Search - Harry Revel, Mack Gordon :: Holiday Inn (1942 Film) / Road To Morocco (1942 Film) / Two For Tonight (1935 Film) [3 on 1]

Good music, bad collection

Mark Savary | Seattle, WA | 07/19/2000

(2 out of 5 stars)

"At first glance, this is a pretty good deal; the soundtracks from three Crosby films, with Fred Astaire along for the ride. Unfortunately, this particular deal is not so hot. An import from Italy, this CD is nothing more than a dub of the sound channel from the films. That is, a copy directly from the audio portion of a VCR tape, complete with sound effects and dialogue. You could of course achieve the same thing yourself if you had the films at home. If you are not very familiar with the films, then the dialogue and background effects will be totally out of place and just sound weird. There are also long music cues that make sense when watching a film, but do not translate well to an audio CD.On the plus side, the "Holiday Inn" tracks include "Say It With Firecrackers" and "Hollywood Montage", both of which are not on the official soundtrack release. There is the complete July 4th dance sequence with Fred's fancy firecracker footwork.If you're like me and really love these wonderful films (especially "Holiday Inn"), you'll find this slapdash disc quite nettlesome. But if you don't care about the sound quality (which is also suspect), and you can ignore the odd dialogue snippets, poor editing of intros and outros, and such other annoyances, then go for it. The price is right.Overall, this is great music, so I can't say I got burned. But it would be best to stick with the original soundtracks if you want quality processing."