Easter means nothing to me. Not since I turned 14 or 15. Okay, maybe when the kids were young in the early ’90s and we all went on a couple of easter egg hunts. But don’t even think of pulling that shit now.

If I’m so inclined there’s one way to bring it all back, to revisit that time in my life when Easter service at our local Episcopal church and Palm Sunday and chocolate rabbits were actually “things” of some value, and that’s listening to Miklos Rozsa‘s Biblical film scores. I’ve said this three or four times since HE launched, but when orgiastic, big-screen, reach-for-the-heavens emotion was called for, no one did it better. He may have been first and foremost a craftsman, but Rozsa really had soul.

Posted 15 years ago: “Listen to the overture and main title music of King of Kings, and all kinds of haunting associations and recollections about the life of Yeshua and his New Testament teachings (or at the least, grandiose Hollywood movies about same) start swirling around in your head. And then watch that Nicholas Ray‘s stiff, strangely constipated film (which Rozsa described in his autobiography as ‘nonsensical Biblical ghoulash’) and ask yourself if Rozsa didn’t capture the spiritual essence of Christ’s story better than what Ray, screenwriter Phillip Yordan and producer Samuel Bronston managed to throw together.

“I don’t know if it’s commonly known, but the “buhhhm-ba-dum-dum” theme from Jack Webb‘s Dragnet TV series was taken from Roza’s score for The Killers. Here’s Rozsa’s bum-da-dum-dum in the opening credits for that 1946 noir classic.