highly strung

HITCHCOCK ‘N’ HERRMANN’S BEST MUSICAL MOMENTS…

1 ‘Scene d’Amour’ Vertigo

Bernard Herrmann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s makeover movie hits its lovesick (very sick) apogee. As James Stewart’s Scottie watches Kim Novak’s Judy ‘become’ Madeleine, the Wagner-inspired score trembles with voluptuous lyricism, dizzy dissonance and doomed romantic grandeur.

2 ‘The Murder’ Psycho

Hitch wanted silence in the shower, but Herrmann cut in, setting a high watermark in rule-busting scoring history by thrusting a strings-only sonic assault to the forefront. Herrmann’s shrieking glissandos and low-end lunges lacerated audiences’ nerves. Much-imitated, never matched.

3 ‘Overture’ North By Northwest

Herrmann captured what he called “the crazy dance about to take place between Cary Grant and the world” for Hitch’s wrong-man romp set during the Cold War. ‘Overture’ puts the ‘go’ in fandango, slamming Hitch’s chase thriller into gear with agile vim.

4 ‘Prelude’ And ‘Rooftop’ Vertigo

Piercing, circling, dizzying: with Inception-sized “braaams”, Herrmann’s ‘Prelude’ tugs us into Scottie’s fever-dream mindset with awesome power. The sense of foreboding in the nauseous ‘vertigo chord’ of ‘Rooftop’ speaks volumes: like Scottie, we’re in over our heads.

5 ‘The Prelude’ Psycho

The ever-confident Herrmann was emphatic that title sequences should always “set the drama”. With its main melody rising anxiously over restlessly insistent strings, the pulse-racing ‘Prelude’ sends out stark warnings long before the shower heats up.

6 ‘Scottie Tails Madeleine’ Vertigo

The opulent hysteria of Herrmann’s score tugs us deeper into Scottie’s sickness during the languorous pursuit of Madeleine. Erotic, melancholic, unsettling, the romantic strings and nagging low-end sub-currents evoke extremes of mystery and darkening obsession.

7 ‘OVERTURE’ THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY

For their first collaboration, the becalmed Hitchcock found a perfect opposites-attract match with the impetuous Herrmann. To Hitch’s delight, Herrmann matched the tone-clash of the director’s darkly puckish comedy in the jaunty melody and doom-weighted woodwinds of ‘Overture’.

8 ‘Conversation Piece’ North By Northwest

Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint enjoy a long ride on the train, enfolded in Herrmann’s come-to-bed love theme. In its sensual chug of strings and sultry oboe-clarinet clinch, ‘Conversation Piece’ proves Herrmann could do warmth and melody just as well.

9 ‘THE CELL’ THE WRONG MAN

Deep, bassy intimations of lingering dread stalk a wrongly imprisoned jazz muso in Hitchcock’s downbeat riff on a career-long theme. The mounting panic attack of Herrmann’s otherwise sombre, spacious score gets the morbid measure of Hitch’s anxieties in ‘The Cell’.

10 ‘MAIN TITLE’ MARNIE

Before they fell out over Torn Curtain, Hitch and Herrmann had one last hurrah. Though not his most innovative work, Herrmann’s theme for Hitch’s “sex mystery” toggles between swooning melodic romanticism and anxious dissonance. Sure, it’s no Vertigo, but what is? Kevin Harley