One of film director
Alfred Hitchcock's early efforts was the 1935 classic movie mystery The 39 Steps. Using only four actors to play more than 100 parts, Patrick Barlow adapted the film script into a comic play that opened a successful run in London's West End over 70 years later, on September 14, 2006. Although it was a straight (i.e., non-musical) play, The 39 Steps employed lots of background music, most of it borrowed from the original film and other
Hitchcock movies, which seems to have given Reynold D'Silva of Silva Screen Records the idea for this album. Silva Screen specializes in re-recordings of film scores, usually done by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, and the label has been ingenious in finding ways to recycle the new recordings on a series of albums. It already had in its library versions of the
Hitchcock film music, and so assembled this compilation, billed on its cover as "music from & inspired by the hit West End show." That isn't quite true, of course. The phrase "from & inspired by" tends to get slapped onto movie soundtrack albums to signal that some of the tracks aren't actually heard in the cinema. But, of course, none of this music was "inspired by" the play, since all of it was recorded at least a decade before the play opened, and in some cases quite a few decades before. (The disc concludes with a couple of British dance band hits of the '30s.) That doesn't matter too much, however. The potential customer simply should consider this an album largely consisting of music from
Hitchcock movies, some it famous and highly identifiable music, such as the stabbing-strings cue that accompanied the shower scene in Psycho. How that is made to work in "the Crofter's Cottage and Chase on the Moor sequences" in the stage version of The 39 Steps, as the annotations put it, is another matter that may be answered by attending a performance in London or, starting April 29, 2008, on Broadway. ~ William Ruhlmann