the kind that looked like they were sourced from the VHS era.
This was more than a little problematic, as the SAE label had a well-established, long-running format for their soundtrack CDs, which meant a detailed track-by-track analysis of the musical score accompanied by freeze-frames from the film's DVD or blu-ray. Luckily, black and white press stills from the film were to be found in abundance, and those, along with some retouched freeze-frames, were used for the track analysis portion of the liner notes.
Original black and white scan and an in-progress look at the Photoshop colorization.
Colorizing black and white photos was another established SAE tradition. When colorizing from black and white, detail in the original 8x10 print—particularly detail in the shadow areas—becomes crucial. Therefore it's always best to try and locate original prints and not re-strikes from years later years when, more often than not, the original negatives were long gone. With those reprints, you're looking at a photo of a photo and the detail vanishes in the process.
Happily we found a few wonderful and original vintage prints on eBay for this release, showing scenes from the film and portraits of Mr. Ferrer in character. In colorizing the portraits, I chose to combine them with new backdrops. For example, the cover photo was meant to have a colorful, flamboyant look when colorized and the golden background works better as a compliment. Likewise, in the opening spread below, the shadow on the wall was added to the original shot to create a sense of depth and emphasize Cyrano's signature nose.
