OT: Henry Mancini's score for Frenzy is available here.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy5kryT0xrJMno-rZfYeXYtc6mQxTvtYX
shareCool, thanks. It's great thriller music which maybe wasn't quite right for Frenzy but could easily be used even now for another film.
shareCool, thanks. It's great thriller music which maybe wasn't quite right for Frenzy but could easily be used even now for another film.
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roger1(ecarle) arrives to agree with the thanks -- this is GREAT, for so many reasons -- and to respectfully disagree with swanstep -- I think this music is perfect for Frenzy...especially in comparison to the Ron Goodwin score rather hastily contracted for by Hitchcock after he first worked with, and then summarily fired, Mancini. (Giving Mancini his own stunning "firing of" story -- "I was fired by a big one" -- matched somewhat when William Friedkin fired Lalo Schifrin off of The Exorcist and rejected HIS score.)
Ahem.
I listened to all the cues and my feelings were a strong mix: exhllarated, fascinated, and very, very sad.
Exhilarated: Having heard the "alternative opening credits music" years ago, I was exhilarated not only to hear it again, but to hear an even BETTER version -- the alternate to the alternate, if you will -- as one of the final cues. I have replaced Ron Goodwin's opening overture with Mancini's in my mind for about 20 years now...NOW I have replaced Mancini's alternate overture in my mine with Mancini's ALTERNATE overture! (Reason being, Mancini's "alternate to the alternate has a great, Herrmann at his most thundering(NXNW) opening flourish(with a touch of British) BEFORE going into his main credit theme.)
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Fascinated: Its fun looking at the title of all the cues and trying to guess WHERE in the film they would go. For instance, the sequence "Big Drag for Babs," "Hot Potatoes" and "Babs Grabs" would seem to end up around the entire potato truck sequence in the film, I believe. Now the actual scene ON the truck has no music, but perhaps "Hot Potatoes" was written FOR the potato truck (Hitchcock often had composers conduct music he later cut in favor of no music.) Big Drag for Babs MIGHT go over Rusk's pushing of the potato truck on the wheelbarrow TO the truck(an atmospheric bit in the movie, with Goodwin's ONE truly atmospheric theme - a kind of woozy waltz over Rusk's psychopathic movements.)
But the BIG catch is "Babs Grabs." My guess: this would go over the sudden flashback in Rusk's mind of his strangling Babs and she GRABS the tiepin from his lapel as she dies. Note in passing: its so famously said that Babs' murder is "unseen" when Rusk takes her up the stairs and into his flat. True enough THEN. But we DO see the strangling -- in fragments much more quickly glimpsed than in Brenda's strangling -- but closing in that close-up on the hand grasping the tiepin in death. Its like a "forgotten murder moment" in Hitchcock AND in Frenzy.
But that's still NOT the big catch in "Babs Grabs."
The big catch is that the music in "Babs Grabs" is the JAWS THEME! Three years early. By Mancini. Not by John Williams.
Listen to it in the "Babs Grabs" cue. Its right there. And if it had gotten into Frenzy, it might have been too familar for Jaws. (But: doubtful: Jaws was always going to be seen ty tens of millions more people than Frenzy, given their plots and ratings)
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Very, very, sad: As exhilarating as it was to finally HEAR this score start to finish, I felt -- at exactly the very same time in exactly the very same rush of emotion...SAD. This SHOULD have been the score for Frenzy. That SHOULD have been the opening credit theme(the ALTERNATE to the ALTERNATE.)
And while the credit theme seems "Frenzy and Hitchcock specific"(the British undertow, with a touch of jauntiness and a touch of the royal)..the REST of the cues(sans the Jaws music) are very, very recognizable AS Mancini, and that is as it should be. When I went to Frenzy, I would have wanted to "hear a Mancini movie" must as much as to "see a Hitchcock movie."
There are recognizable strains in Mancini's score as one would have found in "Wait Until Dark"(above all) "Charade," "Arabesque," "Experiment in Terror" and even the Peter Gunn TV show.
