Except for correcting some misspellings, it is hard to see how David Ades's splendidly detailed, informative and profusely illustrated documentation here could be improved upon; and for all serious cinema buffs this generously filled disc of 15 tracks in digitally refurbished sound should be an essential item in their library. Except in two cases (one of them the Ministry of Information Western Approaches, for the fine score of which Clifton Parker received the princely sum of £100), the films represented here come from the immediately post-war period—the latest is the 1955 A Kid for Two Farthings (with delightful music by that master craftsman Benjamin Frankel).
The composers range from respected musical figures to notoriously near-illiterates like ''Slug'' Brodszky, who, it is frankly admitted here, needed to have ''collaborators'', who were rarely credited: as I well know from the years when I worked for Muir Mathieson, there were also others inadequately equipped for the exacting techniques of developing, scoring and fitting music to film, but they are spared mention. Some film directors wanted incidental music that would enhance the atmosphere without attracting too much attention to the soundtrack (sometimes resulting in scores so dependent on the visual sequence—like Malcolm Arnold's Sound Barrier—as to undermine their understandable independent existence); some films included a featured musical episode, like John Greenwood's exhilarating Irish jig in Hungry Hill and William Alwyn's subtly scored calypso in The Rake's Progress; fortunately we are given only one blatant example of the artistically often ruinous policy of basing a film's music on a theme song or tune specifically designed for commercial exploitation. There is one famous example, too, of a composer taking a film score of his as the basis for a concert work—Vaughan Williams's Scott of the Antarctic, which was elaborated into a symphony—though in many people's opinion it was more effective in its original form.'