An Irishman's Diary

THAT MUSIC is the food of love is fairly well known. That it's also an important part of the diet of violent hatred – at least as presented in cinema – is less well publicised. But consider Hitchcock's Psycho, by way of an example.

Today that film is synonymous with the shower scene, from which the slashing violin soundtrack is in turn inseparable. So inseparable that one might be tempted to assume the visuals and music alike were all the famous director’s own work. Au contraire.

In his original blueprint, Hitchcock planned to keep the music to a minimum, with none at all in the motel scenes. Perhaps he was already getting notions about himself as an artist: a subject to which we’ll return.

But in any case he showed the original version to a preview audience and was so dismayed by the viewers’ jaded reaction that he considered abandoning the whole thing as a movie project and cannibalising it for one of his weekly television shows instead.

In the end, he opted wisely to let his long-time musical collaborator Bernard Herrmann loose on the movie, and the rest was history; or hysteria. Assistant director Hilton Green recalled that, at a second preview, when Herrmann’s music started shrieking, “everybody came off their seats a good six inches”. Even the scene’s photographers were taken in.

It's unlikely to have quite that effect on listeners at the National Concert Hall next Wednesday night. But in any case, Herrmann – who also worked with Hitchcock on such classics as Vertigoand North by Northwest– was born 100 years ago come June.

And to mark the centenary, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra will present a Herrmann-themed evening on February 9th, under the sensitive title “Music to be Murdered By”. (More details at nch.ie)

HITCHCOCK was not the only great director Herrmann worked for, even if their partnership was a defining one for both men. He also composed extensively for Orson Welles: including, early in his career, the score for that perennial movie-poll-topper, Citizen Kane.

And he was still playing his A-game in the last year of his life, 1975, when his discordant orchestration and smouldering saxophone themes alternated to evoke the sleazy New York of Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

That was Herrmann’s last film, and was posthumously dedicated to him.

By contrast, Hitchcock's career went into sharp decline after Psycho. This trend at least coincided with his lionisation by the new generation of "auteur" directors including François Truffaut. But in the view of the great Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman, it was no coincidence.

In his entertaining memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman suggests the auteurs gradually convinced Hitchcock that, far from being a mere director of thrillers – albeit the best – he was (in the scriptwriter's dread word) "important".

And, says Goldman, the endless acclaim from his fellow geniuses took a heavy toll: "Following Psycho, in '63, came The Birds. Some nice shock effects, period. And from then on it got really bad – Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy – awful, awful films. But they got great reviews from the auteur critics." The rot might have been setting in even with Psycho: which, a bit like Janet Leigh's character, comes to a terrible end. In fact, the film's second-most famous scene – involving the dressed-up skeleton in the basement, a knife-wielding Anthony Perkins in drag, and a swinging light-bulb – is probably what most people remember as that end.

But, as Goldman reminds us, the credits are still seven minutes away at this point: “And five of those seven minutes are taken up with one of the great snooze scenes, where the local shrink comes in and delivers this agonisingly primitive course in Freud, where he tells us that Perkins is a nut-cake.”

IT WAS as a result of Torn Curtain, aptly enough, that the Hitchcock-Herrmann partnership broke up for good. Worried he was going out of fashion, the director ordered a pop/jazz score for the film. Herrmann tried to oblige, but couldn’t. And when Hitchcock criticised his efforts, the composer protested that neither of them could out-jump their shadows. As he put it, he didn’t write “pop music” and Hitchcock didn’t make “pop pictures”.

It was widely thought that they never spoke again afterwards. But Herrmann’s widow later recalled a brief encounter, circa 1970, when her husband stopped by Hitchcock’s studio headquarters with a present of a record. The composer’s reported preamble to the visit suggests there was a certain amount of Schadenfreude involved.

“See that tiny little office over there, that’s Hitch,” Mrs Herrmann recalled her husband saying. “And that stupid little parking place. Hitch used to have an empire with big offices and a big staff. Then they made it down to half that size, then they made it to half that size ...” Whereupon Herrmann told his wife: “We’re going over to say hello.”