Nine times out of ten, when I see a 1940s or ’50s movie and can’t place the music (is it Steiner? maybe Victor Young?), the answering credit on the screen will proclaim: Roy Webb. This self-effacing composer produced some 300 Hollywood scores yet is the man least remembered when one is talking about film music. William T. Stromberg and John Morgan, who helm 90 percent of Marco Polo’s film music series, have tried to set that right with this release, which features suites from the moody horror films associated with producer Val Lewton. The music is barely noticeable when you watch the movies, partly because of the noisy optical tracks, which swallow woodwind solos like a frog gulps mayflies; but also because these scores don’t call attention to themselves owing to their effectiveness at complementing the movie they accompany. In his excellent notes, which really amount to an extended essay, Scott MacQueen points out that Webb was the very best composer at writing music that could accompany dialogue without obscuring it. Taking the scores out of the movie and putting them in the studio and on CD allows us to discover some positively rhapsodic melodies and some genuinely scary stuff, too, all of it totally effective. This is music of very high quality, and it is played to a turn by the excellent orchestra. Stromberg unerringly guides the players in the right direction to produce readings that seem entirely idiomatic and definitive. The recorded sound is about as good as one could ask for.
