She gets too hungry for dinner at eight

Continuing my trip back through the 1958 album charts.

08/06/58 : Pal Joey OST - Various Artists


I've absolutely no expectations here for a bunch of songs from a film I've never heard of - what's the worst that can happen?

Hmm, it's a few Sinatra songs, most notably "The Lady Is A Tramp" (which is a fine track), a couple of Jo Ann Greer numbers. of which I liked "Zip" and a LOAD of orchestral filler. There's nothing terrible about it, but it all feels very inessential - I think you'd really have to love the film to bother with this.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on the last week of an eighteen week run, which seems amazingly successful. The rest of the top five were My Fair Lady, South Pacific, The Duke Wore Jeans and The King And I - a full house for soundtrack albums!

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the soundtrack - there is a section in the film entry which gives the most ridiculous level of detail about which tracks on the album are slightly different from the film version. The film is apparently loosely based on the Rodgers & Hart 1940 musical of the same name (four of the tracks, including "The Lady Is A Tramp" have been borrowed from other musicals) and was very successful - it paid for Frank's new house in Palm Springs, even though he didn't have top billing (which went to Rita Hayworth). 

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations", which suggests to me that absolutely nobody has listened to this album in the modern era - and I can't say that surprises me in the slightest. "The Lady Is A Tramp" is obviously always worth a listen, but I imagine it's available on an infinite number of Frank's best-ofs.

20/04/58 - Better than I was expecting
29/06/58 - Pleasingly short

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