= MR. HOBBS TAKES A VACATION =

>>  The Music

The 20th Century-Fox film Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation opened in 
Los Angeles on May 25, 1962. That same day, Time magazine said of its composer: "Henry Mancini has become Hollywood's hottest music man."

Indeed, at that point Mancini had become the public face of American movie music. In just four years, he had sold over a million albums of music from TV's Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky, won two Academy Awards (for the score of Breakfast at Tiffany's and its already-famous song, "Moon River"), and received an astounding ten Grammy Awards.

It was hardly overnight success. Mancini had been toiling at this work for ten years, including seven as part of the music team at Universal, composing and arranging bits and pieces of dozens of scores for the studio's "B" movies (and an occasional "A," such as his Oscar-nominated work on 1954's The Glenn Miller Story).

But Mancini's melodic gifts, his facility with a jazz chart and his association with producer-director Blake Edwards (first on Gunn, later on Tiffany's) had finally combined to catapult him into the front ranks of film composers. The show-business trade paper Variety reported that, in the wake of the Oscar wins, Mancini was accepting only one assignment out of every ten offers.

With the end of Peter Gunn in mid-1961, the composer was free to focus exclusively on movie scores. He accepted four assignments for 1962 films, all very different in tone and subject matter: the thriller Experiment in Terror and the drama The Days of Wine and Roses, both for Edwards at Warner Bros.; Hatari!, an African adventure for director Howard Hawks at Paramount; and the lighthearted comedy Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, a Fox film starring James Stewart and Maureen O'Hara.

Mancini may have done Hobbs at the request of Stewart, whom he had known since their association on The Glenn Miller Story. It was Stewart, in fact, who had suggested that Henry Koster replace ailing Leo McCarey as the director of Hobbs. The other key people behind the camera were seasoned veterans of decades in the movie business-producer Jerry Wald (Peyton Place, An Affair to Remember) and screen-writer Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath, The Three Faces of Eve) - but they had no previous experience with Mancini.

Koster had been at Fox since the late 1940s and had worked regularly with such venerable composers as Alfred Newman (on The Robe and A Man Called Peter, among others) and Franz Waxman (on The Virgin Queen and The Story of Ruth). This was Koster's third of five films with Stewart, including the classic 1950 comedy Harvey.

Mr. Hobbs was based on a novel by Edward Streeter
(Father of the Bride). As loosely adapted by Johnson, Roger Hobbs (Stewart) was a St. Louis bank executive whose wife Peggy (O'Hara) talks him into a month-long stay at a beach house near San Francisco. To Roger's chagrin, she has also invited their four children and three grandchildren, which virtually assures that the getaway won't be a quiet one. And to top it all off, the house turns out to be a ramshackle Victorian eyesore riddled with plumbing and electrical problems.

Shooting took place between mid-November 1961 and mid-January 1062. divided between Carrillo Beach west of Los Angeles (where Fox built the house, a monument to bad taste and inconvenience), the studio's Westwood lot and the Newport Harbor Yacht Club (for a boat sequence in which novice seaman Stewart becomes lost in the fog).

"That was great fun," Koster recalled in 1982. "There was the pictures with Jimmy Stewart. It must have been his spirit. There was very little friction, ever, only ambition and craftsmanship and precision, just doing it right professionally. On top of that he put whipped cream of great talent."

Mancini was signed to score the film in November
I reported that the composer would also "play the role of a 'twist' specialist orchestra leader" and that he would pen "a song for Fabian to sing to Lauri Peters." Newcomer Peters played Stewart's youngest daughter, the teen hearthrob Fabian her summer boyfriend. Mancini's on-camera appearance failed to materialize.

The assignment was perfect for the 37-year-old composer. The film demanded a light touch, a main theme that would convey the fun of the picture, and a good deal of contemporary source music for the parties and teenage hangouts depicted.

Mancini's "Mr. Hobbs' Theme" is the backbone of the score. Its treatments range from the main title with a brassy, big-band opening and a delightful melody, first played on electric guitar by Bob Bain, then on the Brazilian keyboard instrument Timpanola by Jimmy Rowles - to a sprightly arrangement for the eventful boat ride taken by Hobbs and his TV-obsessed son (Michael Burns), and a warm orchestral version for the finale. For the few moderately dramatic moments in the score (starting the water pump, the sailboat sequence), Mancini turns, tongue-in-cheek, to organ and vibes.

