Eye of the Needle: The Deluxe Edition

Miklós Rózsa's penultimate film score comes to a comprehensive two-disc Deluxe Edition featuring both the film recording (previously unreleased) and album version.

Eye of the Needle was a WWII thriller based on a 1978 novel by Ken Follett, starring Donald Sutherland as a Nazi spy living in England. Stranded on a Scottish island while trying to return to Germany with vital war information, he starts a torrid romance with the unhappy and lonely wife (Kate Nelligan) of the local shepherd. Richard Marquand's direction so impressed George Lucas that it won him the job of directing Return of the Jedi.

By the early 1980s, Miklós Rózsa was the only major Golden Age composer still alive and laudably writing the same kind of timeless symphonic score that made him a Hollywood institution. His grand, sweeping music for Eye of the Needle is unabashedly romantic - vintage Rózsa - at turns suspenseful and brooding, pastoral and uplifting. It magnificently connects the film to its period while enhancing the emotion and drama.

Rózsa recorded his music for Eye of the Needle twice: first for the film, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, and then in an album version with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra in Germany. While the 13-track, 42-minute album (on disc two) has been released by Varèse Sarabande, this is the premiere release of the 23-track, 61-minute film version (on disc one)—making for the ultimate Eye of the Needle release, with new liner notes by Rózsa expert Frank K. DeWald.