King Creole Review

This is the last thing he made before conscription, and it is the high point of the soundtrack model rather than an exception to it. The picture was a serious one and the songs were commissioned accordingly. Trouble is the standout, a slow, swaggering blues with a horn stab on every line and a vocal that is genuinely menacing, and it still gets used whenever anyone wants to signal danger. Hard Headed Woman is a jump blues with a New Orleans brass arrangement.

Crawfish opens the record with a street vendor's call traded between two singers, which is a far stranger and better idea than anything on the previous soundtrack. Dixieland Rock and New Orleans do the local colour job efficiently. It runs twenty four minutes and does not waste any of them. The only mark against it is scale: these are film cues, well written and well played, and none of them is trying to be more than that. Within those limits it is close to faultless.