A special Cheltenham Festival edition of Friday Night is Music Night on 11 July featured William Alwyn’s suite from the from the 1947 noir thriller Odd Man Out, as part of an espionage-themed programme celebrating eight decades of spy movies. The BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Karin Ní Bhroin, performed the ‘Police Chase’ and ‘Nemesis’ (finale) from the 27-minute work. Listen to the broadcast here.
Alwyn’s score for large orchestra including harp and celesta is built around a series of leitmotifs, with a tragic, world-weary mood. The ‘Police Chase’ sequence is in a frantic triple-time, with urgent brass fanfares and coruscating string writing; the finale is a portentous Lento funebre, with glowering brass, timpani, and a lamenting theme passed around the strings. It was recorded by Richard Hickox and the London Symphony in 1993.
Odd Man Out, written by R.C. Sherriff and directed by Carol Reed, starred James Mason as Johnny McQueen, a member of an Irish nationalist organisation in hiding from the authorities; the film follows McQueen as he tries to evade capture and escape the country after being wounded in a robbery, with the film reaching a tragic, dramatic climax; its shadowy depiction of the backstreets of Belfast presages the sewers of Vienna in which Harry Lime hides out in Reed’s subsequent espionage classic The Third Man.
Alwyn composed over 70 film scores over the course of his career, with his music created for films during the Second World War deemed so effective at boosting public morale making him a prime target for the Nazi regime, were they to have ever invaded. For a complete list of the suites compiled by Alwyn from his film scores available through Faber Music, click here.