I'm a fan, too! Did you happen to notice how much more music was in the film? I know that most of the Paramount Friedhofer materials Intrada had available to use for those releases were incomplete, alas. Friedhofer seems to have had bad luck at multiple studios in terms of many of his greatest scores surviving only partially (or sometimes not at all, like White Feather).
Yavar
When he was scoring "White Feather", Friedhofer reportedly went to Alfred Newman, concerned that he wouldn't have time to do his best work. Newman allegedly told him to reuse score he had composed for "Broken Arrow" as nobody would ever know the difference.
At least we have Broken Arrow, which is probably top 10 Friedhofer for me… but I suspect if White Feather had survived it would have been in better sound, so it’s still quite a loss even though it reused a fair amount of material. Vera Cruz and Joan of Arc being lost is even sadder, though.
"Hugo Friedhofer: The Best Years of His Life: A Hollywood Master of Music for the Movies" by Linda Danly is a great read, filled with so many insights and anecdotes! I would never have know of BRIDE OF VENGEANCE without its mention there. I'm now engrossed in listening to BROKEN ARROW, a masterpiece.
We first heard A WALK IN THE FOREST was being worked on almost a decade ago I’m pretty sure. I really hope it finally comes out! My anticipation is great.
Another good film and score by Friedhofer is THREE CAME HOME with Claudette Colbert and another great performance by Sessue Hayakawa 7 years before THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI.
I agree Joe. The technology was apparently there for Kritzerland to rescue more of Rains of Ranchipur and Seven Cities of Gold than Varese originally released, so why not get Chris Malone on the job and rescue more of those two great scores as well as any others that can be done?
Here’s hoping more actually survives and it was just too damaged at the time to include, but new tech might be able to restore more.
The complete SO DARK THE NIGHT survives on acetate and in very nice shape. It's a great B mystery that Friedhofer scored at Columbia in 1946.
Are these acetates residing in Last Child's garage or cellar?
No, the BYU has them (as well as a few other Friedhofer items) and I have been waiting for years and years that any US label would release them on CD, but nothing at all happened till now. Is BYU not cooperative so that a CD would be too costly to produce or are the labels not interested as the film isn´t that popular?
