VIDEO: Frenzy, Scored with Henry Mancini's Original Recording

You decide whether Hitch made the right choice—or not.

THEIR FACES ABOVE SAY IT ALL: Alfred Hitchcock, who might already know where this partnership is headed, has retreated into a stoic version of his go-to poker face, turning away in profile. Henry Mancini seems to be hiding his eyes in shame. Hoping for a score as sexy, stylish and bankable as that of The Pink Panther (1963) or Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Hitch tapped the Grammy and Academy Award-winning composer to score his Jack-the-Ripperesque thriller Frenzy (1972). Unfortunately, Mancini didn’t deliver this time—at least, not in Hitch's mind—and was dismissed via a third party. Ron Goodwin (Where Eagles Dare, 1968) stepped in and his orchestrations made it into the final cut. Afterward, Mancini's tapes languished in storage until they were finally remastered and released on CD in late 2022. Filmmaker and Hitchcock scholar Steven DeRosa (Writing with Hitchcock) painstakingly restored key scenes from the film with Mancini's music and he sat down with the HitchCon Monthly group for a watch party in which we played the Mancini clips next to Goodwin’s version.

DeRosa says: “It was fun to place these tracks into the film, which in many instances required separating dialogue tracks and reconstructing sound effects. The end result shows that Mancini and Goodwin took very different approaches to scoring the Master’s penultimate film.”

These publicity stills can be found at The Hitchcock Zone, which states: “These images of Alfred Hitchcock were among several found deep in the Pinewood archives by film historian Morris Bright when researching and writing a book on the Studios, published back in 2007. We are grateful to be able to display them on our site at this time.”