Important film score release

[William]

One of the all time greatest film scores ever is now released on DVD - Hangover Square, starring the heavy-weight psycho Laird Cregar, with music by Bernard Herrmann, about a crazed composer (sound familiar?) who writes a tormented piano concerto (after strangling, in a hypnotic stupor, his sexy-but-evil mistress) and finishes playing it after the audience flees, committing suicide in the concert hall he set afire. Of course we have all been there and done that. but Herrmann's music is still awesome.

It is on the Fox "Horror Classics" set.

[dpcon]

Thanks William! Will hunt that down for sure.

[PaulR]

[:D] [:D] [:D]

Yes Billy - very worth while watching and Herrmann's score is great.

Another film worth seeing in a slightly more modern vein in my view is Pan's Labyrinth - a film basically about dealing with life and death. The score is not memorable unfortunately - but must work with the film supposedly. Beautifully shot though.

[William]

So Paul, was your post after my drunken stupor or before? BTW that same set of films includes The Lodger also with Laird Cregar which has fantastic low-key cinematography, though no Herrmann music. This reminds me of yet another film recently put out on DVD - the Orson Welles/Joan Fontaine version of Jane Eyre. Though it is shortened it is probably the best film of the novel, and also has a Herrmann score with his kind of extreme, violent Romanticism, as opposed to the sappy Romanticism so common at the time in Hollywood.

[PaulR]

Yes - Laird Cregar of Heaven Can Wait fame. Died ridiculously young - a bit similar to Robert Walker of Strangers on a Train. Not seen the Laird Cregar version for some time but have the 1927(?) version (Lodger) with Ivor Novello on DVD.

Welles' Jane Eyre and Macbeth are quite dark films visually I seem to remember, as indeed is The Stranger which I like immensely - also on DVD.

[William]

Welles did not direct Jane Eyre, though his presence obviously affected its conception, as it did in The Third Man, during the production of which Carol Reed must have been very concerned about having the director of Citizen Kane as one of his cast. To go off on yet another tangent The Stranger is a great film, but even better, and just released on DVD, is Woman in the Window, with again Edward G Robinson getting trapped into committing a murder by femme fatale Joan Bennett whom he first sees reflected in the glass of a shop window over a painting of her. It is also directed by Fritz Lang but more dream-like and surreal in its scenes, and makes the paranoia of film noir more intense as the investigator Raymond Massey closes in on the cringing, guilty Robinson.

[PaulR]

It just goes to show the impact you can have as an actor - and sometimes director when show up in a film like The Third Man for approximately 8 minutes of screen time. I still can't get over the speech Welles stuck in about cuckoo clocks - much to the severest reaction from Graham Greene. But thankfully they left it in.
You can't make films like this and the ones you mentioned anymore - audiences today wouldn't understand them.