Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  We have Orson Welles to thank for Herrmann’s movie music. The composer started out scoring radio plays for Welles, and after seven years of radio conducting, he moved to Hollywood at the request of the director. The studio behind Citizen Kane was keen to get the thirty-year-old newcomer on the cheap, but Welles insisted he received the same fee as one of the most sought-after composers of the time, Max Steiner, and straight off the bat with his debut film score, Herrmann received an Oscar nomination for Best Dramatic Score. Yet his music for Citizen Kane wasn’t victorious that year, beaten by another of his nominated scores, The Devil and Daniel Webster (also known as All That Money Can Buy).

  Herrmann worked again with Welles on Jane Eyre (1943), and during the 1940s the composer divided his time between work for the concert hall and the cinema. His great passion was conducting and he preferred to call himself a ‘composer who worked in film’ rather than a ‘film composer’. This was less to do with snobbery than his firm belief that music is music, whatever medium it’s written for. He would do his own orchestrations for film scores and was known for being very exacting with his musicians, often pushing them to their limits. The results, such as The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), speak for themselves – and didn’t he know it. According to Herrmann in an interview with Royal S. Brown, the director ‘only finishes a picture 60 per cent. I have to finish it for him.’

  Hitchcock had been keen to work with Herrmann about a decade earlier but conflicts with schedules or studios prevented it. He wanted the composer to score Spellbound in 1945 but that role went to another legend of Hollywood’s golden era, Miklós Rózsa, earning him the first of his three Best Original Score Oscars. However, Hitchcock had not been a fan of what he thought was intrusive music, despite the praised and much imitated use of the theremin as a byword for suspense, and Rózsa did not work for him again. Hitchcock had no qualms about cutting people, cast or crew, out of his projects.

  Herrmann was also unable to work on To Catch a Thief in 1955, so Lyn Murray took on scoring duties, and when Murray couldn’t do the following film, he put Herrmann forward. The rest is history.

  Hitchcock understood his audience. He placed them at the centre of each film, and chose to control or manipulate them, ensuring that they never got too comfortable. Ultimately, though, he knew his role was to entertain. One of the few directors to successfully combine mainstream and orthodox film-making with visionary and experimental methods, he was skilled at adapting to, and at times leading, cultural trends and the adoption of new technologies.

  In his fifty years as a film director, from 1926 to 1976, Hitchcock navigated his way through a fascinating period in cinema history, overcoming two seismic shifts in the industry: first the transition from silent films to ‘talkies’, and later the arrival of television sets in family homes. With the advent of the gogglebox weakening the big film studios’ grip on entertainment and popular culture, Hitchcock cannily became a television personality of sorts, hosting the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (later The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) for which Herrmann would score seventeen episodes. Hitchcock literally put himself into his work. With his film cameos and television introductions, his face became well known. People would go and see ‘an Alfred Hitchcock film’ solely because his name was attached to it.

  On leaving school, Hitchcock became a draughtsman in an engineering firm and studied art at the University of London. His first work in film was as a title designer, before he moved into directing. He carried the aesthetics of silent cinema into the new sound films, telling Truffaut that he viewed silent films as the ‘purest form of cinema’, a belief that would inform the use – or absence – of music in his later work. In fact, John Williams, who scored Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot (1976), maintained in 2012 that one of the main things he had learned from the great director was knowing when to stop the music and let the silence in.

  Hitchcock had made over twenty films in Britain before he was invited to Hollywood by producer David O. Selznick, and his first American movie, Rebecca (1940), was a success, receiving eleven Academy Award nominations and winning two, for Best Picture and Best Cinematography. It was the first of five Best Director nominations for Hitch, although curiously, considering his lasting appeal, he was never to win.

  The director worked with some of the greatest film composers, and collaborated on four projects each with Franz Waxman, including one of his finest, Rear Window (1954), and with Dimitri Tiomkin: Shadow of A Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953) and Dial M for Murder (1954). These working partnerships should be viewed as successes by the very fact the composers were asked back on several occasions, but the chemistry that Hitchcock would find only with Herrmann was lacking.