In reality, Hitchcock DID get this effect in his next(and final) film Family Plot, in which the "newly great" John Williams (taking over for Mancini as a composer of thriller scores in the 70s as Mancini had been in the 60s) was able to make a Hitchocck movie sound like a SPIELBERG or LUCAS movie. Williams scored Family Plot in the year between Jaws and Star Wars, and Family Plot sometimes FEELS(not just sounds) like a "missing link Spielberg/Lucas movie."
So it would have been if Frenzy had a Mancini score for "Hitchocck and Mancini." And with Frenzy as the "Hitchcock/Mancini" movie right ahead of the "Hitchcock/Williams movie," ...that much MORE movie music history would have been made.
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As for the absence of Bernard Herrmann on the scores of EITHER Frenzy or Family Plot? Another sad "what if" tragedy ---as I've pointed out before, Herrmann was fired off of Torn Curtain by Hitchocck -- but lived JUST long enough (through 1975) that he COULD have score the final four Hitchcock movies -- Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, and Family Plot. Still if we couldn't have Herrmann, having had Mancini and Williams on the final two would have been great.
Let's add a third post-Herrmann composer in here: Maurice Jarre. He's who Hitchcock got for Topaz, and HE was certainly a top composer of the 60s --VERY top with Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago for David Lean. Jarre also gave my favorite movie of 1966 -- The Professionals, a rousing fandango-like opening theme that sounds like "North by Northwest goes West." His Topaz score has a great opening theme (North by Northwest goes Miltary March) and another theme that threads through the movie(I thought I detected that theme in the last minutes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - when Sharon Tate invites Leo in -- but that turned out to be Jarrie's theme for "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.")
So we could have had "Jarre, Mancini, and Williams" for the final three Hitchocck films, but didn't get them. (John Addison of "Tom Jones" did Torn Curtain, with a very exciting credits theme and a rather saccharine romantic theme.)
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Some personal history on Henry Mancini and Frenzy:
As a young Hitchcock fan in 1970, 71, and 72...I had followed Frenzy from its being announced (1970 which was the year in which 1969's Topaz MAINLY played, so Frenzy actually turned up pretty quick) , then in 1971 (as the virtually no-name British cast was announced and Time magazine covered the filming in London with photos in several issues).
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Somewhere in 1971 or 1972, an article was published in which Henry Mancini was announced as the composer for Frenzy. I was VERY excited -- if the movie couldn't have a name cast, at least it could have a name COMPOSER, and wasn't music always the second best excitement of a Hitchocck film?)
I recall Mancini saying "the music will sound in very low notes -- I start at C and go down from there" -- and I clung to that belief in what the Frenzy score would sound like.
Now -- over 50 years later -- I can finally hear that "start at C and go down score." And its exhilarating, fascinating, and very very sad.
But back then, I was shocked when I saw Frenzy: there were no reports of Mancini being fired -- the film simply ARRIVED with a Ron Goodwin score. But I for one, was very angry, and I held it against...Ron Goodwin?
Years later I read of why Mancini fired and saw it mostly in the Goodwin overture (from a helicopter cruising down the River Thames)....Goodwin gave Hitchcock what HE wanted -- a fake "royal parade theme with a ton of Ye Olde English pomp and circumstance -- and not a TRACE of horror or thriller music. I get it, I get it -- the "cliche vision of Ye Olde England will be countered by grim sex murders in a city starting to rot - but Mancini's vision was SO much more in the Hitchocck tradition: exciting thriller music, with a touch of terror AND..just around the edges...of of that "Ye Old English" pomp and circumstance. Mancini gave Hitchcock what he wanted and ADDED terror and profundity.
I feel that both the madness of Bob Rusk and the terror of his murders is expressed in the Mancini Frenzy overture. In the first cue "Prologue"(NOT the alternate) -- at both 0:18 and 0:44 -- there is a rather jaunty but mad "twist" that conjures Rusk up to me.
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Back to Ron Goodwin: to the good, his opening overture over the Thames IS "big" enough to launch a Hitchocck movie, and that "woozy psycho's waltz" that launches the potato truck sequence in a very Hitchcockian way.
The rest of the thriller music is what I call "industrial strength" music -- heavy, blaring(those horns on the shot of Brenda dead with her tongue hanging out -- eech), with the general air of a bad British TV cop show.
