For Mel Tormé's recording "These Desperate Hours", released on the 1999 Rhino CD Mel Torme At The Movies, Rhino lists Burt Bacharach and Wilson Stone as composer and lyricist in the CD liner notes, and the recording and composer credits are likewise listed in Serene Dominic's 2003 book Burt Bacharach: Song By Song.
From what I can tell based on searching Discogs and other online sources, the Rhino CD was the first commercial release of the Mel Tormé recording of "These Desperate Hours", so the composer information was likely based on research by some Rhino employee. Because the Tormé song was identified by someone along the way as a tie-in to the 1955 Paramount movie The Desperate Hours, and Bacharach copyrighted a song titled "The Desperate Hours" in 1955, it was probably easy for a Rhino employee to confuse the two songs.
Bacharach's song was published by Paramount Music Corp., however, so his song was likely the actual promotional tie-in. It was released at the time, and Bacharach and Stone are credited on the record label, along with Paramount Music:
https://www.discogs.com/master/1693796- ... rate-Hours
If you listen to Tormé's song, and compare it to the 1955 recording by Eileen Rodgers and Ray Conniff of Bacharach's "The Desperate Hours", it's obvious in about three seconds that these are two completely different songs:
Here's the Eileen Rodgers song, which has some of the same frantic vibe as Bacharach's 1958 "Hot Spell":
Looking at the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series in Google Books, you will find a 1960 copyright entry for the Mel Tormé song as follows:
"THESE DESPERATE HOURS; w & m Mel Torme, Stanley Styne, & George Duning. Appl. author: Columbia Pictures Corp., employer for hire of George Duning & Stanley Styne. ©Colpix Music, Inc."
It's interesting that "These Desperate Hours" was published by Columbia Pictures Corp., not Paramount, the studio behind the 1955 film.
EDIT: I found the following item in Cashbox Magazine (VOLUME XXII-NUMBER 6 OCTOBER 22, 1960 ):
That would be "Dan Raven", a show that ran during the 1960-1961 season and was produced by Screen Gems, hence the Colpix copyright: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053495/... George Duning is penning the music and Mel Torme and Stanley Styne the Lyrics for “These Desperate Hours,” song for new teevee series entitled - “DanRaven.”
Here's the copyright entry:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ca ... frontcover
I would guess that the Tormé recording was thus made in 1960, and not in Oct. 1955, per the Serene Dominic book.
Interestingly, in Dominic's interview with Bacharach, BB says "That’s right. We were doing songs like movie promotional songs for hire. It’d be $500 a song. 'Desperate Hours,' I remember that."
If he actually remembered the song, he must not have been in the loop when Tormé's recording was added to the tracklist of Universal Music's 2013 Anyone Who Had A Heart : The Art of The Songwriter.
As a side note, if Bacharach meant "for hire" in the legal sense of "work for hire", it's interesting that he was willing to write songs for a flat fee early on. His copyright entry for "The Desperate Hours" does not include a line like "author: Paramount Pictures Corp., employer for hire of Burt Bacharach and Wilson Stone", as we see in the copyright of "These Desperate Hours", but perhaps such a line is not necessarily legally required when writers are doing work for hire.
So it appears that the Rhino CD got it wrong, and this error made its way into Serene Dominic's "Song By Song" book, and from there, into CD anthologies like El Records Burt Bacharach: The First Book of Songs 1954-58, the new Dream Big – The First Decade Of Songs from El sister label Cherry Red Records, and the previously mentioned Universal anthology.
Oh, and do you want to hear Bacharach's "The Desperate Hours" sung in Finnish? Of course you do!