GoKawiilThe first Alfred Hitchcock film I can remember seeing was The Birds, when it was broadcast on BBC One on the evening of Sunday, 6 June 1971. I would have been nine years old, and it must have come as quite a revelation to me that this enigmatic but ubiquitous celebrity had a sideline in filmmaking. To me Alfred Hitchcock was many things, but not a film director. His was the name on the front cover of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, several issues of which I had recently picked up at a church jumble sale and devoured in a state of terrified fascination. It was also to be found above the titles of horror story anthologies called things like Stories Not for the Nervous and Stories That Scared Even Me. I was an enthusiastic collector and reader of these paperbacks, which could be picked up at any local bookshop. Best of all, there was the series of children’s thrillers which were always prefaced with the words Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in … The first one was The Secret of Terror Castle, followed by The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy and, eventually, several dozen more. The Three Investigators were teenage detectives who lived in a town called Rocky Beach, California. Pete Crenshaw was the dynamic, action-loving one; Bob Andrews was bookish and nerdy (this was who I identified with); and their leader, Jupiter Jones, was smart and mercurial and overweight and bore more than a passing resemblance, it was often remarked, to a young Hitchcock, who made several comic appearances in the novels in the guise of the boys’ reluctant sponsor. Jupiter had entered a competition and won all three of them the use of a gold-plated Rolls-Royce complete with an English chauffeur by the name of Worthington. Their headquarters was a trailer in Jupiter’s uncle’s scrapyard, hidden beneath piles of junk. For years I assumed – along with most of their readers, I imagine – that Hitchcock was the author of these novels, until I noticed a tiny credit on the title page: ‘Text by Robert Arthur’. I looked ‘text’ up in the dictionary to double-check it meant what I thought it did. It was disappointing to discover that Hitchcock himself hadn’t written any of these stories, but it didn’t stop me from wolfing them down.
In the late 1960s, when I was consuming all this Hitchcock-related ephemera, the great director’s filmmaking career was in a slump from which it would never really recover. His last three films had been Marnie, Torn Curtain and Topaz: all three of them relative failures commercially, and the last two artistic duds as well (some would say the same of Marnie). He had ideas for films that would take advantage of the new relaxations in censorship, but the studios wouldn’t let him make them. And yet he was richer and more famous than he had ever been, thanks largely to these lucrative spin-offs, all by-products of the industry that had grown up around his appearances on two television shows: Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65). Credit for originating these shows is often given to Hitch’s agent, Lew Wasserman, but his celebrity from the mid-1950s onwards can be attributed to a man whose name is not well remembered now: James Allardice. He was the jobbing TV writer responsible for the monologues (‘host wraps’) that Hitchcock delivered in his comically lugubrious style, introducing each episode and providing a link into the commercial breaks. They set the tone of both series (rather inappropriately in the case of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the content of which was often darker) and turned the director into an unlikely television star.
According to Steven C. Smith, Hitchcock’s way of explaining to Allardice the note he wanted to strike in these monologues was to give him a private screening of The Trouble with Harry. This morbid comedy from 1955, stunningly photographed in autumnal New England, concerns the inconvenient appearance of a corpse and the tiresome chain of circumstances that lead the townsfolk to keep burying it and then digging it up again. It was also the first collaboration between Hitchcock and the composer Bernard Herrmann. On the basis of this, Smith argues that because The Trouble with Harry was the film in which Hitchcock gave free rein to his peculiar sense of humour, and because Herrmann’s music is so important to the tone of the film, and because it was screened for Allardice as a briefing tool, Herrmann ‘deserves some credit’ for the TV show’s ‘style’. It’s a rather tortuous argument, but there is no denying that Herrmann saw his score as expressing something quintessential about Hitchcock’s personality.
More than a decade later, after he and Hitch had fallen out, Herrmann chose five of his orchestral Hitchcock scores (passing over The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man) to rearrange and re-record for the Decca label, under the title The Great Movie Thrillers. In his 1991 biography of Herrmann, A Heart at Fire’s Centre, Smith referred to this recording as ‘an olive branch’. In the liner notes, Herrmann wrote that The Trouble with Harry was ‘in many ways the most personal and the most humorous of Hitchcock’s entire output. It is gay, funny, macabre, tender and with an abundance of his sardonic wit, and I hope that my interpretation of these moods will in turn be transformed into a portrait of “Hitch”.’ This gesture was not enough to repair the rift that had opened up after their bitter disagreement over the Torn Curtain soundtrack. But it does confirm that The Trouble with Harry – while not a satisfactory viewing experience – is one of the films we can turn to in order to understand the essence of Hitchcock, and that Herrmann considered his music to have played a crucial part in distilling it.
