https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81qweiWqyTU
This video has been on youtube for a long time, but I've only just seen it.
I know that Hitchcock originally intended for the shower scene to have no music, but he changed his mind when he heard what Herrmann had composed, but to me, it seems more shocking and real without it.
With the growth in appreciation of Herrmann's contributions generally, people these days sometimes imply that Hitchcock was some sort of numbskull to have originally wanted the shower murder to have no music (i.e., the way we react to stories about Paramount execs wanting 'Moon River' cut out of Breakfast at Tiffany's). This video is useful because it show that Hitchcock's initial idea *was* on-to-something - the scene is less nightmarish but more intimate, we hear every whimper, grunt and scream from Marion as she dies. With the score it's as if Marion ceases to be a real character becoming something abstract as soon as the attack begins, whereas without the score she's still there, in character as it were, right up till the end of the attack.
So the video reminds us that that making a features film involves literally thousands of decisions of this sort: very consequential choices each with its own signature strengths and weaknesses. Every such decision is a tradeoff. And the pattern of tradeoffs a director endorses constitutes a large part of his or her style.
Note that lots of directors (including Hitch in The Birds) have done whole movies completely without score (or maybe only over opening and closing titles). And some directors such as Bergman, Haneke, Mungiu, and Lumet almost never have scores so that that fundamental directorial choice to 'max out' along one dimension of realism became/becomes part of their signature styles. In the '90s, the Dogme 95 group even had 'No score or post-produced sound of any kind' as one of their 'rules of chastity' (after 'No props', 'No lights', 'No period - everything's here and now', No b/w or any other color manipulations', etc.). There are, then, many different dimensions of realism along which classical Hollywood film - a very romantic cinema - scores very low.
I see what you mean. I feel so much more sympathy for her without the music.
shareI think without the music, you can hear not only her screams, but her groans and sighs as the life leaves her and she slides down the wall. Its very sad, really.
Herrmann talked Hitchcock into those screeching violins and probably upped the box office gross on Psycho at least two-fold -- would there have been as much screaming in the audience without them?(Maybe in the shower scene, but not in the staircase scene, maybe in the fruit cellar scene.)
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Hitchcock prevailed with two gruesome murders and no music over them, in the years after Psycho:
Torn Curtain(1966): There is no music as Paul Newman and a farmer's wife(spy) slowly kill Gromek the bad guy with a knife, a shovel (clanging against his shins) and a gas oven. It is realistic brutality to the max.
As it turns out, Herrmann wrote murder music for THAT scene -- grinding, thundering music, no audience screams. Hitchcock fired Herrmann. But the FINAL composer on Torn Curtain, John Addison, ALSO wrote music for the murder. You can hear both pieces on the Torn Curtain DVD. The Herrmann Gromek murder music ended up in Scorsese's Cape Fear remake, over the houseboat/hurricane climax.
Frenzy(1972): Hitchcock fired ultra-famous composer Henry Mancini off of this one. Mancini's great credit overture can be heard on YouTube, but he reportedly wrote an entire score. Whether or not Mancini scored the rape and strangling of Brenda Blaney(Barbara Leigh-Hunt) is not known. But that scene in the final film(with a mostly pedestrian Ron Goodwin score) has no music and is about as brutal and realistic a depiction of death as Hitchcock ever gave us, including the sounds of the strangling necktie tightening round the victim's neck and her gurgles in final death.
The Frenzy murder got no audience screams. Just revulsion, walk-outs, tears....
Hitchcock prevailed with two gruesome murders and no music over them, in the years after Psycho
It's interesting to think of FX as the Trojan horse carrying orchestral scores back into fashion every couple of decades (and in the early 1930s it appears that that Trojan horse function led to the much greater acceptance of scores period at the beginning of the sound era). Certainly Star Wars when I was a kid did exactly this, seemingly changing overnight how films sounded.