  When Hitchcock and Herrmann finally got to team up their individual careers were already at a high, and together they would climb even higher. The composer liked the idea of scoring a black comedy, and The Trouble with Harry, a macabre tale about a corpse that won’t stay buried, appealed to him.

  Perhaps underrated in comparison with their later collaborations, this is a very British film within an American aesthetic. Herrmann provided a light score, suggesting a disturbing humour within the rural Americana of the setting. He repurposed existing music from CBS radio series Crime Classics and incorporated his own original cues, artfully playing with western musical tropes by shifting them ever so slightly, leading the audience down a seemingly familiar path before arriving somewhere unsettling. The Prelude toys with musical expectations before throwing the audience off-kilter, hinting at the half-diminished seventh chord that would become the celebrated trademark for Vertigo and Psycho.*

  The dark humour of the film was far more appreciated by audiences in England and France than in the United States, and it was the only one of Hitchcock’s Paramount films not to make a domestic profit on initial release. However, audiences were much more receptive to it when it was re-released in 1963 in a double-bill with The Man Who Knew Too Much. Tonally, it was a strong influence for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series, for which the director asked that his introductions and conclusions were written in the style of this film.

  Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann while working on The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956.

  Viewed alongside their later projects, The Trouble with Harry might not be a ‘typical’ Hitchcock film or Herrmann score but it provides hints about how the two gelled. The director classed it as one of his favourite scores and, in 1968, after the two had gone their separate ways, Herrmann wrote the short suite Portrait of a Hitch, incorporating sequences from the score, and dedicated it to the director.

  Their second collaboration was a remake of Hitchcock’s 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), which had at the time relaunched his career as a skilled thriller director, but which he felt was ‘the work of a talented amateur’. With bigger budgets and decades more experience in his favour, Hitchcock set out to retell the tale of kidnappers, a mysterious murder, an assassination attempt and a holidaying couple caught up in it all.

  This is one of his most musical films in the sense that music has more of an overt presence: Doris Day’s on-screen rendition of ‘Que Sera, Sera’ won the Best Original Song Oscar and reached number two in the Billboard charts, and the film’s memorable climax takes place at a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where a shooting has been planned to accompany the crash of a cymbal.

  Some critics view this as a masterclass in the dramatic use of music, and there are hints of their core collaborative ‘sound’ taking shape, such as rising and falling arpeggios in key scenes. However, due to the presence of other music and the decision to keep Arthur Benjamin’s ‘Storm Cloud Cantata’ from the original film in the concert scene, this was not Herrmann’s greatest chance to shine. The composer orchestrated and expanded the piece, and while he didn’t make his mark over the whole score as he would for later Hitchcock projects, he appears in
the film as the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra at the concert. He reportedly won over the orchestra with his musical knowledge and tales of Hollywood. After shooting the film, the musicians presented him with a volume about the orchestra’s history, with the inscription ‘To Bernard Herrmann, the Man Who Knows So Much’.

  The Wrong Man (1956) quickly followed, based on the true story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, who was framed for crimes he didn’t commit – a definitive Hitchcock trope. Henry Fonda plays the lead role of Manny, a bass player at New York’s Stork Club, and elements of the score reflect the character’s jazz background. The film opens in the club with a terrifically – and misleadingly – jaunty prelude, the sort of music you’d want to greet you as you open your front door in the morning, at the start of what will turn out to be a fantastically successful day. Not quite so for the rest of the film. It is a sombre tale, at times unrelenting and frustrating, and the score reflects this.

  By the time Hitchcock and Herrmann worked on what would be considered one of their masterpieces, they had developed a mutual respect and understanding. A story of obsession and control, Vertigo received mixed reviews on release and wasn’t a huge commercial success, but it is now widely viewed as the finest and most revered Hitchcock film. In 2012, it topped a critics’ poll of the greatest films of all time, published in Sight and Sound – the official British Film Institute magazine. This honour had previously been held by Citizen Kane every decade since 1962. Director Martin Scorsese considers Vertigo to be one of his favourite films and its impact is far-reaching, including technical styles such as the famous use of the ‘dolly zoom’, which created the impression of vertigo for the viewer.

  James Stewart’s detective, John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, develops a fear of heights and is forced to retire when a colleague falls to his death. He is then hired by an old friend to watch his wife, Madeleine, who has reportedly become possessed by the spirit of her ancestor, Carlotta Valdes. Then it appears that Madeleine has died, and Scottie is tormented by her death. Months later he sees a woman with a resemblance to her, and he tries to recreate the dead woman through her.

  Hitchcock had wanted Herrmann to listen to Norman O’Neill’s score for J. M. Barrie’s 1920 play Mary Rose as part of his preparation, and apparently the studio went to great lengths to track down the only remaining vinyl recording in England for him, but a more prominent musical influence on the final score is the ‘Liebestod’ from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, especially in the famous ‘Scène d’amour’, a piece full of anguish, where love and obsession collide. Despite the title, it feels unsentimental, more a reflection of Scottie’s state of mind as he confesses his love for the woman known as Madeleine, continually building up to dangerous heights.

  Herrmann’s score for Vertigo is the longest for any Hitchcock film. He was in a position of freedom compared to composers who had worked for Hitchcock before: when the director submitted his usual detailed notes to the sound department, he kept some of the scenes vague, adding that the sound requirements would depend on what music had been written. For someone so methodical, this indicates the faith he placed in Herrmann.

  As with the following two films, Saul Bass designed the iconic opening titles, and Herrmann wrote the music to fit the visuals. Bass, himself an innovator who had previously worked with other great directors such as Otto Preminger, referred to Hitchcock as a ‘master’, and the titles prepare the audience well for the film, with disconcerting swirls and close-ups of an eye. The music matches perfectly, with foreboding arpeggios, and the spiralling music brings about its own sense of vertigo. However, Herrmann knows when to scale back the anguish, and there is real economy in the music in another famous scene when Scottie follows Madeleine around the streets of San Francisco. Incidentally, Herrmann didn’t think this was the best setting, and wrote the score with the heat of New Orleans in mind. It is a long scene with no dialogue, highlighting Hitchcock’s skills in silent films, and when Scottie is watching Madeleine in the graveyard, the music, colours and editing form a perfect bond. It really is a masterclass in film-making.

  From the dizzy heights of infatuation to a fast-paced thrill ride. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman set out to write the ‘Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures’ and the tale of Cary Grant’s advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill who is mistaken by a gang of spies for a US government agent, George Kaplan, is energetic, stylish and fun. More of an instant hit in the cinemas than Vertigo, North by Northwest was a strong influence on the James Bond series, and apparently Ian Fleming asked Hitchcock to direct the first film about 007. Imagine what might have been.

  The opening sequence starts as a green image before Saul Bass introduces grids of thin lines, fading to the New York traffic reflected in a building and later to the busy streets, and Herrmann’s ‘Overture’ brings it alive. Described by the composer as a ‘kaleidoscopic orchestral fandango’, it is repeated in various cues throughout the film, such as ‘The Wild Ride’, when Roger is driving to escape the clutches of James Mason’s Vandamm and also ‘On the Rocks’, the famous showdown at the top of Mount Rushmore. MGM Studios had asked for a score in the style of George Gershwin, but Herrmann characteristically ignored the request, preferring South American rhythms to express the cat-and-mouse dance that takes place throughout the film. Yet it’s not all frenetic, and the ‘Conversation Piece’ that features when Roger meets the beautiful Eve on a train to Chicago is dreamy and languid.

  The music was composed and orchestrated in fifty-one days. As was Herrmann’s style, he worked his way through the score from the beginning to the end of the film, sketching it out before writing a neat orchestral score in ink. It is a lean score, with only fifty-three minutes of music in a film lasting two hours, but it packs a punch. You’d be forgiven for thinking there is music during the famous crop-dusting scene, when Roger is pursued by a plane with nowhere to hide and take shelter, but there is none – another fine example of restraint on behalf of the composer and director.

  The famous story behind the shower scene in Psycho and the accompanying strings is that Hitchcock had asked for no score, but Herrmann wrote one anyway. The director had wanted to use just the sound of running water, and this would have been effective enough considering the shocking events unfolding on-screen, but the composer was convinced he could take it one step further. Storyboarded by Saul Bass and shot from a range of angles, this remains a truly disturbing scene, yet the addition of the controlled and inventive strings, played with such attack, heightens the dramatic impact: the high strings are prominent when the murder is taking place and the low strings take over after the killer has left. Hitchcock recognised how powerful the combination of visuals and music was and allowed himself to be proved wrong – on this occasion.

  The director was mindful that the shower scene, one of the twists in the film, would be crucial to the film’s success. The marketing campaign told audience members they had to arrive for the start of the film and this paid off because people would queue around the block to get a ticket. Equalled only by John Williams’ Jaws theme as musical shorthand that everybody understands, those strings embody fear in film, and Hitchcock acknowledged Herrmann’s contribution by placing the composer’s name at the end of the opening credits, just before his own.

  Another exercise in restraint, Psycho does not actually show much on-screen violence but allows viewers to piece the horror together themselves, ‘designed to terrorise an audience, but only in their mind’, as Hitchcock explained in an interview for television programme Speculation in 1969. The film was made on a low budget, in black and white, and Herrmann said he wanted to create a ‘black and white’ score to match, hence the sole use of strings. During the production, Hitchcock began to feel so despondent about the film that he considered splitting it in two and broadcasting it on his television show but Herrmann saw its potential and persuaded him not to, so we have him to thank for more than simply the music.

  The Prelude invites the audienc
e in with its beguiling speed and an intriguingly dreamy motif over the frenetic strings. Robert Ziegler, who has conducted live performances of the score to accompany film screenings, admitted at a Hitchcock study day at London’s Southbank Centre in 2017 that when it comes to this particular piece, his direction to the orchestra is always to ‘play faster’. The theme is repeated as Janet Leigh’s character Marion Crane drives away with the stolen money, adding urgency to an otherwise static close-up of a woman at the wheel, and during the rainstorm that leads to her fatal decision to pull into Bates Motel.

  Although the shower scene is cemented within our collective cultural compass, it is not the only example of complete synergy between visuals and score. Hitchcock was said to have described the editing process of private investigator Arbogast’s death scene in terms of music. The sudden strings that accompany a shot from above, showing the killer rushing out of the bedroom, can still make audiences jump out of their seats. Yet again, Psycho shows the strength in silence: in a key scene directly after Marion’s murder, there is no music or dialogue, and it makes for a compelling contrast to the strings and screams echoing in the audience’s ears.

  Despite the instantly recognisable parts of the score, Bernard Herrmann described another melody as the ‘real Psycho theme’: a simple three-note sequence in ‘The Madhouse’, when Marion Crane suggests to Norman Bates that his mother should be put into a home. The composer used it again in his final film score, during the end credits of Taxi Driver, because he viewed Robert de Niro’s character, Travis Bickle, as another ‘psycho’ who would attack again.

  Psycho did not receive unanimous critical praise on release but the public loved it and it was a box-office hit. Hitchcock commented in interviews that Herrmann’s music was a large part of the film’s success but some film critics believe that the cracks in their collaboration had already started to form by this point, because the composer had contradicted the director’s initial instructions about the shower scene. The two were close enough for Herrmann to be able to convince the director to listen to his work and consider it for inclusion in the first place, but for Hitchcock, who was known to hold a grudge, it might have been a struggle to share the limelight.