Their collaboration had begun at the absolute apex of Hitchcock’s career, both creatively (Rear Window just behind him, Vertigo on the horizon) and commercially, with the TV show about to launch him as a major celebrity and global brand. It’s not entirely clear what brought the two men together. Smith speculates that Hitchcock considered the humour in The Trouble with Harry to be distinctively English and was drawn to Herrmann (born in New York to Russian and Ukrainian parents) because of his cultural Anglophilia: he was an admirer of the music of Delius, Bax, Finzi, Rubbra and especially Vaughan Williams. That’s possible, but these composers’ influence isn’t at all obvious in the score for The Trouble with Harry: its best cue, ‘The Doctor’, offers a jaunty, bittersweet melody for high strings played over a repeating woodwind figure, and sounds to me exactly like Francis Poulenc. Anyway, English-sounding or not, Hitchcock loved the music for The Trouble with Harry and immediately engaged Herrmann to score his remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. The project didn’t inspire his best efforts, however, and the film’s most notable musical moments – Arthur Benjamin’s cantata Storm Clouds, played during the Albert Hall climax, and Doris Day’s interminably repeated renditions of ‘Que Sera, Sera’ – were not his work.
As with The Trouble with Harry (and Rope, Rear Window and Vertigo) Hitchcock bought back the rights to The Man Who Knew Too Much and it disappeared into legal limbo for almost three decades. These titles, therefore, did not form part of my teenage Hitchcockian learning curve, which slowly taught me that he was not in fact a children’s author and magazine editor but a highly regarded film director. Since we were all, back then, entirely dependent on the whims of television schedulers for our film education, the next of his films that I saw came courtesy of BBC One’s eight-week Hitchcock season in the early summer of 1975. This was The Wrong Man, made in 1956 and coincidentally the third of his collaborations with Herrmann. It is a very atypical Hitchcock, a return to black and white for the first time in a few years and shot in a low-key documentary style. It tells the true story (or true-ish: there is a tacked-on happy ending) of a jazz musician, played by Henry Fonda, who is wrongly accused of armed robbery and put through a nightmarish sequence of police interrogations and legal proceedings which feel more like Kafka than Hitchcock. I found it haunting, compulsive and intensely depressing, and didn’t watch it again for another 51 years – until last week, in fact. Again, Herrmann’s score is not exactly memorable, but it serves the film perfectly. His credo, as quoted by Christopher Palmer in The Composer in Hollywood (1990), was:
Music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.
In The Wrong Man, Herrmann’s way of finding this ‘communicating link’ was to avoid all overtly dramatic effects and to express Fonda’s guarded anxiety through a repeated pizzicato bass line (his character is a double bass player) often punctuated by quietly dissonant chords assigned to woodwinds or muted trumpets. The music is diffident, sometimes almost unnoticeable. In that respect, it would seem to have nothing in common with Herrmann’s score for the next Hitchcock film, Vertigo, which is loud, lushly romantic and Wagnerian. But in another respect, the scores are identical: both are self-effacing, in the sense that both are the work of a composer who recognises that his task is to seek out the essence of the material on screen and to express that rather than himself.
The Vertigo score is one of the most lauded in film history and was followed by two further movies – North by Northwest and Psycho – which found director and composer at their creative peaks and working in perfect synergy: a hat-trick of musico-cinematic masterpieces for which it would be hard to find any comparison. I encountered them in reverse order: Psycho screened on BBC Two on Sunday, 12 August 1979, and I watched it in a caravan in a field in North Wales, on a tiny black and white portable television powered by my father’s car battery; I saw North by Northwest as an exhilarating midnight movie at the Cambridge Arts Cinema sometime in the early 1980s; and my first glimpse of Vertigo was at the London Film Festival in the autumn of 1983, where it had its first British public screening for more than two decades – in a double bill with Rear Window, which remains one of the greatest four hours in the cinema that I’ve ever experienced.
With all three films, it was the combination of music and images that was almost overwhelming. For North by Northwest, with its opening scenes in Manhattan, the execs had been expecting Herrmann to give them cityscape music in the style of Gershwin; instead, he came up with an energetic Spanish-inflected theme, ‘a kaleidoscopic orchestral fandango’, which might have seemed wilfully oblique at first but sounds inevitable as soon as you hear it. As for Psycho, although the score is famous for its high-pitched staccato violins during the shower scene, it’s also memorable for its slower and quieter passages, where the monochrome use of string orchestra and leaden, repeated minor chords create an atmosphere of not just dread but intense melancholy. (Just as you can hear Poulenc behind the music for The Trouble with Harry, so another member of Les Six, Arthur Honegger, seems to have left his mark on Psycho’s score. There are clear echoes of his Symphony No. 2 for strings and trumpet. Herrmann would have admired Honegger as one of the very first serious composers to write film music, and indeed he conducted his Pastorale d’été for a Decca LP in 1971.)
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