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As a "midwife" from Kong to Star Wars, I would select out Bernard Herrmann's massively thunderous, rich and exciting scores for the Ray Harryhausen fantasies of that -- you guessed it -- 1958-1963 cusp:
Seventh Voyage of Sinbad(58)
Gullliver (60)
Mysterious Island (61)
Jason and the Argonauts (63)
These scores -- both in the credits (Sinbad and Island are the best) and of the "creatures" -- are the essence of screen excitement, and I find it not too coincidental that Herrrmann was at full bore for Hitchcock during these same years.
Herrman, Hitchcock, and Harryhausen...what a team. One wonders: was Hitchcock considered just as "cheesy" as Harryhausen in those years? Was Herrmann putting up these great scores for "mere entertainers"? If so, more power to him. Those scores are my childhood AND my teens AND my college years(when I bought the revival soundtrack albums.)
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Two related data points:
1. I finally got around to watching a couple of Japanese Godzilla movies, both the 1954 original and its recent remake Shin Godzilla (2016). Nether movie impressed me - Godzilla isn't nearly as interesting a monster as Kong, the basic Godzilla plot is too simple to be satisfying, and the human characters in both Godzillas are poor, *but* the original had a pretty good, energetic score, which the 2016 film shrewdly just reuses. Godzilla's score now seems to me the core of Godzilla, but the American Godzilla films haven't used it at all that I remember.
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I've lost track of my Godzillas. Shin Godzilla is not the one with Bryan Cranston? And the one with Jean Reno is from 1998 -- he turned down The Matrix to do it; oops.
I do like the original 1954 version with the American inserts of Raymond Burr as "reporter Steve Martin." Heh. Burr was famous for Perry Mason first and Ironside second, but ...Rear Window and Godzilla bring up the rear rather closely.
Its worth noting that the US got there first with a giant reptile tearing up a city -- in Ray Harryhausen's "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" (1953.) This was a hit that INSPIRED Godzilla; somehow all those sequels took over the idea, I guess.
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2.
I remember being a bit bored by Zimmer's work in the movie - it was 2+ hours of throbs and booms basically, also somewhat headache inducing -
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Intriguing. Chris Nolan somewhere did an interview on the weird, incessantly buzzing musical sound effect that usually accompanied the Joker when he was threatening people(like Maggie Gyllenhaal at the party)..it gave HIM a headache. But he decided the sound effect served almost a subliminal effect on audiences.
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but I guess a lot of people have *really* liked it so that Batman has ended up being a Trojan Horse for a certain sort of Stravinsky+metal influenced classical music.
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Eh...I like Danny Elfman's credit overture for the Nicholson/Keaton Batman the best.. it riffed a darker vibe off of John Williams robust "you are flying" magnificence of his Superman overture 11 years earlier. "Those were the days"(11 years apart.) A score meant something. A credit theme could be REMEMBERED. (And both Batman and Superman's opening credit music borrowed Herrmann''s motif for the opening of North by Northwest...building, building, building, BUILDIING....EXPLODING.
I've lost track of my Godzillas. Shin Godzilla is not the one with Bryan Cranston?[/quote]No, Shin Godzilla. a.k.a. Godzilla Resurgence is an all-Japanese production that came out only last year. One funny thing that definitely distinguishes Shin Godzilla from teh recent Hollywood one is that SG uses all its CGI money to make a very cartoonish/man-in-a-suit Godzilla. It's had to get your mind around-it as a westerner: we use CGI to make things more realistic whereas the Japanese perspective is that the CGI in live action blockbusters can be as unrealistic as CGI animations.This reminds me to mention that I recently read a book on populist '80s film called 'Live Moves Pretty Fast' by a Guardian columnist, Hadley Freeman. The book's very uneven (and it contains quite a few factual errors), but its best chapters, esp. one on Eddie Murphy that got me to gap-fill lots of Eddie films recently, one on Dirty Dancing, and one arguing for the superiority of Burton's Batman over Nolan's are interesting and fun and make it worth tracking down at least from your local library.
