Customer Reviews

The Wrong Man [SOUNDTRACK]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Based on a true story, Alfred Hitchcock's ultra-realistic 1956 film THE WRONG MAN tells of Manny Balistrero (Henry Fonda), a nightclub musician whose life is nearly destroyed when he is wrongly accused of armed robbery. Film composer Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), whose long collaboration with Hitchcock climaxed with VERTIGO (1958), NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959), and PSYCHO (1960), scored THE WRONG MAN. His score is relatively brief in length and sparely orchestrated, yet it is extremely effective, as appropriate to gritty, black-and-white film as is PSYCHO's all-strings score. Herrmann cleverly constructs the score around a rhythmic figure in the double-bass, the instrument which Manny plays in the movie. The cue "Manny Picked Up by the Police" epitomizes Herrmann's use of the double-bass motif and happens to be the music that stayed with me most after my initial viewing of the film. The tracks "The Smashed Mirror" and "Sanitarium and Finale" anticipate both PSYCO and Herrmann's late 1950's scores for television's THE TWILIGHT ZONE, while "The Resort in Winter" was apparently influenced by Puccini (specifically, the third-act opening of the opera LA BOHEME). Amid all of this stark realism, Herrmann conjures a poignant, even sentimental mood in "Father and Son" and uses a woodwind motif to Romantically convey the mental distress of Manny's sad wife, Rose (Vera Miles); for the nightclub scenes he writes persuasive mambo tunes. In sum, this original soundtrack recording presents - in surprisingly vivid sound - a masterful early Herrmann score for Hitchcock.