Music in the Films of Hitchcock

THE NEW YORK TIMES

January 8, 2007
CONNECTIONS
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Hitchcock, Thrilling the Ears as Well as the Eyes
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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Correction Appended
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"I must get that damned tune out of my head!" exclaims the beleaguered
Richard Hannay as he is chased across the Scottish Highlands in "The 39
Steps."
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"I can't get that tune out of my head!" complains Charlie, the
unsuspecting niece of the Merry Widow Murderer, as she keeps imagining
that waltz in "Shadow of a Doubt."
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"I can't tell you what this music has meant to me!" exclaims the
once-suicidal Miss Lonelyheart in "Rear Window," with effusive gratitude
to the song's composer.
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Innocents all, twisted round by suspicion, doubt, danger and confusion.
And all haunted by music that, Alfred Hitchcock kept hoping in his
lifelong quest, would haunt audiences as well.
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It is that "damned tune," after all, that leads Hannay to the heart of
an international espionage plot and allows him to upend its nefarious
goals. It is that "Merry Widow Waltz" that leads Charlie to guess that
her admired doppelgänger, Uncle Charlie, may not be everything he
seems. And it is that composer's song (which prevents a suicide) that
provides the sole salvational counterpoint to another plot, in which a
neighbor murders and dismembers his wife, which Jimmy Stewart discerns
from his rear window. Hitchcock's characters are haunted by tunes for
good reason. And while the achievements of his films and their scores
have not lacked elaborate celebration (he worked with the best film
composers of the 20th century and left his mark on their development),
Hitchcock had something else in mind that may not be fully appreciated.
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Bernard Herrmann, for example, who created the scores for "Psycho,"
"North by Northwest" and some of Hitchcock's other masterpieces, said
there were only "a handful of directors like Hitchcock who really know
the score and fully realize the importance of its relationship to a
film."
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But it was more than that. For Hitchcock music was not merely an
accompaniment. It was a focus. And it didn't just reveal something about
the characters who sang the score's songs or moved under its canopy of
sound; music could seem to be a character itself.
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This might sound a bit grandiose, but take a look at Jack Sullivan's
fascinating new book, "Hitchcock's Music" (Yale University Press). In
his book "New World Symphonies," Mr. Sullivan, who is director of
American studies at Rider University in New Jersey, inverted the usual
suggestion that American concert-hall music evolved under the
domineering shadow of European influence. He showed instead how American
music powerfully shaped the evolution of Europe's art form. Now he shows
that it isn't just that Hitchcock believed that sound should serve
image; he believed that image should serve sound.
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"Hitchcock's career," Mr. Sullivan writes, "was an unending search for
the right song." "Rear Window," he argues, discussing some of the songs,
boogies, ballads and street sounds that make up the film's score, "is
Hitchcock's most daring experiment in popular music." And Hitchcock
remade "The Man Who Knew Too Much" in 1956 so that the "movie would be
about music."
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Mr. Sullivan might have made his case more systematically; he is also
hampered by hewing to a dutiful and sometimes awkward chronological trek
through Hitchcock's 50-some feature films. And he doesn't do enough to
remind readers of the films' plots (even when discussing Hitchcock's
little-known 1934 biopic about the Strauss family, "Waltzes From
Vienna"). But he examines Hitchcock's meticulous notes about film
scores, pays attention to every casual calliope tune and chronicles the
director's arguments with studios and fallings out with composers
(Hitchcock eventually fired even Herrmann from his privileged perch)
while revealing new ways of thinking about Hitchcock's music.
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Part of Hitchcock's musical style is just a matter of sheer
attentiveness and sly humor. When a carnival organ plays "Baby Face" in
the background of "Strangers on a Train," in which the murders of a wife
and a father are plotted, or when Cary Grant, before the maelstrom,
innocently walks through a hotel lobby in "North by Northwest" as Muzak
plays "It's a Most Unusual Day," we can see the portly master winking
over his characters' heads.
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"Mozart is the boy for you," an ailing Scottie is told futilely by a
friend visiting him in a mental institution in "Vertigo," though Mozart
doesn't stand a chance against Herrmann's vertiginous score.
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Yet Hitchcock could also be wrong in his judgments, as Herrmann proved
when he showed that, despite the director's assertion, music should
accompany the shower murder in "Psycho."
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But in Hitchcock's most powerful films it is impossible to separate
music from the visual fabric or plot. In "The Lady Vanishes" the leading
man is an ethnomusicologist studying the endangered folk musics of
Europe on the eve of World War II. The film's elderly Miss Froy, though,
has the real musical ears, listening closely to a guitarist's serenade
that has encoded within it a melodic message that must be brought to
Britain before it is too late; she hears and recalls what the hero does
not.
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The 1956 remake of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" uses Arthur Benjamin's
"Storm Clouds" cantata, which was commissioned for the 1934 version of
the film. In the remake an assassination is to take place at a climactic
cymbal crash. The bad guys, here as elsewhere in Hitchcock's works, are
surprisingly musically literate. They play recordings for the assassin.
They supply a score reader who follows along as Herrmann conducts the
London Symphony Orchestra. And in the remake, Mr. Sullivan points out,
the musical emphasis is heightened from the beginning.
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The heroine's musical past becomes crucial. Doris Day's professionally
trained voice thwarts the assassination with her anticipatory scream.
Music's powers even help her find her kidnapped child as she sings his
favorite song, "Que Sera, Sera."
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Music has as much a role to play in these films as any of the
characters. It might charm them or be used by them. But it also can
reveal more than they know, offering secrets or promising salvation.
Hitchcock's music has such an independent life, it also seeps through
film's strict boundaries: Something that seems to be a score turns out
to be a radio playing off screen ("Rear Window"); music that starts as
part of a film score is heard again in the humming of a hero (in
"Foreign Correspondent").
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"I have the feeling I am an orchestra conductor," Hitchcock once told
François Truffaut. He also compared film to opera.
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Hitchcock, without ever drawing a line between the popular and high
arts, explored his chosen genre with a firm belief about the powers of
music. Music can provide an archetype for Hitchcockian suspense. Music
can hint at more than it says; it can unfold with both rigorous logic
and heightened drama; and despite all expectations it can shock with its
revelations.
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Mr. Sullivan's book suggests that Hitchcock's musical faith was more
profound than any he could have had about people. And this faith was
shared by a generation of film composers who worked with him and were
also émigrés to the United States in the 1930s and '40s, including
Erich Korngold, Miklos Rozsa and Dimitri Tiomkin.
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Despite the events they lived through (which provided their own form of
menace and resolution), they shared a conviction that the culture of
music had such power that it could match the increasing dominance of
film. It could stand in confidence alongside it, knowingly alluding to
ambiguities, complexities and multiplicities that not even Hitchcock's
heroes could entirely figure out before the films end.
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Connections, a critic's perspective on the arts, appears every other
Monday.
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Correction: January 12, 2007
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The Connections column on Monday, about music in the films of Alfred
Hitchcock, misspelled the surname of a composer who worked with him. He
was Miklos Rozsa, not Rosza.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company