SOURCE: "Write It Black: Roy Webb, Lewton and Film Noir," in Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 48, August, 1981, p. 168.

In the following essay, Palmer examines composer Roy Webb's contributions to Lewton's films.

Film noir attracted some outstanding individual scores from composers generally better known for their work in other contexts: Hans Salter's Phantom Lady, Max Steiner's The Big Sleep, Miklós Rázsa's Asphalt Jungle, David Raksin's Force of Evil. But Roy Webb, one of the least fêted and most underrated of all Hollywood composers, displayed a particular talent for translating both horror and violence, and their more subtle and far-ranging nuances, into musical terms—largely through a wide spectrum of modern harmonic resource and an intuitive understanding of the atmospheric properties of orchestral colour.

Webb was born in New York in 1888 and attended Columbia University. While there, he was asked to take charge of a sixteen-year-old boy who...