Intrada Soundtrack Forum

INTRADA Announces:



DOUBLE INDEMNITY: FILM NOIR AT PARAMOUNT
Music by MIKLóS RóZSA, HUGO FRIEDHOFER, FRANZ WAXMAN, GAIL KUBIK, LEITH STEVENS, HEINZ ROEMHELD, and VICTOR YOUNG
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 335

Following the releases of the vintage Paramount scores The Lost Weekend and Desert Fury, Intrada's next entry is a 2-CD set featuring seven different composers writing for film noir classics. The headliner is Miklós Rózsa's Oscar-winning score to Double Indemnity, in near complete form. Rózsa composed three principal motifs for the film. A restless “conspiracy” theme dominates his score, but it is the powerful murder theme that opens the film and the composer returns to this theme repeatedly with an almost tragic quality. The third principal theme is a love theme.

But that's not all! This album also contains the surviving elements of several other Noir scores:

Hugo Friedhofer's Ace in the Hole
Franz Waxman's Sorry, Wrong Number
Gail Kubik's The Desperate Hours
Leith Stevens' The Scarlet Hours
Heinz Roemheld's Union Station
Victor Young's I Walk Alone


Friedhofer’s Ace in the Hole deftly matches the unusual mixture of tones Billy Wilder achieved in his unusually bleak dissection of modern journalism. For Sorry, Wrong Number, Waxman set the film’s anxious tone with a dramatic main title cue which incorporated phone sound effects. In The Desperate Hours, Gail Kubik took an unusual and daring approach, writing and recording a score he described as “pointillistic … a series of sounds which were completely unpredictable: you didn’t know when the next sound was coming or where it was coming from.”

For The Scarlet Hour, Leith Stevens supplied suitably dramatic and agitated original cues for key scenes, but the main musical focus of the film is the original song “Never Let Me Go,” written by the team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Although the main titles of Union Station don’t list a composer, Heinz Roemheld scored the picture, yet little of his music ended up in the final film. Finally, the nearly 30 minutes of Victor Young's I Walk Alone features a vivid and varied score including bluesy music and exciting chase music.

Most of the music in this album was sourced from 35mm magnetic film stored in the Paramount vaults. Desperate Hours is three-track stereo. The Scarlet Hour is in “quasi stereo” because there were “directional angles” for certain cues, while all the other film tracks are mono.

INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 335
Retail Price: $29.99
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For track listing and sound samples, please visit:
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.9968/.f