4/18/23
Newsletter #310
The Crack of Dawn
I was gabbing with composer Joe LoDuca the other night and we were discussing how one can be the best at what they do, yet still unfulfilled. I brought up the great film composer, Bernard Herrmann (whose first film was Citizen Kane, and his last was Taxi Driver), who deeply wished he was a conductor of a major philharmonic orchestra. Joe said, “I coulda been a conductor. I coulda had class. I coulda been somebody.”
Bernard Herrmann scored seven of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, three of which are as brilliant as film scores ever got: Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960). As there is no musical score in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), Bernard Herrmann created a particularly creepy soundtrack out of just birds screeching and cawing, which he electronically altered to great effect.
I’m telling this story in the wrong order, however, at the age of sixty, Alfred Hitchcock was an alcoholic, quite obviously overweight, having health issues, and was kind of falling apart mentally. This was simultaneous to making his two most successful movies in a row – North By Northwest and Psycho. Financial success brought Hitchcock down.
After The Birds, which was a big hit (and the first Hitchcock movie I saw as a kid in the theater, and I thought it was terrifying), came the beginning of Hitchcock’s decline. His next film, Marnie (1964), scored by Bernard Herrmann, was not a critical or a box office success, and Hitch continued to drink and fall apart. To recreate the time period (which gets lost in the course of time), Alfred Hitchcock was so hot that he was able to get the two biggest stars in the world – Paul Newman at his peak, and Julie Andrews right off The Sound of Music – to star in his next film, Torn Curtain (1966).
Nothing in Torn Curtain works. Not the script, the stars, the setting, the tone, nor the innocuous music score by the British composer, John Addison. Addison replaced Bernard Herrmann, who had already scored the entire film. This is a famous and painfully stupid break-up story.
The one scene for which Torn Curtain is remembered is when Paul Newman and a German woman kill a Russian agent by sticking his head in an oven and gassing him to death. It’s a particularly brutal, ugly, long scene. Hitchcock decided to play it without music, with just grunting and groaning (which is effective), and told Herrmann that’s what he wanted. Nothing. No music.
Now, let’s recreate the scene: It’s 1966, Bernard Herrmann – Bennie to his friends – is a 55-year-old New Yorker, almost as overweight as Hitchcock, constantly chain-smokes Marlboros, and is a renowned hot-head. He is on a Universal soundstage conducting – his favorite thing in the world – a full studio orchestra (no, it’s not the philharmonic, but it’s a full orchestra, with harps, no doubt) and Alfred Hitchcock shows up. And what is being recorded but the score for the murder in the oven scene, the one that Hitch specifically said had no music.
Now run with me folks, this is not on video. Hitchcock has had quite a few cocktails at lunch, then strolls across the Universal lot – which he probably owned about one-fifth of at that point, with a building named after him – and finds Bennie Herrmann doing exactly what he told him not to do. Except Bennie Herrmann is a master craftsman at his peak, and what he’s doing doesn’t cost anybody anything – he’s booked the orchestra for the whole day – why not get the music cue he’s written, then Hitchcock can just not use it. Except that Hitchcock blew a fuse, fired Bernard Herrmann (they never worked together again), shit-canned Herrmann’s whole score, hired the-at-best-weak, John Addison, who did the best he could.
Torn Curtain sucks. I’ve heard Herrmann’s music for the scene, and I’ve seen it synched up, and guess what? It’s way better. Yes, it’s more grueling played silent, but it’s not more exciting, and, Hello, this is a film with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. Exciting is better than grueling. It doesn’t matter. The movie bombed big time.
Both Hitchcock and Herrmann went into an eclipse in the late 1960s – still working, but making junk. Sadly, this was when I came into the picture. I had the misfortune of seeing Topaz (1969) brand-new in the theater and that movie is terrible. And it was a good book by Leon Uris. Bernard Herrmann was doing It’s It’s Alive! (1974).
But each man had one more good picture in him, although they didn’t work together. Alfred Hitchcock went back to England, back to his roots, and made Frenzy (1972). I remember coming out of the theater after seeing Frenzy at the Studio Theater in Detroit, I was 14, I undoubtedly lit a cigarette, and thought, “That’s what I want to do.”
In the movie there is a killer/rapist. He catches the woman, ties her to a chair, then begins to taunt and play with her before raping her. As this is occurring the camera slowly begins to back away, then out the door, down the hall, out the front door, then back across the street, with cars passing between us and the building. The building where a rape, soon to be a murder, is occurring, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s just a building.
Bernard Herrmann’s last movie is Taxi Driver (1976), a cinematic milestone, and Bernard Herrmann’s score is one of the great pieces of art of Earth. Bennie Herrmann was 65. He finished the recording session for the movie, went home and died in his sleep that night. A life well-lived. But . . . he could’ve been a conductor. He coulda had class. He coulda been somebody.
G’day, mates and maties. As Monty Python might say, for no reason, “Put on the kettle.”