WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967)
Composed and Conducted by Henry Mancini

Film Score Monthly Vol. 10 No. 7 / TT: 50:33 / 3,000 Limited Edition

Mostly known for his light, tuneful and pop-oriented music, Henry Mancini is not the first name one thinks of when it comes to horror and suspense. Nevertheless, the jazz-roots composer of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1962) and THE PINK PANTHER series excelled at painting grimmer aural pictures whenever the opportunity arose. As a young house composer for Universal, he provided enthusiastic Sturm und Drang cues for science-fiction monster opuses like THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) and TARANTULA (1955), while later sinister credits included Orson Welle’s TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), Blake Edwards’ EXPERIMENT IN TERROR (1962) and the bats-in-revolt horror movie NIGHTWING (1979).

One of Mancini’s best scores in any genre is for the 1967 suspense thriller WAIT UNTIL DARK. Based on a play by Frederick Knott, the film stars Audrey Hepburn (already associated with Mancini after BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S) as a blind woman terrorized by a trio of crooks, who seek a heroin-filled doll they think is hidden somewhere in her apartment. The story gradually builds from the criminals’ early attempts to deceive Hepburn with false friendships to a final, tense game of cat-and-mouse in the dark with a ruthless psychopath brandishing a knife (Alan Arkin, in a rare non-comedic turn).

Mancini bases his score on an ingenious concept: two pianos playing the same chords at the same time, except that one of the instruments is tuned one-quarter tone flat. The result is a slightly off-kilter, slightly queasy quality to the music that effectively unsettles us from the start. The dual pianos play a tick-tock-like pattern, an incessant undercurrent to the score’s main theme, which Mancini dubbed the “Theme for Three,” and is intended to portray the criminals as they go about their machinations. Also, as Lukas Kendall cannily points out in his excellent liner notes to the CD, the pianos’ “queasy echoes suggest a malfunctioning sonar” that ties in with the blind woman’s feelings of dislocation and her constant straining to sense the environment around her.

The melody for the “Theme for Three” is pleasant, purposeful and calm, but it’s a sly deception, just like the crooks themselves. The melody is alternately played by unorthodox instrumental choices such as electric harpsichord, electric guitar, and, in one eerie instance, the simultaneous playing of a piccolo with a whistler. Throughout the score, Mancini’s intimate-sounding orchestration favors strings while minimizing woodwinds and percussion and eliminating brass altogether. To this pared-down, almost black-and-white sound, we occasionally hear the tones and cries of novachord, sitar, and Japanese sho—tiny drops of malevolent color in their darkest hues.

As the plot heats up and Hepburn realizes the danger she’s in, Mancini responds with churning strings that start in their lowest registers but rise in pitch as her dread increases. The last several tracks illustrate Arkin’s final assault on Hepburn and showcase Mancini’s talent at building suspense. As the heroine rushes about her apartment smashing light bulbs, she’s accompanied by a rapid-fire ostinato from novachord and piano. On top of this, Mancini increasingly screws the tension with upwardly sliding strings, a spitting snare drum, dissonant novachord jabs and a howling soprano saxophone—all building to a crashing climax. Although the orchestration is totally different, the approach is very similar to a passage Mancini later composed for the crazed science-fiction horror hybrid LIFEFORCE (1984).

There are two additional motifs in WAIT UNTIL DARK that are worth mentioning: a music-box tune for the doll that exists both in the underscore and as a source within the film, and a romantic theme for Hepburn, which is more in line with the light pop that Mancini was famous for.

Film Score Monthly presents the entire dramatic underscore plus a couple of light-jazz source cues and a lyrical rendition of “Susy’s Theme” (sung by Sue Raney) that played over the end credits. All tracks are arranged chronologically as they were heard in the film and sound fresh and clear, as if they were recorded yesterday. The album concludes with some fascinating bonus tracks: an alternate Main Title that utilized the romantic theme rather than the creepy one, and some tests of the quarter-tone flat piano wherein we can hear Mancini discussing the takes with his recording engineer.

Limited to 3,000 copies, this is one of FSM’s best releases of last year. Be sure to check out the sound samples at www.filmscoremonthly.com or the label’s distributor, www.screenarchives.com

– Bill Cooke

You can contact Bill Cooke online at williamtcooke@yahoo.com. If you are a disc producer and would like your CD reviewed by Shameful Cinema, send review material to Bill Cooke c/o Shameful Cinema, 3007 Columbia Ave., Columbia, SC, 29201.