HITCHCOCK'S MUSIC: BOOK REVIEW

In the '70s, '80s and '90s, books on film music were relatively scarce, but today there's a glut of books on the craft, with some even devoted to individual scores, such as Bernard Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Danny Elfman's Batman. Of all the possible books that could be written about film music, one that absolutely demanded to be exist is Hitchcock's Music, which takes an impressively thorough look at not only the creative use of music in the Master of Suspense's films but also the process that resulted in those scores. The only surprising thing is that this book has been so poorly publicized -- I didn't even know of its existence until I stumbled across a copy at Barnes & Noble.

Hitchcock's films and their scores were among the primary elements that first made me a film devotee and a film music fanatic. Seeing Family Plot in its original release in 1976 was one of the formative events of my film-going life, and, living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, I was fortunate enough to have access to the revival houses of San Francisco, which regularly screened Hitchcock films (except for the handful of "lost" Hitchcocks -- Rope, Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, which I didn't see until they were re-released by Universal in the early '80s), as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which had a screening series of Hitchcock's pre-Hollywood films which tied in with the release of Donald Spoto's book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. Before I discovered Hitchcock I was an obsessive Harryhausen fan, so my love of Bernard Herrmann scores only increased my interest in Hitchcock.

What helps make Sullivan's book an engrossing narrative and not just a string of score analyses/histories is that Hitchcock's career manages to span several distinct eras of filmmaking -- he directed the first British sound film (Blackmail), moved on to become a top director in Hollywood's Golden Age (working with such masters as Friedhofer, Newman, Rozsa, Steiner, Tiomkin, Waxman, and of course Herrmann), experimented greatly with the use of music in films (the source-dominated Rear Window, the electronic-effects-scored The Birds), and battled the song-based commercialism of film music in '60s Hollywood. It also doesn't hurt that, beyond the greatness of his films, Hitchcock was among the most colorful of film directors, and some of the composers he worked with (especially Herrmann and Tiomkin) had similarly outsized personalities.

What makes this book especially necessary is that Hitchcock is not merely one of the great pioneers of visual storytelling in cinema, but as the chapters detailing his early films convincingly demonstrate, he was similarly groundbreaking in his use of music and sound, and it's rare to find a book that deals so thoroughly, and accessibly, with the use of music and sound in film. Musicologists may be bothered that Sullivan's prose isn't over-burdened with technical terms, but that makes it all the more readable for laymen such as myself

Sullivan takes a largely chronological look at Hitchcock's oeuvre, though he occasionally varies the chronology to group similar projects together, such as the World War II-themed projects (Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat). The first chapter deals with Hitchcock's earliest sound films, and convincingly demonstrates the director's imaginative use of the new technology, as well as introducing the prominence of music in his film's storylines. Blackmail, the first British sound film, is perhaps best remembered for the famous "knife" scene, where the heroine, having stabbed her would-be attacker, is tormented by the repetition of the word "knife" by her family members at the breakfast table, but along with the original score cues (by Henry Stafford, arranged by Hubert Bath), the film makes key use of the song "Miss Up to Date," the first of many examples of popular songs receiving prominent placement in his films, whether the sinister use of the "Merry Widow" waltz in Shadow of the Doubt and "The Band Played On" (sometimes referred to as "Strawberry Blonde") in Strangers on a Train, or the Oscar-winning "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)" from the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Murder features a radio performance of Tristan and Isolde (music which later influenced Herrmann's Vertigo score) at a pivotal point, while the author presents a fascinating exploration of the use of music in Hitchcock's underrated and little seen marital picaresque Rich and Strange. Even more unexpectedly, Sullivan presents an impressive defense of one of the director's least seen yet most maligned films, the Strauss biopic Waltzes from Vienna, even providing quotes from the director who was interviewed during the editing process (and it's a pleasant surprise to learn that the film featured Korngold arrangements of Strauss tunes).

Hitchcock's more popular British films of the '30s, though often sparsely scored (Sullivan discusses the questionable crediting of many of these scores to Louis Levy), had similarly prominent use of music in their storylines, from the corpse-on-the-organ of Secret Agent to the MacGuffin tune from The Lady Vanishes (which also has a musicologist hero). The juxtaposition of Disney's "Who Killed Cock Robbin" with a tragic scene provided one of the most emotionally devastating sequences in the entire Hitchcock canon, in Sabotage, while Young and Innocent, like The Man Who Knew Too Much, climaxes with a musical performance in which the killer plays a key role.

Hitchcock's move to Hollywood at the end of the decade resulted in Rebecca, his only Best Picture winner as well as the first Hitchcock film with a full symphonic score. Waxman's classic score was reportedly the composer's favorite of all his works for the screen, and the chapter on Rebecca goes into impressive detail about the score's history, though most of it will be familiar to anyone who's read Christopher Husted's extensive liner notes for the Varese Sarabande re-recording of the score. The details are fascinating, from the consideration of Waxman as an "insurance composer" for Gone with the Wind to the use of a handful of tracked-in cues to the threat of replacing Waxman with a composing team who would adapt his themes in time to have the film released by the end of 1939 (partly because Waxman understandably wanted to have the final edits of scenes before he began scoring them). As a Hitchcock obsessive, I had long been aware of the director's repeated and futile attempts to make a film version of J.M. Barrie's play Mary Rose, but I didn't know that he'd even tried and failed to obtain music from the stage production of Mary Rose, first to use in Rebecca and later in Vertigo.

