Essential 10: Juliette Gréco / Essential 10: Juliette Greco

The first thing that has to be clarified about this CD is that, although it's titled The Cinema of Juliette Gréco, it has only four tracks on which she sings. The idea is to compile music from the soundtracks of a half-dozen 1949-1958 films in which Gréco appeared and/or sang on the soundtrack, though she did not actually have a lead role in any of them. So after the first four tracks, the selections are entirely instrumental pieces to which Gréco did not contribute. It might be going too far to say this package is deceptive, as it is annotated with reasonable thoroughness, and doesn't claim to be a Gréco album (though it doesn't exactly claim not to be, either). But it seems fair to state that this is more for soundtrack buffs than Gréco fans, though the Gréco-sung tunes — including French and English versions of "Bonjour Tristesse" — are easily the highlights of the CD. If those sultry songs put you in the mood for more of the same from this interesting cult chanteuse, the remaining 65 minutes of the disc can't help but come off as a disappointment, comprised of relatively typical if varied '50s-era soundtrack music. The scores are often densely orchestrated and portentously melodramatic. Some folksier accents of accordion, nightclub jazz, and martial bands pop through on occasion in the excerpts from The Sun Also Rises, which also has some English spoken narration.