Murder and Mayhem (CD review)

Great Scores from Hollywood's Golden Age. Steiner: The Beast With Five Fingers; Friedhofer: The Lodger; Young: The Uninvited. William T. Stromberg, Moscow Symphony Orchestra. Marco Polo 8.225132.

You've got to admire that title. Who can resist "Murder and Mayhem"? The program consists of suites from three thrillers of the mid Forties, the music reconstructed by John W. Morgan: from 1946 The Beast With Five Fingers (a favorite gothic chiller of mine growing up); from 1944 The Lodger (a Jack the Ripper yarn); and also from 1944 The Uninvited (an eerie ghost story). A famous writer of film music composed the score for each movie, the first by Max Steiner, the second by Hugo Friedhofer, and the last by Victor Young. Of the three works, though, it is by far Young's music for The Uninvited that is most memorable.

British director Lewis Allen made The Uninvited in 1944 from a novel by Dorothy Macardle. It stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as a brother and sister who begin seeing and hearing strange things in the night when they unwittingly move into a haunted house on the coast of Cornwall. The movie ranks among the two or three best ghost stories ever filmed, no small thanks to its musical soundtrack. Fortunately, it's the longest suite on the disc, a little over twenty-four minutes, and it contains the most evocative tunes. Chief among them is one called "Stella By Starlight," a pseudo-Rachmaninov affair for piano and orchestra, later in the film heard on violin and orchestra, and a few years afterward recorded by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Harry James.

The Uninvited features mysterious-sounding mood music, descriptive scene accentuation, and good, old-fashioned Romanticism, all of it brought to life brilliantly by William Stromberg and his Moscow Symphony players, who have done this kind of thing so often it must be second-nature to them by now.

The sound, recorded by Marco Polo in 1999, is an improvement over their previous work. This album is from the same team I have reviewed before in film music, but the sonics this time are less disproportionately warm and round, more detailed, and more immediate. There is a small degree of hardness to the upper midrange, to be sure, but otherwise it is solid and clean. A lengthy and highly informative booklet insert completes the package.

Although I have to deem the whole project a success, I recommend The Uninvited in particular for repeat listening.

Adapted from a review the author originally published in the $ensible Sound magazine.

JJP