![]() ![]() In "The Lady Vanishes" the leading man is an ethnomusicologist studying the endangered folk musics of Europe on the eve of World War II. Yet Hitchcock could also be wrong in his judgments, as Herrmann proved when he showed that, despite the director's assertion, music should accompany the shower murder in "Psycho."īut in Hitchcock's most powerful films it is impossible to separate music from the visual fabric or plot. "Mozart is the boy for you," an ailing Scottie is told futilely by a friend visiting him in a mental institution in "Vertigo," though Mozart doesn't stand a chance against Herrmann's vertiginous score. When a carnival organ plays "Baby Face" in the background of "Strangers on a Train," in which the murders of a wife and a father are plotted, or when Cary Grant, before the maelstrom, innocently walks through a hotel lobby in "North by Northwest" as Muzak plays "It's a Most Unusual Day," we can see the portly master winking over his characters' heads. Part of Hitchcock's musical style is just a matter of sheer attentiveness and sly humor. But he examines Hitchcock's meticulous notes about film scores, pays attention to every casual calliope tune and chronicles the director's arguments with studios and fallings out with composers (Hitchcock eventually fired even Herrmann from his privileged perch) while revealing new ways of thinking about Hitchcock's music. And he doesn't do enough to remind readers of the films' plots (even when discussing Hitchcock's little-known 1934 biopic about the Strauss family, "Waltzes From Vienna"). ![]() Sullivan might have made his case more systematically he is also hampered by hewing to a dutiful and sometimes awkward chronological trek through Hitchcock's 50-some feature films. "Hitchcock's career," Sullivan writes, "was an unending search for the right song." "Rear Window," he argues, discussing some of the songs, boogies, ballads and street sounds that make up the film's score, "is Hitchcock's most daring experiment in popular music." And Hitchcock remade "The Man Who Knew Too Much" in 1956 so that the "movie would be about music." Now he shows that it isn't just that Hitchcock believed that sound should serve image he believed that image should serve sound. He showed instead how American music powerfully shaped the evolution of Europe's art form. In his book "New World Symphonies," Sullivan, who is director of American studies at Rider University in New Jersey, inverted the usual suggestion that American concert-hall music evolved under the domineering shadow of European influence. This might sound a bit grandiose, but take a look at Jack Sullivan's fascinating new book, "Hitchcock's Music" (Yale University Press). And it didn't just reveal something about the characters who sang the score's songs or moved under its canopy of sound music could seem to be a character itself. For Hitchcock, music was not merely an accompaniment. Hitchcock's characters are haunted by tunes for good reason.Īnd while the achievements of his films and their scores have not lacked elaborate celebration (he worked with the best film composers of the 20th century and left his mark on their development), Hitchcock had something else in mind that may not be fully appreciated.īernard Herrmann, for example, who created the scores for "Psycho," "North by Northwest" and some of Hitchcock's other masterpieces, said there were only "a handful of directors like Hitchcock who really know the score and fully realize the importance of its relationship to a film."īut it was more than that. And it is that composer's song (which prevents a suicide) that provides the sole salvational counterpoint to another plot, in which a neighbor murders and dismembers his wife, which Jimmy Stewart discerns from his rear window. It is that "Merry Widow Waltz" that leads Charlie to guess that her admired doppelganger, Uncle Charlie, may not be everything he seems. It is that "damned tune," after all, that leads Hannay to the heart of an international espionage plot and allows him to upend its nefarious goals. And all haunted by music that, Alfred Hitchcock kept hoping in his lifelong quest, would haunt audiences as well. Innocents all, twisted round by suspicion, doubt, danger and confusion. "I can't tell you what this music has meant to me!" exclaims the once-suicidal Miss Lonelyheart in "Rear Window," with effusive gratitude to the song's composer. "I can't get that tune out of my head!" complains Charlie, the unsuspecting niece of the Merry Widow Murderer, as she keeps imagining that waltz in "Shadow of a Doubt." "I must get that damned tune out of my head!" exclaims the beleaguered Richard Hannay as he is chased across the Scottish Highlands in "The 39 Steps."
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