Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann

The four-volume 1992 documentary series Music for the Movies (which also includes the titles Toru Takemitsu, Georges Delerue, and The Hollywood Sound [VL-7/07]) is a valuable primer on the art of soundtrack composition, drawing on a wide range of interviews with noted composers, studio musicians, film scholars, and filmmakers. This particular entry presents a concise but thorough survey of Bernard Herrmann's life and career, generously backed with film/music clips. Narrator Philip Bosco begins by noting that Herrmann's music is universally recognizable, from the suspenseful intensity of his themes for Alfred Hitchcock (including such classics as North By Northwest, Vertigo, and—of course—Psycho) to the infernal jazz of his final score for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. In addition to the informative interviews (featuring Scorsese, composer Elmer Bernstein, French auteur Claude Chabrol, and many others), the crown jewel here is the inclusion of Herrmann's never-used music for the long, unbearably intense killing scene in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain—the 1966 thriller that resulted in Herrmann's bitter break from Hitchcock (who never acknowledged the composer's priceless contribution). Wisely, filmmaker Joshua Waletzky doesn't flinch from the harsher details of Herrmann's life and personality (composer David Raksin describes Herrmann as "not a sociable man" and "a virtuoso of non-specific anger"), serving up an even portrait of an ambitious but also temperamental genius. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (J. Shannon)