"How to Murder Your Wife' and Other Fatal Attractions

Titling a film How to Murder Your Wife is probably not a maneuver that would succeed today, but in 1964 it was just fine as the name of a farce with Jack Lemmon as the prospective perpetrator and Virna Lisi as the intended victim.

Neal Hefti

Accompanying the action was an entirely characteristic but highly enjoyable, light-hearted score by Neal Hefti. This is the third such '60s score from his pen that has appeared here, following Sex and the Single Girl and Harlow. I'm posting it in response to a suggestion by longtime blog follower woolfnotes.

To fill out today's program, I've added nine "fatal attractions" - singles with "murder" (or in one case, "killing") in the title. Unlike Hefti's swingin' sixties motifs, these numbers from earlier decades cover the blues, jazz, Western swing, vocals and big bands - and even include another "murder" soundtrack theme.

How to Murder Your Wife

Lobby card

As you might expect, the How to Murder Your Wife proceedings were more innocent than the inflammatory title would indicate. The plot is more labyrinthine than I care to explain, but it involves Lemmon as an improbably rich cartoonist - with Terry-Thomas as a valet, no less - who ends up inadvertently married to the amazingly good-looking Lisi. The latter starts spending all his hard-drawn earnings and demanding constant sex, which wears Lemmon to a frazzle. He did have it tough, eh?

Terry-Thomas, Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi

Anyway, his fantasies of getting rid of her make it into his cartoon strip "Bash Brannigan," which star characters that look suspiciously like Lemmon and Lisi. I believe it all works out in the end, although Hefti finishes his score with the dirge, "Requiem for a Bachelor."

Bash Brannigan's fiendish plot

This all reflects the Playboy ethos of the time, and is so dated as to be seeming to come from another world. But there are compensations: Lemmon is always good, Terry-Thomas is perfect, and Lemmon's lawyer is played by the wonderful Eddie Mayehoff, he of the pop eyes and massive underbite. Also, Lemmon's enormous bachelor pad is not in the least dated - it would be in perfect taste even today, almost 60 years later.

Jack Lemmon and Eddie Mayehoff

Hefti's music is well suited to this Richard Quine comedy. You will immediately recognize its resemblance to his other scores of the period, including pre-echoes of the theme to The Odd Couple - another Lemmon opus.

The Other 'Fatal Attractions'

As usual with such compilations, I'll present the constituent parts of the "other fatal attractions" in chronological order.

First we have "Murder in the Moonlight (It's Love in the First Degree)," a contrived title if ever I've heard one, courtesy of the unknown to me but impressively named Ray Nichols and His Four Towers Orchestra, with its nasal vocalist Billie Hibberd. Nichols started recording as far back as 1925; this waxing comes from his final session, in 1935.

Lil Armstrong

"It's Murder" comes from the pen, piano and vocal chords of Lil Hardin Armstrong, by this time (1936) a veteran recording artist, here with her Swing Orchestra. This is a enjoyable piece from Armstrong, soon to be divorced from husband Louis.

Speaking of good music, it doesn't get much better than "She's Killing Me" from Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, with a classic lineup including vocalist Tommy Duncan, fiddler Jesse Ashlock, trumpeter Everett Stover and pianist Al Stricklin, all of whom Wills name checks. The disc is a cover of a 1931 Nichols Brothers effort. Wills recorded his version the day after Hardin's session (September 28, 1936), also in Chicago.

Tommy Duncan and Bob Wills

We move over to London for a 1937 date by American clarinetist Danny Polo and His Swing Stars, a group selected from Ambrose and His Orchestra, where Polo was ensconced in the reed section. "Blue Murder" is a Dixieland-tinged instrumental, a style that Polo and Ambrose's high-toned musicians handle pretty well.

J.B. Marcum

"The Murder of J.B. Markham" is an unusual outing for songwriter-singer Johnny Mercer. This folk ballad was apparently inspired by a field recording captured by Alan Lomax earlier that same year (1937). That was based on the true story of crusading attorney J.B. Marcum, who had been assassinated on the steps of a Kentucky courthouse in 1903. Mercer's record is the only one of our 78s that concerns itself with a real, as opposed to a figurative or fictional murder. His reading is lively but inappropriately jaunty.

From 1941 we have a hard-swinging instrumental, "Murder at Peyton Hall," from the big band of Charlie Barnet. The leader's alto is featured throughout the riff tune, with Cliff Leeman's powerful drums also much in evidence. Neal Hefti later would do arrangements for Barnet (notably "Skyliner"), but this chart is by the bandleader himself. The title's significance, if any, is a mystery to me.

Charlie Barnet serenades his pet Herman

Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh wrote "'Murder,' He Says" as a specialty for the hyper-kinetic Betty Hutton to introduce in the 1943 film Happy-Go-Lucky. Introduce she did; record she did not, at least not until this 1951 version with Pete Rugolo. By that time, the hep lingo had dated, but Hutton's knock-'em-down performance had not. She is far more lively than such genteel vocalists as Dinah Shore, who recorded the song back in 1943. You really only get the full Hutton effect from a video, by the way.

Dimitri Tiomkin

A much different experience is provided by Dimitri Tiomkin's "Theme from Dial 'M' for Murder," the film where Ray Milland tries to murder Grace Kelly (go figure). This Coral single is all that was recorded of the score at the time (1955). It was backed by the composer's far more popular "Theme from The High and the Mighty," which benefited in the film from Muzzy Marcellino's iconic whistling. The hit versions of the latter tune were by Les Baxter and LeRoy Holmes; the composer's own recording (not included here) was a late entry.

St. Louis Jimmy Oden

To complete our "fatal attractions" we have "Murder in the First Degree" by the veteran blues musician St. Louis Jimmy Oden, who was actually from Nashville and worked in Chicago. On this circa 1956 Parrot release, Oden is backed by the band of drummer Red Saunders, who in those days was a busy musician in the Chicago studios.

The How to Murder You Wife LP is from my collection; the 78s are courtesy of Internet Archive with restoration by me. The sound on all the singles is very good, except for some surface noise on Lil Armstrong's record. How to Murder Your Wife had the slightly shrill sonics that afflicted many 60s recordings. I've tamed that tendency a bit.