INTRADA Announces:
BLACK WIDOW/GOOD MORNING, MISS DOVE!
Composed by LEIGH HARLINE
INTRADA Special Collection Volume 105
The latest 20th Century Fox Double header features two scores from the '50s. Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955) is an uplifting tale about a woman, Miss Dove (Jennifer Jones), who lies hospitalized by a potentially lethal tumor. While there, she and the people whose lives she’s enhanced reflect on the past, illustrating the influence of her guiding spirit on a rejected girl, an abused boy, an unwed mother, a Jewish immigrant, a jailbird—even on a town father she single-handedly saves from a potentially catastrophic bank run. Along the way, Leigh Harline’s score, conducted by Lionel Newman, serves as guide, signaling transitions from present to past and back again in ways both efficient and, quite simply, beautiful. Sometimes, it is the insistent ping of Miss Dove’s desktop bell that lets us know we’re on the story-telling move; at other points, the interpolation of a wistful tune from a long-lost romantic era, interwoven with the soaring, warm, yet profoundly dignified theme that opens the film and recurs throughout. This theme once again puts the flexibility of Harline’s music on lustrous display; reverent and spiritual in its first incarnation, it goes on to appear in strikingly different forms.
Black Widow (1954) features what one would expect from this genre — the predatory female, the innocent man accused of a crime. An ambitious young writer, Nancy Ordway (Peggy Ann Garner), connives her way up the ladder of the Broadway establishment. Her affairs, lies, and schemes ultimately get her nastily done in; the movie then turns into a whodunit, with the wrongly accused man (Van Heflin) doing most of the legwork to uncover the real killer. Harline crafted a score at once alluring and sinister, the perfect accompaniment to this tale of ambition, seduction, and murder set against the backdrop of the New York theater. Harline’s score is a rich stew of the lushly beautiful and the profoundly disturbing. Although it has moments of pure noir instability, this is music in which glamour is the predominant note --an edgy glamour of thoroughbred sophistication: an Alfred Newman kind of glamour. Not surprisingly, Alfred Newman also conducted the score.
Both scores were restored and assembled from the original stereo elements by Nick Redman and Mike Matessino.
This release is limited to 1000 copies.
INTRADA Special Collection - Volume 105
Retail Price: 19.99
AVAILABLE NOW
For track listing and sound samples, please visit
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.6293/.f
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