Apart from the song, which was written as production began, the score appears to have been written and recorded relatively quickly. Mancini began work in early March 1962 and recorded in early April. Veteran orchestrators Leo Shuken and Jack Hayes, who had worked with Mancini on Breakfrast at Tiffany's, Bachelor in Paradise and Experiment in Terror, orchestrated the score. 

Of the 39 minutes of music heard in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation more than a third consists of source music-mostly the five numbers performed by a seven-man band at the yacht club dance that begins about 50 minutes into the film. Although the ensemble seems to consist of clean-cut teenagers, the music is more jazz than rock 'n' roll with the exception of their final tune, a twist based on the "Mr. Hobbs' Theme."

For Fabian's song, Mancini asked Johnny Mercer to collaborate with him. It was probably inevitable that the filmmaker would want a marketable tune, given the Oscar records of the lyricist (three wins and another eleven nominations at that time) and the composer (two wins and two additional nominations). As the decade continued, they wrote some of the best movie songs of the '60s. Mercer shared his last six Oscar nominations with Mancini, including the title song from Charade, "The Sweetheart Tree" from The Great Race and "Whistling Away the Dark" from Darling Lili.

Their song "Cream Puff" would today be classified as bubblegum pop ("Cream puff, shortcake / sweet stuff, jelly roll /gum drop, milk shake / curl up and be my baby doll"). It is heard three times in the film: twice as an instrumental source cue, once as an on-screen vocal, a duet between Fabian and Lauri Peters. The hope was undoubtedly that Fabian - who had had eight top-40 hits since 1959 - would turn it into a pop record for promotional purposes. But there was apparently no interest on the part of either producers or artists. "Cream Puff' wound up recorded only in an instrumental version by conductor Sonny Lester on the flip side of a 45 rpm single on the studio's own label. (Lester would later become well-known for his novelty LP "How to Strip for Your Husband.") No soundtrack of Mr. Hobbs was ever issued. Mancini himself recorded only the "Mr. Hobbs Theme" for his 1963 RCA Victor compilation album Our Man in Hollywood (the same LP that featured the popular "Days of Wine and Roses" theme in its only Mancini recording as well).

Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation became the second most-profitable film of
the year at Fox, taking in approximately $4 million in box-office rentals (second only to The Longest Day). It was also among the top 20-grossing movies of 1962, and while it received no Academy Award nominations, Mancini and Mercer still walked away winners at the 1963 ceremonies. Together, they accepted Best Song honors for "The Days of Wine and Roses."

Henry Mancini went on to give us some of the best-remembered songs and scores of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, from Charade and The Pink Panther to Wait Until Dark and The Thorn Birds, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation is a welcome addition to the canon of recorded Mancini scores, a reminder of the style and substance that he brought to movie music of the time.

- Jon Burlingame

Realizing a soundtrack album for Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation has been
a longtime dream for Intrada. Happily, Mancini's original scoring session masters survived in multi-track formats. His wonderfully catchy main title, the bright teen dance numbers, all of that lush background scoring. With the exception of two tracks (17 & 22) stereo image and dynamic range were excellent. In the case of the two above-referenced tracks, sonics were good but minor deterioration was evident in the 35mm mag reels. Mercifully, these elements transferred into the digital domain with only minor damage, allowing for their inclusion as well. Mancini (with Mercer) also wrote a brief duet for Fabian and Lauri Peters to sing at a teen dance. Stereo rhythm tracks survived, as did most of Fabian's vocal. However, Lauri Peters separate track was lost, as well as the final portion for Fabian. Fortunately, a separate mono dubdown was available, allowing a composite album mix to be prepared. Through judicious marrying of elements, a fully restored presentation mingling mono with stereo is presented.

In addition to the score, Mancini wrote all of his own source music. We've included every one of Mancini's tuneful dance cues as well as his complete underscore - all in original sequence. Paperwork form 20th Century Fox notated original cue titles and picture placement. In addition to a brief outtake (Track 8) not listed in final editing logs, "demo" versions of Mancini's two primary tunes (Hobb's Theme & Cream Puff) scored for small combo were present on the scoring masters. These are featured on our album as well.

- Douglass Fake