Few of the director's other '40s scores are discussed in such detail, neither in analysis of the scores themselves nor in their production histories, though the section on Spellbound features many fascinating and surprising details, such as the search for a title song, Hitchcock's and (more surprisingly) Selznick's dissatisfaction with Rozsa's classic, Oscar-winning score, and the director's misplaced conviction that Rozsa had reused material from Spellbound in The Lost Weekend (as Hitch would later accuse Herrmann of reusing Marnie material for Joy in the Morning).

One of the many benefits of Sullivan's book is his reappraisal of such underappreciated Hitchcock scores as Roy Webb's Notorious, Leighton Lucas's Stage Fright, and Tiomkin's I Confess. On the other hand, one of the book's few drawbacks is that Sullivan is distractingly uncritical of the music in Hitchcock's films. While there are widely acknowledged masterworks in the Hitchcock musical canon (particularly Rebecca, Vertigo and Psycho), the only score which Sullivan seems to find fault with is Addison's replacement score for Torn Curtain. After he describes Herrmann's scores for Trouble with Harry, Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man as "masterpieces," one would think he'd need a new word to discuss scores of the caliber of Vertigo and Psycho, as it's pretty hard to top "masterpiece."

I was particularly puzzled by his praise for Maurice Jarre's clunky, uneven score for Topaz (but then I've never been on the Jarre bandwagon), especially since the chapter on Herrmann's final Hitchcock scores (Marnie, Torn Curtain) is titled "The Music Ends" while the chapter on Topaz is inexplicably titled "The Music Is Back," as if Jarre's Topaz were a return to the tradition of classic scores like Rebecca and Psycho.

Sullivan's research is impressively thorough, and though it is understandable that not every film can be covered in equally exhaustive detail, it is a treat when he is able to uncover prime research material, such as Hitchcock's own notes on the sound for Family Plot and especially The Birds. The chapter on Hitchcock's (and Herrmann's) use of a groundbreaking electronic effects score instead of a traditional orchestral score on The Birds is especially fascinating, and that bold choice is one of the reasons the film (uneven as it is) remains so effective today -- even if they hire Howard Shore or Thomas Newman, the planned remake of The Birds is unlikely to have as effective a sonic accompaniment.

The lack of excessively technical musical discussion helps keep the book readable, and Sullivan can be insightful (on The Wrong Man: "Icy as it is, Herrmann's music humanizes what would otherwise be unbearable") and even witty, such as in his discussion of the attempts to create a theme song for Marnie: "A frigid, hallucinating kleptomaniac was not exactly the ideal subject for a pop love song." Marnie screenwriter Jay Presson Allen has perhaps the funniest line in the book, discussing her contribution to one of the director's most controversial films: "It's not a very good movie because I didn't know how to write it."

The chapter on Marnie and Torn Curtain naturally provides the story's darkest moments, though the most disturbing incident is not when Herrmann is fired but when, in the midst of correspondence between the composer and director over the approach to the Torn Curtain score (in which Herrmann made reference to Hitchcock's "views" on the score), Herrmann receives a letter from Paul C. Donnelly, a "member of the production team", instructing the master composer that "there is one point that Hitch asked me to stress, and that is that you should not refer to his 'views,' but rather his requirements for vigorous rhythm and a change from what he calls 'the old pattern.'" That Hitchcock would have a member of his team correct Herrmann on such a petty bit of word choice is a chilling portent of the final separation (An interesting side note -- Herrmann was reportedly sought for such earlier Hitchcock projects as Spellbound, Notorious and The Paradine Case).

The book at least has a happy ending of sorts, especially for those of us who are Family Plot fans. Williams was hired for the film largely on the basis of Jaws (Goldsmith was also considered, and though Family Plot might not have been a great fit for the composer, the thought of a Hitchcock-Goldsmith collaboration is truly mind-blowing), and is quoted discussing his position as a "young" composer working with a Master at the end of his career at the same time he was the "older" composer working with another great director (Spielberg) at the start of his career. The Family Plot scoring experience seems to have been a happy one for all concerned (though Williams noticed Hitchcock's declining health over the course of the project), and the composer was able to employ his own timpanist father for the score. Williams Sr. had performed in Bernard Herrmann's CBS radio orchestra so the composer had known Herrmann for years, and even contacted him to get his permission to work with Hitch. (The chapter also includes several of Family Plot's cue titles, listed below*).

It's remarkable the number of explicit musical references Sullivan manages to discover in Hitchcock's films, including the killer's piano playing in Rope, the musical numbers in Stage Fright, the song written over the course of Rear Window, the jazz musician hero of The Wrong Man (whose profession marks him as a suspicious character to the police), the discussion of musical therapy in Vertigo, and the climatic ballet in Torn Curtain.

I was able to spot only a handful of factual errors in the book -- the film version of The Fugitive came out in 1993, not 1992; the theremin is not a keyboard instrument; MGM made North by Northwest, not Paramount; and at one point the author seems to confuse Ron Goodwin with Ron Grainer (At least one Herrmann expert contends there are many more factual errors than this in the book, but I didn't notice them). Overall, I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is an absolutely necessary work, but on film music in particular and film making in general.

-- Scott Bettencourt
 

Blanche's Challenge
Mystery Woman
The Shoebridge Headstone
Maloney's Knife
Share and Share Alike
The Search Montage
Blanche Gets the Needle
The Diamond Chandelier
Blanche Wakes Up
 

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com