This film is the last one in a set of 15 early Hitchcock films I just bought, released by TGG direct (whoever that is...). They are generally good prints and the soundtrack i.e. dialogue is generally pretty intelligible (in the talkies, obviously.)
Interestingly, apropos of this thread, the other film on the same side of the disc is "The Farmer's Wife," and that film I found awful for three reasons, the (long) length, the distractingly odd "dialogue" on the title cards (and I can follow British idiom pretty well) and the AWFUL music they used.
I'm reasonably sure neither of the films' scores are original, but are someone's choices added somewhere along the long road from 1929 to my DVD. "The Manxman's" was very well chosen Classical music (I recognized a very slow rendition of Liszt's "Liebestraum" I think at one point) that always fit the mood and almost seemed to be written for the film, which made the film so much more watchable than "The Farmer's Wife," which mostly used the same 3 or 4 less serious pieces (more like pre-Mantovani light orchestral muzak) over and over mostly indiscriminately and even broke into a totally inappropriate rinky-dink bucolic novelty piece that was way too cutesy and distracting. (Although to be fair, I think I heard a bit of Bizet once too.)
Essentially, I agree that the score is a huge factor in how I perceive a silent film. What I really enjoy is a silent horror film with improvised pipe organ music, but if you can't give me that, have someone who's serious about music and film make some good classical choices and I'll be happy.
reply
share