Jack Warden and Jean Marsh star in the sad tale of Jack Corey and Alicia. Corey is a convicted felon, although he claims that he killed in self-defense. He’s a decent enough guy, from what we see of him in thirty minutes, that you tend to believe him about that. But he’s been sentenced to solitary confinement on an asteroid which, Rod Serling’s narration tells us, is “nine million miles from Earth.”
Okay, they’re not Hitchcock’s. He didn’t compose them. They’re Bernard Herrmann’s. Specifically, this collection includes the soundtracks to The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. Herrmann scored a lot of Hitchcock films, especially his big, splashy Universal ones. Popular films whose Herrmann soundtracks are not included herein are Psycho, Marnie (perhaps not as popular a film, but a beautiful soundtrack), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (the 1956 release, with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day.) He even served as sound designer on Hitch’s music-free film The Birds.
I first discovered Herrmann, like a lot of fans my age, because his music from The Day The Earth Stood Still and Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef, was prominently featured in Lost in Space. Herrmann did a lot of TV, a lot of it original, particularly for The Twilight Zone. I guess my next encounter with him was his moody score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, with Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney. That was one of the first CDs I ever bought, when CDs became popular. (The cassette era, in which I came of age, wasn’t especially kind to soundtrack-lovers. They were pretty much released largely on vinyl and then jumped to CD. There are exceptions.