Intrada Soundtrack Forum

INTRADA Announces:



SEE NO EVIL
Composed and Conducted by ELMER BERNSTEIN
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 293

Bernstein’s score proves to be spare and just right in helping set the picture’s mood of intended terror.
--The Los Angeles Times


The 1971 Columbia thriller See No Evil pits a blind woman against a savage killer. The film is spotted very sparingly, allowing many tense scenes to play out unscored. Even within composer Elmer Bernstein’s cues the music is often made more powerful by being silent. Chamber music textures abound throughout the orchestration. Bernstein’s use of strings, alto flute, piano, electric guitar, forceful trombone octaves, bass clarinet, glittering glockenspiel, brittle xylophone, clarinet doubled two octaves higher by piccolo are colors carefully calculated to make the most impact but often with the least “noise.” Everything in this concise-but-superb score has its point.

For this premiere release of Elmer Bernstein’s complete soundtrack (the third and final score commissioned for the film), Intrada fortunately was able to locate the two-track stereo session masters, recorded and mixed by Richard Lewzey at Cine-Tele Sound Studios (CTS) in London in July 1971. For decades these tapes appeared to have been lost but, in fact, they survived in full stereo and in beautiful condition, with every cue present—including Bernstein’s three brief original source music cues.

In the film, Sarah (Mia Farrow), a young woman recently blinded in a horse-riding accident, is adjusting to her new circumstances under the loving care of her aunt, uncle and cousin. One morning she wakes and, thinking everyone else is still asleep, goes to the kitchen to make coffee. She has no idea that her cousin lies dead in the next bed, that her uncle’s bloody corpse lies in the bathtub and that her aunt’s dead eyes are staring at her from the living room. Nor does she realize that the murderer’s safety will soon hinge on one more death: hers.

INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 293
Retail Price: $19.99
Available NOW
For track listing and sound samples, please visit
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.9014/.f

A great sounding stereo premiere release of an older Columbia Pictures film is truly a miracle for those who can appreciate it, and this is one of the more interesting ones, too.

Thank you very much for this album.

I'm in on this one, short though it be. (I know, I'm an ungrateful wretch, but it's a damn shame the ditched Previn and Whitaker scores couldn't have been included.)

Don't worry, it's not ungrateful at all to have hoped for an optimal situation. But, getting just the dynamite Bernstein score is amazing considering how hopeless the situation for elements seems to be with many of these Silver Age Columbia Pictures films.

See No Evil and Cromwell are amazing finds on Intrada's part, and makes me slightly more optimistic that titles like MacKenna's Gold, Goodwin's The Executioner and the Matt Helm series can eventually be found as well.

I have been waiting literally years for this Bernstein recording-"See No Evil". I went to see the film solely because of Bernstein's score and I was not disappointed.

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Robert M Eastman

Well, at last, my second favourite score by Elmer Bernstein has finally been released. Congratulations are in order me thinks. Another brilliant release from Intrada, and one soundtrack recording I will certainly cherrish forever. Well done guys!

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Robert M Eastman