Pic girl in TV & Movie Soundtracks

"The Girl Most Likely" (01/07/2003) Soundtracks Original Soundtrack, DRG (USA)Original score composed by Hugh Martin & Ralph Blane. Originally released on Capitol (W930). Includes liner notes by Hugh Martin. All tracks have been digitally remastered. Some soundtracks are more interesting for the people involved with them than for the music they contain. Such is the case with the modest movie musical The Girl Most Likely, which opened in late 1957 and spawned a soundtrack album in early 1958. The film was a remake of the 1941 comedy Tom, Dick and Harry, about a woman, played by a non-singing Ginger Rogers, who struggles to make up her mind among three suitors. The new version starred the reliable Jane Powell, the songs were written by the team of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, best-known for Meet Me in St. Louis ("Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," "The Trolley Song"), and the music was arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle, who did similar duties for albums by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and others. The result was a group of competently sung, pleasant enough songs that touched upon such relevant subjects as indecision ("I Don't Know What I Want") and social climbing ("We Gotta Keep up With the Joneses"). No hits emerged from the score, and the film was just a minor success, so the album went out of print and was only restored to availability 45 years later, when DRG Records licensed it from Capitol and put it out on CD with new liner notes by Martin. Although digitally remastered and in excellent sound, the album is not otherwise augmented or annotated. There are no bonus tracks, and the mystery of Richard Pribor's involvement is not cleared up. (Pribor is sometimes credited for extra lyrics on "We Gotta Keep up With the Joneses" and for "Wedding Fantasy," which may be "Pink Cloud Music," here credited to Riddle and Bob Russell.) Still, it's nice to have even a minor work by these principals back in print. ~ William Ruhlmann