Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema (Preview)
by Steven C. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025. 295 pp., illus. Hardcover: $39.99 and E-book: $15.39.

Reviewed by David Sterritt

No cinephile needs reminding that the longtime collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann produced some of world cinema’s most brilliant audiovisual moments. The haunting themes of Vertigo (1958) and what Herrmann called the “pure ice water” of Psycho (1960) are probably the composer’s most celebrated Hitchcock contributions, but the scores of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and North by Northwest (1958) are momentous in different ways. Music is also crucial to The Wrong Man (1956), where the main character is a musician by trade, and Marnie (1964), where the score matched the title character’s “heightened, neurotic emotion,” as Steven C. Smith writes in Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema, a comprehensive account of the eponymous partnership that held as many surprises as one would expect from a liaison of personalities so generously endowed with creativity and eccentricity. Their psychological traits made quite a contrast, too: Hitchcock was notably averse to conflict and confrontation, whereas Herrmann was just as notably outspoken, irascible, and vexatious.

Herrmann started his career as a staff composer at CBS radio, where he later became chief conductor of the network’s orchestra. His assignments at CBS included scores for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre Playhouse, and Smith quotes producer John Houseman’s colorful remark on the Herrmann-Welles relationship: “Amid the snapping of batons and the hurling of scripts and scores into the air…the two men came to understand each other perfectly.” So perfectly that Welles recruited Herrmann to make his movie-scoring debut with his own first feature, Citizen Kane. (The music received an Academy Award nomination, but the composer lost the Oscar to himself, winning for his other score of 1941, All That Money Can Buy, aka The Devil and Daniel Webster.) Herrmann provided music for almost fifty films before his death in 1975, just hours after recording his phenomenal score for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). His musical trademarks included a preference for offbeat combinations of instruments instead of large symphonic forces, a love of short repetitive phrases, careful attention to shadings of volume and texture, and the paradoxical practice of using muted instruments played as loud as possible. “That mix of suppression and sonic force,” Smith writes, “is a thumbprint unmistakably Herrmann’s.”

Hitchcock took the music for his films very seriously, writing detailed notes and working as closely with composers as he did with screenwriters and other creative personnel. His connection with Herrmann almost started in the Forties, when studio boss David O. Selznick pursued the composer for two Hitchcock films, Spellbound (1945) and The Paradine Case (1947). Herrmann declined these opportunities, perhaps fearing Selznick’s notorious meddling with the scores for his pictures, but a breakthrough came in 1955 with Hitchcock’s mild-mannered and deeply personal The Trouble with Harry, which was “an American movie with a British sensibility” and therefore perfect for Herrmann, an American Anglophile to his bones. This production made Hitchcock nervous, since its darkly comic story needed music to assure audiences it was okay to be amused. And this time Herrmann jumped at the chance to work with him, hailing him as a “great romantic director” whose films allowed “enormous scope for sensual and lyrical musical treatment.” Hearing the completed music, Smith reports, Hitchcock felt he had found “his musical alter ego,” and The Trouble with Harry became, perhaps surprisingly, his “favorite Herrmann score.”…

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David Sterritt, a Cineaste contributing writer, is author of editor of fifteen books on film.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 3