Garden of Evil

In the Fifties Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin were the usual go-to guys for Westerns, but Bernard Herrmann managed to get in on the act in 1954 with his score for Henry Hathaway's Garden of Evil. Although the composer would go on to write music for the television shows Gunsmoke and The Virginian and provide a score to Burt Lancaster's The Kentuckian, it is not a genre that many people associate him with.

Garden of Evil is essentially a Western variation on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which is itself a kind of neo-Western. The picture starred Cary Cooper, fresh from his Oscar-winning role in High Noon as the town marshal standing up against impossible odds. Susan Hayward appeared in her third Herrmann-scored movie as the woman who hires Cooper and his fellow prospectors to rescue her husband from hostile Indian territory. Another Western stalwart Richard Widmark was along for the ride.

The movie was filmed on location in southern Mexico and made good use of the rugged terrain, and Herrmann responded with some equally rugged music. Mining themes he had used for his First Symphony (written in 1941 around the time of Citizen Kane), he provided a loud and brash score with the blaring horns and strident timpani that were becoming his stock in trade. The score does have its quieter moments: a lilting cantina song ("Me-Mue"), softly crooned on the soundtrack by Rita Moreno, and a playful Appalacian-tinged piece called "The Wild Party", which anticipates the idiom of Herrmann's later score for The Kentuckian. The overall impression, however, is one of doom and gloom, and for some Herrmann laid it on a bit too thick. A reviewer in Variety objected to the "misuse of [...] the background score" and went on to say that "the music is permitted to become so busy that it is impossible to concentrate on the drama."

The original soundtrack is available on Bernard Herrmann at Fox Vol 2 (VSD.6053), which I've been listening to while writing this. A re-recording of the complete score is also available on the Marco Polo label (8. 223841). I've not heard this version but, given that it comes from John Morgan and William Stromberg, I'd bet my last plugged nickel that it's a sublime recording.