Hello!

Today’s links were found by the inquisitive Gary Teetzel, who points us to a worthy cause, film music-wise …

… a  The Night of the Hunter  Kickstarter Campaign to produce a new recording of the film’s Walter Schumann music score. The Kickstarter post is from Roger Feigelson, who includes some notes about the progress of the project (a lot seems to be done already) and what contributors can expect.

The Night of the Hunter of course has one of the best mystery-horror music scores ever — several cues chill the bones, especially the eerie vocals and the theme songs. I remember music producer-collector Bruce Kimmel being obsessed with the music — he got the rare original soundtrack album as a child.

The video provided at the Kickstarter page shows the actual session for the title cue, said to have been performed at the tail of a session for a different recording. The choir is a really good match!

And Gary Teetzel has a Radio Discovery for us … to avoid confusion, I’ll let him describe it in his own words :

“While driving to work today I was listening to the ‘audition show’ — essentially the pilot — of the 1947 adventure/suspense radio show “Escape”.  The drama stars Berry Kroeger, a busy radio actor of the time who didn’t become a regular in movies until the next year. Kroeger plays an English ventriloquist who seems to be going mad. He imagines that his dummy ‘Toby’ has a life of its own. He becomes jealous when Toby seems to want to leave him, to work with a more famous American ventriloquist. The ventriloquist’s derangement increases sharply, until finally ….. “

“Is all this sounding familiar?  I thought so, too, but figured there were dozens of ‘crazy ventriloquist’ stories out there.  Escape usually adapted short stories, so maybe it was just a coincidence. I was surprised, then, when the announcer at the end said that the name of the episode was Dead of Night, and thanked Universal Pictures for letting them adapt it. Universal distributed the Ealing Studios movie of  Dead of Night in 1945, so yes, it was an official adaptation. One more surprise: The voice of Toby the dummy?  Art Carney!     — Gary

You can listen to the episode here:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson