Film Score Monthly CD: Wait Until Dark (2025)

A definitive 1960s soundtrack comes to CD at last: Wait Until Dark (1967), the brilliant, moody and haunting score composed and conducted by Henry Mancini.

The name "Mancini" resonates today as a master of light pop and comedy. One of the touchstones of his career—and of movie music itself—is "Moon River," composed for Breakfast at Tiffany's and conveying the beauty and heart of Audrey Hepburn. However, Mancini was endlessly inventive and relished the opportunity to showcase a darker and more dramatic side of his ability. One of the best chances came on another, very different Audrey Hepburn movie, Wait Until Dark, and he did not disappoint.

Wait Until Dark was a suspense masterpiece starring Hepburn as a blind housewife who is terrorized by three hoods (Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston) trying to retrieve a heroin-filled doll from her New York City apartment. Based on a stage play by Frederick Knott, the film features an engaging battle of wits between Hepburn and the thugs, and a truly terrifying climax as the nighttime confrontation foretold by the title comes to pass.

Mancini's score is a masterwork of color and mood, playing a haunting, minor-mode melody (in the style of Experiment in Terror) over a brilliant device: two pianos, tuned a quarter-tone apart, with the "wrong" notes eerily echoing the "right" ones. Combined with Mancini's melodic instruments—sitar, electric harpsichord, electric guitar, and a whistler in the main title—this recurring theme backed by the quarter-tone pianos (the "Theme for Three") turns his familiar big band style on its head.

A second major theme in the score (titled "Wait Until Dark," and sung in the end credits) is a more familiar kind of pop Mancini composition for Hepburn's good-hearted character, not quite "Moon River" but more in that style. The score also includes several upbeat source cues in the loungey Mancini tradition.

However, it is the music for the film's climax—dark, oppressive and terrifying—that will thrill fans of Mancini's dramatic scores such as Lifeforce. As Alan Arkin makes his frontal assault on the blind but not entirely helpless Hepburn, Mancini's throbbing strings and eerie sounds leave the viewer in a state of panic that one of the world's most famous leading ladies is about to have her throat slit.

This premiere release of Mancini's complete original soundtrack to Wait Until Dark is remixed from the original 1/2" three-track scoring session masters recorded at Warner Bros. Liner notes are by Lukas Kendall.

Henry Mancini (1924-1994) was, prior to John Williams (his former pianist in the Peter Gunn band), the most public face of film music. His"Moon River" and "Pink Panther" theme became pop standards and he changed the nature of film music through his deft use of instrumental color, jazz/pop songwriting forms and light dramatic touch. (It is often said that his bass lines were more memorable than most other composers' entire scores!)While he was most associated with sophisticated entertainment of the 1960s—a reputation he cultivated through his career as a recording artist for RCA—he could do all sorts of styles; see his brilliant, chilling thriller score for Wait Until Dark.IMDB