MovieScore Media expands its acclaimed Discovery Collection with its 13th entry: David Shire’s Primetime Emmy nominated music for the 1998 television version of Rear Window. Designed as an acting vehicle for the recently wheelchair-bound Christopher Reeve, The ABC production kept the basic premise of the original Hitchcock movie: wheelchair-bound Jason Kemp (Reeve) suspects that his neighbour Julian Thorpe (Ritchie Coster) murdered his wife, but nobody believes him. With the help of his beautiful blonde aide Claudia Henderson (Darryl Hannah), Jason gathers enough evidence to convince the police, but the killer is on to his schemes and confronts the paralyzed man in his own home...

At long last, David Shire's score for the 1998 television reworking of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic Rear Window is available through MovieScore Media's Discovery Collection.

Shire composed one of my all time favourite scores: Return to Oz. Yes, I know, a strange choice, but it is such an incredibly intricate and memorable score (forget that the movie is a pretty average kids flick) that I defy any serious soundtrack collector to not place it in their top 20 scores.

Rear Window is very much in a similar vein, containing several similar sounding segments of music. 'Windows 98' is one of the album's most impressive tracks (which tongue-in-cheek also incorporates a PC Windows 98-esque alert sound). 'Act In' pays homage to both Franz Waxman's original Hitchcock score as well as Gustav Holst's The Planets. In addition tracks like 'You've Got Mail' also "borrow" heavily from the original movie's score.

The album contains 19 tracks (53 min, 42 sec), and while it's by no means an essential purchase, I'd strongly urge any serious score collector to pick this up.

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Darren Rea