Quartet Records and Paramount Pictures are glad to present the world premiere release of the very cool score composed by Frank De Vol (Hush…Hush… Sweet Charlotte, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) for Robert Aldrich’s neo-noir 1975 film Hustle, starring Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Eddie Albert and Ernest Borgnine.
Hustle is about two weary and bitter LAPD detectives (Reynolds and Paul Winfield) who are assigned to investigate the death of a young woman whose body is found on an isolated beach. They conclude, with the support of the coroner’s report, that the victim, a hooker and known drug user named Gloria Hollinger (Deneuve), committed suicide using pills.
Frank De Vol was a brilliant film composer, a master of melody and orchestration, and a longtime collaborator on most of Robert Aldrich’s films since they began working together in the early sixties with Baby Jane. For Hustle, De Vol provides a terrific score dominated by a great noir love theme, suspense and tension cues, funky sounds, a kind of soft jazz, and dramatic music, always melodic and richly harmonized. One of De Vol’s best effort in film scoring, it has remained unreleased until now. Remixed from the 2″ 16-track session tapes maintained in pristine condition in the Paramount vaults.
As a bonus, we have included the short score for The Longest Yard (1974), another De Vol-Aldrich-Reynolds-Paramount collaboration. For this cult sports comedy film about a workaholic convict who recruits a group of fellow prisoners to play football against their guards, De Vol composed another catchy tune as a main theme, along with some brief underscore cues and adaptations of famous Americans marches. Sadly, the session tapes of this soundtrack are long missing, so the only source we could use was the mono stems, beautifully restored by Chris Malone for this release.
The package includes a 16-page full-color booklet with detailed liner notes by Tim Greiving discussing the films, the scores, and the brilliant collaboration between Robert Aldrich and Frank De Vol.
