Soundtrack
- First complete recorded history of perhaps Franz Waxman’s most underrated score
- Original film recordings very scarce and can only be heard in full on home video
- Waxman’s own contemporary adapted and conducted concert suite is also rare
- Hoped to emulate Spellbound Concerto’s phenomenal success but sadly flopped
- It was unavailable for over 30 years; modern re-recordings now far more common
Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.
The Paradine Case: Making of a Masterpiece; Collectors Guide, Part 2: Home video, 3: Soundtrack

“I’ll play my own theme tune.” Alida Valli by John Miele for Kodachrome (alt)
Contents
Film recordings
- Cinezik 2-LP Best Scores From AH’s Films (2020)
- Disques Cinémusique MP3 Best Gregory Peck/Charles Laughton/Franz Waxman Movie Themes
Paradine’s scoring duties were deftly handled by the prolific, 12-time Oscar nominee and two-time winner, Franz Waxman, who also notched up Rebecca, Suspicion and Rear Window among his illustrious credits. Apart from the above 1½-minute snippet played over the film’s opening credits being lifted for a trio of kosher compilations and a ropy collection from UK bootleggers Enlightenment, no original soundtrack music has ever been released. This is almost certainly because, along with those for the other Hitch-Selznicks, the original masters no longer exist. However, in their absence we do have the isolated music and sound effects track on the remastered US releases, which are the best way to enjoy this sorely underrated gem. Such blended tracks were specially produced by studios to facilitate dubbing in foreign markets.
- Hitchcock’s Music (2006) – Jack Sullivan | interview, podcast, video | review/#2/#3/#4
Though scored by Waxman, Paradine has some stock music; for instance that accompanying the café scene appeared earlier in George Sanders-starrer Action in Arabia (1944) scored by Roy Webb and then was reused in Notorious, scored by Miklós Rózsa. Interestingly, the piano piece Mrs. Paradine plays at the start of the film is indicated by her sheet music as being “Appassionata” by Francesco Ceruomo. This is actually true; it’s her own (and the film’s main) theme, attributed to the Italianised version of Franz Waxman’s name (cera: wax, uomo: man). Further, he was a German-Jewish émigré and Waxman was itself a translation of Wachsmann, his original name. I’m stuck for another non-comedic example where the main character introduces a film or just themselves playing their own theme; any suggestions?
- Nathan Platte: Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood (2018) book site, review/#2
- Musical Collaboration in the Films of David O. Selznick, 1932–1957
- Deceptive melodies: musical fetishes and motivic manipulation in TPC/alt
- Conducting the Composer: Selznick and the Hollywood Film Score in Music, Sound and Filmmakers (2012)
Paradine suites
The music from The Paradine Case found in this album is a special arrangement of Franz Waxman’s score for the David O. Selznick production. Actually, it is a recomposition of the thematic material from the score, presented in rhapsodic form for piano and orchestra. The main theme, which runs throughout the piece, is a haunting nocturne which pictures the sphinx-like beauty and strange attractiveness of the film’s main character, Mrs. Paradine, played by the beautiful and talented new Selznick discovery, Valli.
We hear this theme in many variations and in different rhythmic patterns. Toward the middle of side three, we hear the introduction of the “Keane Theme” as a horn solo. It is this theme which plaintively portrays the emotion of Gay Keane (played by Ann Todd) when she realizes that her almost idyllic marriage is slowly being destroyed by the fascination her husband, Tony Keane (played by Gregory Peck), has for the beauteous Mrs. Paradine. Toward the end of this symphonic poem, we come to a short piano cadenza. This is joined by the woodwinds, which drive the cadenza to a final climax in a recapitulation of the main theme. The album ends with a short and brilliant coda. – US Alco 78rpm shellac 2-disc set (1947) audio
Waxman’s 1947 suite has so far been reissued on:
- Entr’acte LP Kipling’s Jungle Book* +2 (1979) Symphony Orchestra, cond. Franz Waxman (12:25), also on…
- AEI LP FW and Miklós Rózsa Conduct Selections from Their Scores for TPC and Spellbound (1979)
- RDM Edition CD TPC and Spellbound (2013)
- Milan 2-CD/MP3 Alfred Hitchcock and His Music (2013)
*Notice to collectors
The selections on this album, released for the first time together on LP disc, were carefully mastered from the original 78-rpm editions by Ward Marston using the most advanced technics available today. As the original stampers of the Alco recordings could not be located, it was necessary to use the best available 10″ shellac disc pressings.

Joan Crawford, Franz Waxman and Mrs. Harvey H. Briggs (President of the LA Music Festival) at Warner Bros. Studios in 1947
Neither Franz Waxman’s The Paradine Case nor Roy Webb’s The Enchanted Cottage is, as recorded on this disc, an actual film score. Instead, each is a short rhapsody for piano and orchestra, a genre quite popular in the thirties and forties, arranged by the composer from the music written for the film. The presence of the piano in these rhapsodies is far from gratuitous, however, for the instrument plays a key, symbolic role in both films. In The Paradine Case, the piano is strongly linked to the character of Mrs. Paradine; in The Enchanted Cottage, it is associated with the entire narrative.
