Ever since a short 7 minute suite from Joy in the Morning showed up on Rhino's The Lion's Roar CD I had a feeling this score would show up in its entirety. Now that FSM has made an assault on MGM scores along side 20th ones, this was one of the possibilities.

I've always liked this strange film even with Richard Chamberlain being harsh and homophobic. It starts with a neat stunt--a kid climbing a staircase in roller skates--and settles into its story about the pressures a young married couple face living with each other at a college in the 20s. One idea I've always liked is the bit where Yvette Mimieux waits outside the classroom on the stairs while her husband is in class inside. And, one very sweet moment comes when the gay florist calls Yvette Mimieux some word she's never heard before and she looks it up later in a dictionary and realizes it was a very nice compliment.

Herrmann's score is very lush and romantic and sounds like Vertigo as Blue Denim does. In fact, it sounded so typical Herrmann/Vertigo that Hitchcock, already souring on Herrmann, was displeased with it, hoping that Herrmann's score to Torn Curtain wouldn't sound like that too (it didn't, but that still didn't help things).

FSM also is putting out The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing as someone on the board hoped they would. I know the Williams fans are glad to have another one, but I don't really care for this score much. Unless you like that folksy, country sound, I'd stay away from this.

Now if FSM wants to tell us what their Tiomkin is going to be..............I'm all ears.

I dislike a lot of Bernard Herrmann because of his incessant heavyosity. His fever-pitch lush-shtick leaves me absolutely cold.

The score sounds a great deal like Marnie and has sections that would appear in the Clarinet Quintet. Then it's peppered with mini-scherzos like the one that comes when Gregory Peck greets his family in the first act of Cape Fear. Hell, what else do you need?

I have to agree with Lou that the vocal is crappy. "These are the things I will give to my darling. These are the things to my darling I'll give." -- What the hell is that!?

Anyhow, onto the good stuff.

I never thought I'd find myself enjoying scores that are so much strings and so little brass, but Herrmann is able to keep my interest. I'm a pretty new Herrmann fan, as I've been only enjoying his work for a little over a year.

For this one, I guess Herrmann had a theme shoved down his throat, and in response, he decided to shove it down ours. I think it's an enjoyable theme, but it sure is used quite a bit. The sequencing of the album may be to blame for making some of this repetition worse at the beginning of the album (film order, I assume), but I'm too lazy right now to rearrange the tracks into a better listening experience.

The sound quality of the album is alright. The violins sound a bit "weird," but I can't quite describe why I feel that way.

MARK HOCKLEY SAID: "Herrmann does 60s romance! But of course with this composer there is always a shadowy undercurrent, one that darkly shimmers through every note of this intriguing score. Prominently featuring a trendy (for the time!) title song written by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster (with a vocal rendition by Richard Chamberlain on the MAIN TITLE), unfortunately it's not really very good. Herrmann's original music on the other hand is lyrical and lush, despite being borderline melodramatic at times, but thankfully he manages to counterbalance this with his usual penchant for dark subtlety. The composer also makes interesting use of the rather bland title song, giving it various imaginative interpretations and references throughout the score (THE WAITING ROOM/PORTICO, THE SHOWER, THE NEW LOOK etc.), but a lack of diversity is the soundtrack's biggest demerit and there are few outstanding moments. Even so, anything by the truly great Mr. Herrmann is a must have, although this is in many ways a minor work in terms of his formidable career. Despite this, it is still worthy of attention and displays yet again his singular emotionally charged outlook, one that coupled with a certain darkness of the soul has created some of the most enduring film music ever written."

PETER LANE SAID: Herrmann, as so often in the later years found himself hemmed in by a title song, this time from the ubiquitous Sammy Fain, which he was obliged to use extensively...There is also a haunting love theme of the composer's own invention.

Nevertheless, throughout the score there is an inescapable sense of Herrmann revisiting in a fairly uninventive way the emotional and aural world he had fashioned in VERTIGO and subsequently explored in TENDER IS THE NIGHT and MARNIE.

None of this was lost on Alfred Hitchcock. Having just seen JOY IN THE MORNING, the director remarked to his assistant that Herrmann was using music that rightly belonged to his films. Thus, the stage was set for the disastrous argument the following year between the two men over the score for Hitch's next film, TORN CURTAIN.

The anecdote about Hitchcock hearing the Joy score and not liking it was in Smith's bio of Herrmann. It almost seems as if Hitchcock was souring on the Herrmann sound so that no matter what Herrmann wrote for Torn Curtain it was likely Hitch was going to be unhappy and reject it. In the documentary on Herrmann, David Raksin calls Hitch names for being disloyal to Herrmann. But perhaps Hitchcock was actually being loyal to Herrmann, giving him the job and taking the chance in letting him try to do something new when he was really thinking about another sound altogether. The problems with that were two-fold: 1) You hire Herrmann you get Herrmann not Herrmann doing some pop group and 2) Hitch should have had the sense to realize that Torn Curtain required a Herrmann sound rather than something that could sell LPs.

A similar thing happened between Hawks and Tiomkin on Hatari!. Hawks was souring on orchestral scoring altogether. He asked Tiomkin for a score that didn't use an orchestra! Tiomkin was baffled on what to do and was fired. Hawks hired Henry Mancini to get the kind of jazz scoring that Mancini had done for Peter Gunn and Breakfast at Tiffanys. But in that case Hawks's instincts were right and the results were great. I love Tiomkin but I don't think he would have come up with the Baby Elephant Walk no matter how hard he tried. Perhaps Hitchcock had something similar in mind or atleast Hitchcock's bosses did (it seems that during the 60s everybody suddenly hated the Herrmann sound). But it couldn't work for Hitchcock as well as it did for Hawks. Torn Curtain was a weaker Hitchcock film to begin with so it needed all it could get and in the end by dumping Herrmann it didn't get it.

As for Joy in the Morning, it's a neat little film and it's great that there is Herrmann in there. The score might have echoes of Vertigo and Marnie but at least Herrmann put a little body into the score so that it's still a "joy" to listen to.

Don't hit me for saying this, but those stunted puppies mean more to me than VERTIGO. I prefer that sparsely instrumented chamber music to his full-orchestral lushwerks. But I found out that the limited instrumentation wasn't Herrmann's choice. According to Bill Wrobel: "Herrmann was required to conform to a previously set orchestral guideline for this already started outer space theme music."