Cat People [Classic Music for Val Lewton Films]

Personnel: Ondrej Dobo, Stanislav Benacka, Eugen Gaal, Milan Jagelka (bass voice).
Liner Note Authors: Robert Wise; Scott MacQueen; Curt Siodmak; John Russell Morgan.
Recording information: Concert Hall of the Slovak Radio, Bratislava, Slovakia (05/1999).
Editor: Ladislav Krajcovic.
Roy Webb (1888-1982) was never remotely as well established as a composer as his mentor Max Steiner, but he composed his share of good music in the course of scoring 300 movies in a career lasting more than 30 years. This collection is devoted entirely to Webb's music for the movies of Val Lewton, the producer responsible for Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Seventh Victim, The Body Snatcher, and Bedlam, among other notable low-budget suspense and horror movies of the early 1940s. Each of those scores is represented here, and it's a most interesting mix; no two sound alike, and each is more complex musically than meets the ear. Bedlam's music is the most traditional Hollywood music, deliberately evoking the 18th century setting of the film. Cat People and The Seventh Victim represent distinctly non-traditional suspense scores, built around memorable core motifs, dealing with their central characters' struggle with the forces of evil within and without; as it happens, Webb was at a disadvantage on The Seventh Victim in that the film's most effective musical moment was the party scene in which Johannes Brahms' "Waltz in A minor" was used to stunning effect over a telling piece of dialogue. His music for The Body Snatcher and I Walked With a Zombie are similar in that both utilize traditional folk sources as their bases: Scottish music in the case of The Body Snatcher and Haitian music in I Walked With a Zombie. The best parts of each score are represented, and they make more engaging listening than the other material, being less psychologically oriented and more extroverted, though "I Walked With a Zombie" would likely have worked better if it had included the sung material from the original film. The performance by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra under William T. Stromberg is more than competent, and the tempi and timbres of the recording capture the essentials of the original film material, which is complex enough but not always that interesting as music. It's revealing that the annotation gives about as much space to plot summaries and biographical information on Lewton as it does to the music itself. Clearly the concept behind the CD is a marketable one, even if the music itself lacks some of the substance that one is accustomed to hearing in the work of Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and others. ~ Bruce Eder