The Paradine Case was Alfred Hitchcock’s tenth feature film in the United States. Shot in 1947, the movie also represented Hitchcock’s third collaboration with producer David O. Selznick, with whom he had previously done Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945), and his third with composer Franz Waxman, who had earlier scored Rebecca and Suspicion. Unlike most producers, Selznick took a great interest in film music, and it was through his efforts that some of the earliest film-score recordings, including the 78 r.p.m. sets of Waxman’s Paradine Case and Webb’s Enchanted Cottage were made. And unlike most directors, Hitchcock was given a fair amount of control (for the time) over the use of music in his films, and the manner in which the score weaves in and out of The Paradine Case’s narrative very much reveals the master’s touch.
The Paradine Case is built around a very Orphic story concerning a man’s obsession for a mysterious woman whose life is in his hands, his excessive curiosity concerning her past, and his ultimate loss of her due to this curiosity. In this way, the film very much foreshadows Hitchcock’s later masterpiece, Vertigo. In the film’s initial shot, a butler opens the door of a splendid mansion. Two plain-clothes police officers who, as it turns out, have come to arrest Mrs. Paradine for the murder of her blind husband, are introduced into the house. On the soundtrack, we hear only the main musical theme played on solo piano. It is a sinuous, chromatic, typically Waxman melody not unreminiscent of the composer’s theme for Hitchcock’s Rebecca (which is also about a mysterious woman, although a dead one).
In a classically Hitchcockian manner, the camera tracks ahead of the police officers through the house, into a room, and up to the back of a woman sitting at a grand piano, playing the music (in the rhapsody recorded here, this version of the theme is heard towards the beginning, the first time the piano plays unaccompanied). In this way, Hitchcock actually presents the film’s main character, Maddalena Paradine (Alida Valli) as a musical theme before he presents her as a character. And thus, the audience is immediately captivated in an unexplainable, irrational way by Waxman’s haunting melody much in the same manner as Mrs. Paradine’s lawyer, Anthony Keane (Gregory Peck), will be captivated by her.
Keane, who has a reputation for never losing a case but also for having a flair for the dramatic, will later return alone to this same room (around halfway through the film), which turns out to be Mrs. Paradine’s bedroom. And here, Hitchcock goes to even more elaborate extremes to recreate the “strangely attractive” Mrs. Paradine via a kind of iconography that includes the music. Unusually, for instance, there is a large picture of Mrs. Paradine on the headboard of the bed. The piano, too, is in the room, and as Keane goes to it, we are shown the music Maddalena Paradine was playing at the beginning.
It is a work entitled “Appassionata,” the Opus 69 of one Francesco Ceruomo (both the opus number and the composer’s name are obviously tongue-in-cheek inventions by Waxman)! The music on the soundtrack, which is heard fairly literally some four minutes into the rhapsody, is basically the main theme played in elaborately arpeggiated figures over a romantic orchestral accompaniment. As the headboard with Mrs. Paradine’s picture comes into frame, a four-note motive is head above the piano and orchestra in a high flute solo that then descends in a rapid flourish that repeats the rhapsody’s opening cadenza.
Several other portions of the rhapsody are lifted more or less directly from the actual film score. Following the solo Appassionata, for instance, there is a disquieting section in which Waxman presents the main theme in parallel, mid-range dominant seventh chords (in the first inversion) eerily divided between solo violin and four violas over a pedal point in the basses and timpani. This music, somewhat recalling parts of Waxman’s justifiably famous Bride of Frankenstein score, is quite similar to that first heard during Keane’s initial interview with Mrs. Paradine in prison. (It is also worth noting that in the score itself, and in the rhapsody, an electric violin is used on several occasions to give an added intensity to some of the thematic lines.)
Later on (around seven minutes into the rhapsody), Waxman introduces a solo horn theme which, in the film, is used to accompany the scenes between Keane and his increasingly unhappy wife (Ann Todd). The contrast between the very diatonic structure of this theme (which, in its horn solo form, is heard behind the final reconciliation between Keane and his wife at the end of the film) and the more chromatic filigrees of the Maddalena Paradine theme very effectively accentuates the difference between the down-to-earth realities of Keane’s home situation and the mysterious world of sexuality and death embodied by Mrs. Paradine. – Royal S. Brown/Discogs, US Entr’acte LP (1979)
- Focus on Godard (1972) – Royal S. Brown
- Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (1994) – Brown
- Film Musings: A Selected Anthology from Fanfare Magazine (2006) – Brown
There are just two modern recordings of the rhapsody to date:
- Varèse Sarabande LP New Recordings from the Films of FW/alt (1986) Queensland Symphony Orchestra cond. Richard Mills (12:20), also on…
- Varèse Sarabande CD Legends of Hollywood: FW Volume One (1990)
- BSX CD/MP3 FW: Legendary Hollywood Vol. 2 (2024)
- Koch CD TPC: Hollywood Piano Concertos (1995) New Zealand Symphony Orchestra cond. James Sedares (12:06)
The Paradine Case: Making of a Masterpiece; Collectors Guide, Part 2: Home video, 3: Soundtrack
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This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.