The Apartment / The Fortune Cookie

The Apartment was a huge success, and garnered an incredible ten Academy Award nominations (including one for Lemmon), and won five, including Best Picture. Adolph Deutsch, an underrated and really terrific composer, wrote the wonderful and popular score. However, the score's well-known main theme was, in fact, by Charles Williams, a British composer, and had been used years earlier in an English film. That theme, entitled "Jealous Lover" was made so popular by the film that the publisher agreed to re-name it "Theme From The Apartment." The music served the film perfectly, and the soundtrack album was hugely popular, as was the Ferrante and Teicher version of the theme. There is superb dramatic scoring as well as jazzier tracks, and the whole thing makes for a wonderful listening experience.

The Fortune Cookie was Andre Previn's last original Hollywood film score. And what a score it is—sly, beautiful, moody, funny—it has it all. In fact, it gives the film a surprising depth, and is just further proof of what an amazing film composer Mr. Previn was.

The Apartment and The Fortune Cookie were previously released on CD only as part of a very big and very expensive box set called The MGM SoundtrackTreasury from Film Score Monthly—that set sold out very quickly, so for people who missed it, or may have wanted only one or two scores, it was a lost opportunity. Therefore, we're very pleased to bring out this single release of two of the best scores from that set.

We've also added a bonus track from the Wilder/Lemmon film, Irma La Douce—the great Andre Previn main title music, which incorporates all the major themes from the film (both by Mr. Previn, and his adaptation of Marguerite Monnot's music from the original stage musical).

This release has been newly remastered. While we present the original LP sequencing, we have taken the liberty of putting the fantastic The Fortune Cookie main title back where it belongs, as the leadoff track for that score.

This release is limited to 1,000 copies only.