= MANCINI SURROUND =

Mostly Monsters, Murders and Mysteries                                                 < Prev   -    Next >   

Even the most famous film composers have had scores turned down by producers. It happened to Mancini only once, when Alfred Hitchcock decided he wanted something different for Frenzy (1972). Strange as it may seem, Hitchcock thought that Mancini score "too menacing." For the opening, an aerial sequence proceeding along the Thames and passing Tower Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, he wrote music of stately British character. even a touch Handelian, and calling for that
stateliest of instruments: the organ.

Mancini admirers have long encouraged him to do something about all the many bits of music he wrote at Universal during his apprenticeship years (1952-58), when he served as an arranger, orchestrator, patchwork composer and deviser of scores using music from the studio library. His newly constructed "Monster Movie Suite" is a partial answer to what he was doing in those busy years.

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) called for music to match the monster (a hideously ugly, scary thing) as it kills scientist Mark (Richard Denning); in It Came From Outer Space (1953), a fiery object lands in the Arizona desert and causes panic; and in Tarantula (1955). "Terror Strikes" when the beast, swollen to epic proportions by an injection, starts eating people. 

- TONY THOMAS

Photograph: Creature from the Black Lagoon (courtesy of Universal Pictures)