Category: Daily Dispatch

Spooky comedies – a seeming oxymoron. Yet over the decades, perhaps in an attempt to subvert our fears or to generate laughter from tension, filmmakers have frequently juxtaposed humor with the supernatural or, at any rate, death.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll hear music from “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1944), about two seemingly innocuous spinster aunts who poison lonely old men and have them buried in their basement. The rest of the family’s pretty kooky, too. There’s the uncle who believes he’s Teddy Roosevelt and that he’s digging the Panama Canal. There’s the brother, disfigured by plastic surgery, who is a murderer-on-the-lam, holding up in the house, unaware that his body count pales next to that of his unwitting hosts. And then there’s poor Cary Grant. All he wants to do is get married.

The score, by Max Steiner, is as manic as Grant’s performance – perhaps a mite overdone, with its breakneck allusions to familiar melodies – but it bears the same distinctive gloss as other Steiner classics like “Casablanca” and “Gone with the Wind.”

The first of nine collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann was a black comedy titled “The Trouble with Harry” (1955), a droll farce about a corpse that materializes in a New England community and can’t seem to stay buried. The film starred John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine. Harry is first discovered in a gorgeous, leaf-strewn Vermont landscape, not unlike the autumn that we are experiencing right now.

We’ll also hear music from the Don Knotts comedy, “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” (1966). Vic Mizzy was the composer, and I think it’s immediately evident that this is the man who also wrote the music for “The Addams Family.”

Finally, we’ll have selections from Tim Burton’s loosey-goosey Michael Keaton vehicle, “Beetlejuice” (1988). In a kind of twist on “Topper,” Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play a recently-deceased couple who try to scare off the inhabitants of their former home. In desperation, they enlist the services of a manic “bio-exorcist” by the name of Beetlejuice, and things get seriously antic.

The music is by Danny Elfman, as always a fan of Nino Rota, although he also pays homage to the Stravinsky of “The Soldier’s Tale” and frequently alludes to Raymond Scott. There’s even a touch of Bernard Herrmann in one of the tracks, as Elfman evokes the skeleton fight from “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.”

It’s a mishmash of horror and humor this week, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network, and at wwfm.org.