This Month

From the screeching strings of Psycho (1960) to the sobbing saxophone of Taxi Driver (1976), composer Bernard Herrmann gave us some of our most memorable movie music. In this Spotlight, TCM celebrates the masterful composer with many of his best-remembered film scores. Herrmann (1911-1975) was born in New York City and educated at New York University and the Juilliard School. He made his conducting debut while still in school, and by the age of 20 he had his own orchestra. Beginning in 1934, he distinguished himself through his work as composer, conductor and music director at the Columbia Broadcasting System.

After years of composing and conducting for the concert stage, Herrmann began scoring films through his radio work with Orson Welles. He would eventually accumulate more than 80 movie and TV credits, receiving four Academy Award nominations and one Oscar (for 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster). Our tribute is divided into four categories, shown below with a detailed look at one Herrmann score from each group.

Herrmann Comes to Hollywood looks at the movies that formed the composer’s reputation in the movies and includes one of his seminal works – his first score, created for Welles’ legendary debut film, Citizen Kane (1941). Herrmann had composed, arranged and conducted music for Welles’ Mercury Theatre radio plays including the infamous War of the Worlds (1938). When the director headed for Hollywood to make Citizen Kane, he took along many of his radio collaborators including Herrmann.

In contrast to the romantic, sweeping film music that was in vogue at the time, Herrmann’s Citizen Kane score was influenced by the elliptical radio style and amounted to what he called “a jigsaw” of everything from waltzes to polkas, jazz to opera. There is even an original four-minute aria composed for a fictional opera called Salmambô.

The Kane score was Oscar-nominated, and Herrmann won the award that year – but for another film, The Devil and Daniel Webster. That film is included in this grouping, along with other significant projects from the period: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, another Welles project), Jane Eyre (1943), On Dangerous Ground (1951) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952).

Adventures in Sound encompasses fantasy films with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, along with a few other action movies that also have music by Herrmann. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) was the first of four films scored by Herrmann that were produced by Charles H. Schneer with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, who was called “the Wizard of Dynamation.”

This was one of three “Sinbad” features animated by Harryhausen but the only one scored by Herrmann. The composer said his goal was “to envelop the entire movie in a shroud of mystical innocence.” The various musical moods include a romantic Asian-style overture, a haunting dirge to introduce Sinbad’s mysterious ship and a frantic xylophone scherzo for Sinbad’s famous duel with a skeleton.

The other films in the grouping are The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953), The Naked and the Dead (1958) and the Harryhausen movies The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Mysterious Island (1961) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

The category Herrmann & Hitchcock celebrates the cinematic coupling of two towering talents: the music-maker who created mood and atmosphere and the storyteller who folded all the elements of cinema into a compelling, suspenseful whole. All told, Herrmann contributed scores to seven films directed by Hitchcock.

In much of Vertigo (1958), the director allows Herrmann’s music to dominate the scene and define the action. The theme is obsessive love, and the score has echoes of “Liebestod” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Roger Ebert wrote that Herrmann’s music created “a haunting, unsettled yearning.”

The Vertigo musical suite includes an introductory two-note motif that echoes the notes sounded by foghorns at either side of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The horns themselves are heard in the film in a key scene where Kim Novak’s character makes a visit to San Francisco Bay. To stress the James Stewart character’s acrophobia, Herrmann employs a disorienting chord and startling harp music that anticipates the scary violins in the shower scene of Psycho.

The other Hitchcock/Herrmann collaborations in our tribute are The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), North By Northwest (1959) and Marnie (1964).

More Hitchcock & Thrillers features The Bride Wore Black (1968), a French suspense film directed by François Truffaut and scored by Herrmann. Truffaut, a Hitchcock disciple, includes several tributes to the Master of Suspense in this story of a vengeful bride. Herrmann’s lush score is built around Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” with his own variations and flourishes. He also references an earlier movie he scored, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, with quotes from that film’s “Memory Waltz.”

Some critics have unfavorably compared Truffaut’s film with Hitchcock at his best. A reviewer for Timeout.com writes that the “one thing special” about The Bride Wore Black is Herrmann’s “swooningly romantic score.”

Also in this group of films are a pair of Hitchcock classics, Psycho and The Birds (1963), plus non-Hitchcock thrillers Cape Fear (1962), Sisters (1972) and It’s Alive (1974).