Miklós Rózsa Jungle Book / The Thief of Baghdad

Miklós Rózsa was a Hungarian-American composer trained in Germany (1925-1931), and active in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with extensive sojourns in Italy from 1953. Best known for his nearly one hundred film scores, he nevertheless maintained a steadfast allegiance to absolute concert music throughout what he called his double life. The Thief of Bagdad is a 1940 British Technicolor Arabian fantasy film, produced by Alexander Korda, directed by Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, and Tim Whelan, with additional contributions by Korda's brothers Vincent and Zoltán and William Cameron Menzies. The film stars child actor Sabu, Conrad Veidt, John Justin, and June Duprez. It was distributed in the US and the UK by United Artists. Thief of Bagdad won the Academy Awards for Cinematography, Art Direction (Vincent Korda) and Special Effects (Lawrence W. Butler, Jack Whitney) and was also nominated for Original Music Score. The Jungle Book was another Alexander Korda movie, this time based on the immortal stories by Rudyard Kipling. In 1943 the film's score, in a recording made directly from the soundtrack, was released on a 78-RPM record album with narration by Sabu, the film's star, added. It became the first commercial recording of a non-musical U.S. film's orchestral score to be released.