And I can't say that Ron Goodwin ever established himself as a movie music composer on the order of John Williams, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein..perhaps somewhat close to felllow Britisher John Barry of James Bond fame..
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Back to Mancini:
I believe that Mancini's firing off of Frenzy FINALLY came out in Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius and the later and better Patrick McGilligan bio A Life in Dark and Light. Here we got that Hitchcock felt Mancini's score was "too sinister" and that he got it all wrong on the opening Thames royal tour("If he'd told me that's what he wanted, I would have changed it," said Mancini. Well...THAT would have been bad too.) Someone second-hand quoted Hitchcock as saying "If I had wanted Herrmann, I would have gotten Herrmann" in firing Mancini.
There are some ironies here. Hitchcock had fired HERRMANN -- quite famously -- off of Torn Curtain, and one of the reasons was that -- to Universal's taste -- Herrmann couldn't give Torn Curtain a score LIKE MANCINI -- something more hip and jazzy for the 60s as opposed to Herrmann's 50s grandeur.
And yet soon Mancini -- whose scores so dominated the 60's in comedies(for Blake Edwards) AND thrillers -- rather lost his mojo in the 70's. Mancini was out -- John Williams(with his Herrmann-LIKE thunder) was in.
Go figure.
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Note in passing: one can hear Herrmann's Torn Curtain score in various places now -- including over scenes on the Torn Curtain DVD, and the un-used "Murder for the Kililng of Gromek" music figures in the climaxes of both Scorsese's "Cape Fear"(which otherwises uses ALL of Herrmann's score for the original Cape Fear) and QT's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"(when Leo fires up the flame thrower.)
So 'un-used Hitchcock scores" have been used and -- here I will JOIN swanstep -- maybe somebody should get that Mancini Frenzy score into a NEW movie ..STAT.
A CRITICISM of the Mancini Frenzy overture/prologue: I can SLIGHTLY feel Hitchcock's urge to reject the Mancini overture when..a bit at the beginning and then heavily in the middle -- Mancini chooses to go into a deep ORGAN curlicue that sounds for all the world like the Phantom of the Opera madly playing away. THAT doesn't quite sound like a Hitchcock movie, but after awhile, you get used to it and organ notes nicely close it(likely for the camera drop down to the speaker by the Thames.) Also does not the Phantom himself also connect to Rusk? Mad men.
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A fun cue on the album: "Tijuana on the Thames." I listened to it. It truly has a "Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass" vibe, Mancini-style. My guess is that it would have gone over the scene of Rusk entering the diner from the parked potato truck. Goodwin's cue in the movie for this music -- meant to be PLAYING on the radio in the diner -- is that typical "fake rock and roll music" that movies had to use before REAL rock was put on soundtracks.
An easy to ID cue on the album: "Posh for Two." This music has a near MATCH in Goodwin's score: the prissy violin music for the dinner at Brenda's "Businesswomen's Club" between Richard and Brenda(that ends with him crushing a wine class in his bare hand, cutting it.
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I note that all these "lost Mancini cues" are from an album that has BOTH the Ron Goodwin cues(of which, again, there are two or three good ones) AND the Mancini score. Well, its good to have them both.
On the topic of "thriller music scores on album," I will leave with this link to a discussion I started over on the Jaws board about the best-selling "Jaws music of 1975" album.
https://moviechat.org/tt0073195/Jaws/65da77b64e1a13098447a8ec/The-Jaws-Soundtrack-Album-of-1975
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PS. The Frenzy cues in this post each have the 1972 movie poster for Frenzy accompanyin them.
Take a look at that. I thought at the time, that this was the best Hitchcock poster since The Birds..and it had a modern 1972 look of its own. "HITCHCOCK'S" was given its Hitchcock/Truffaut auteuristic due and the necktie theme was announced with flair.
But one weird thing: he's very tiny on the poster, but Barry Foster as Bob Rusk is clearly shown to be the killer of the film, what with the killing necktie in his hands.
...but the movie wants us to think that the killer is JON FINCH(Richard Blaney) for the first 30 minutes of the film. THAT is spoiled.
No matter...its not a big deal. Bob Rusk is the somewhat-famous psycho of Frenzy.