Alfred Hitchcock Obscurities

Alfred Hitchcock

When it comes to music, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock is known for his collaborations with composer Bernard Herrmann on such productions as Vertigo and North by Northwest, and even his own 1958 LP Music to Be Murdered By. Today, however, we'll examine some of the more obscure records associated with the director's 1954-60 movies - including some discs that featured Hitch himself.

Let's begin with the records that feature the director's own, very recognizable voice - one that the moviegoer of 1960 would have known well from his 1955-62 television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. To promote his film Psycho, Hitchcock recorded a series of promotional discs not for airplay, but for use in the theaters themselves. These were to be heard in the lobby in the run-up to Psycho's opening, and thereafter while patrons were waiting in line to buy tickets, and then in the lobby.

Much of the content was based on the gimmick that no one would be admitted to the theater after the film had started - "no one, not the manager's brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)" as an accompanying poster made clear (below, with the label of one of the lobby spots).

The recorded spots are droll affairs, in keeping with Hitchcock's then well-established persona. In the line-queue recording he tells the listeners, "This queuing up and standing about is good for you. It will make you appreciate the seats inside." He proceeds to explain the no-admittance policy as follows: "Psycho is most enjoyable when viewed beginning at the beginning and proceeding to the end. I realize this is a revolutionary concept, but we have discovered that Psycho is unlike most motion pictures and does not improve when run backwards." All the Hitch spots are similar in tone.

The other recordings covered in this post come from two of the director's films of the 1950s, with three of them from one of his less-successful items, the 1955 comedy The Trouble with Harry. The first of these discs comes from the film itself. It is "Flaggin' the Train to Tuscaloosa," which is heard over the opening credits, supposedly sung by the lead actor, John Forsythe, but actually by bandleader Ray McKinley. The song, written by Raymond Scott and Mack David, was commercially released on Decca.

Ray McKinley and his Decca 45

Harry also spawned an exploitation song of the same name as the film, written by Floyd Huddleston, Herb Wiseman and Mark McIntyre. In that composition, "the trouble with Harry" is that he's a musician who plays the same riff over and over. This inspired two records - one by "Alfi and Harry," with "Alfi" played by the exasperated Ross Bagdasarian, 50s king of the novelty record, who tries to get pianist Harry to vary his tune. 

The other was by Les Baxter, taking a break from his exotica recordings to exhort Harry - who plays the baritone saxophone on this disc - to change his tune. While the two singles are surprisingly different, they are equally annoying. The idea is memorable, however - I can recall hearing the Bagdasarian record back when I was six years old.

Dimitri Tiomkin, Les Baxter, Ross Bagdasarian

Our final Hitchcock item is the theme from his 1954 suspense film Dial "M" for Murder, written by the distinguished film composer Dimitri Tiomkin. The theme veers from a menacing opening to a highly romantic main melody. It's a fine piece of music, although more conventional than Herrmann's scores, and so it has slipped into a perhaps undeserved obscurity.

These records all were cleaned up from Internet Archive posts.

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