Hitchcock, Thrilling the Ears as Well as the Eyes

NYTimes
January 8, 2007
Connections
Hitchcock, Thrilling the Ears as Well as the Eyes
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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”).

“I have the feeling I am an orchestra conductor,” Hitchcock once told François Truffaut. He also compared film to opera.

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.

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 Rosza and Dimitri Tiomkin.

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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