One of the nice things about this movie is the music, from Prokofiev's Lt. Kije Suite, which was composed for the movie Lt. Kije (1933). In that movie, Kije does not really exist, and so his death is a fake.
In the novel by Joyce Cary, Jimson actually dies at the end, but in the movie, we see Jimson sailing away. I wonder if the creators of this film were thinking of the earlier film.
The music is easy to like, and makes The Horse's Mouth hard to forget.
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Woody Allen also used Lt. Kitje extensively in his film Love and Death.
shareI remember buying a collection of Prokoviev music and thinking, as I listened: "wtf... it's the Horse's Mouth"!!! It fits so perfectly, the only piece of that suite I can disassociate from the film is the Romance segment (the bit playing while all the artists are a bit down)/
Prokoviev contributed a lot of music to films, most notably Eisenstein. If you liked his music here, check out Ivan the Terrible, notably part II, or Alexandr Nevsky. He became a lot more Wagnerian and helped invent the modern film score, with its leitmotiv system.
And you can hear his influence in many subsequent film scores. Many of the more playful, dissonant elements in scores by John Williams, for instance, owe a lot to Prokofiev.
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