[quote]Eh...I like Danny Elfman's credit overture for the Nicholson/Keaton Batman the best..
I've lost track of my Godzillas. Shin Godzilla is not the one with Bryan Cranston?
No, Shin Godzilla. a.k.a. Godzilla Resurgence is an all-Japanese production that came out only last year.
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Hmm..and Warners will be bringing King Kong and Godzilla together any year now. That's a lotta Godzillas. (As one critic noted, the Jean Reno/Matthew Broderick Godzilla was actually a rather faithful remake of "Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" not of Godzilla -- except for the addition of Baby Godzillas in an ode to the raptors in Jurassic Park.)
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One funny thing that definitely distinguishes Shin Godzilla from teh recent Hollywood one is that SG uses all its CGI money to make a very cartoonish/man-in-a-suit Godzilla. It's had to get your mind around-it as a westerner: we use CGI to make things more realistic whereas the Japanese perspective is that the CGI in live action blockbusters can be as unrealistic as CGI animations.
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Ha. Well, they have a tradition to uphold...
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Eh...I like Danny Elfman's credit overture for the Nicholson/Keaton Batman the best..
This reminds me to mention that I recently read a book on populist '80s film called 'Live Moves Pretty Fast' by a Guardian columnist, Hadley Freeman. The book's very uneven (and it contains quite a few factual errors), but its best chapters, esp. one on Eddie Murphy that got me to gap-fill lots of Eddie films recently, one on Dirty Dancing,
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I've seen that book in stores and flipped through it. The 80s remain unexplored territory, movie-wise. So many hits, so little resonance. Eddie Murphy is a case in point. 48HRS, Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop made him a superstar and then...it was all downhill. For DECADES.
"Life moves pretty fast" is a Ferris Bueller line, and I've moved that movie up to my favorite of 1986 over such worthies as The Fly and even "Manhunter"(which at least got SOME of the Hannibal Lecter story right, and from a better Harris novel with a better secondary psycho, IMHO.)
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and one arguing for the superiority of Burton's Batman over Nolan's are interesting and fun
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Well, understanding the can of worms it would open on a Batman fan site, I'll say that not only was Burton's Batman better than Nolan's Batman, well...which ones are we comparing?
Burton's Batman started the entire movie franchise and did so with an established "prestige superstar"(Jack Nicholson) to give it gravitas (as Brando had been used in Superman , but in a much smaller part.) Nolan's first Batman was "Batman Begins," a film calculated to put all the emphasis on Bruce Wayne and his origins, with a de-emphasis on interesting villains, too much lingering on dull backstory that had taken minutes in the Burton original and a finale on an elevated train that had been done just the year before in "Spiderman 2," better.
No, Burton's Batman is actually to be pitted against Nolan's SECOND Batman movie -- The Dark Knight -- and NOLAN'S Joker(Heath Ledger, great in the part, and posthumously adding his own gravitas) and, well...I give the nod to Burton yet again. The Dark Knight bogs down in plot and sounds in a certain stupidity on the part of practically everybody in Gotham City, falling over and over again for the Joker's traps. Meanwhile, the Joker leaves the movie with about 20 dull minutes left to go(some unconvincing Two-Face material.)
The plot was more simplistic and throwaway in Burton's Batman(the Joker's killing people with cosmetics), but that one reveled in the basics of Jack versus Michael -- the best Batman we ever got.
And Burton's Batman has Elfman's better score....
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and make it worth tracking down at least from your local library
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I may well. I can't stay in the rut of that 50s/60s cusp all the time. The Big Eighties entertained me a lot. Personal favorites: Used Cars(Kurt Russell conjured up a comic persona he is still using in "Fate of the Furious" and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 as Pratt's dad this year -- the trailer shows us, not a spoiler), Raiders, ET, Terms of Endearment, Ghostbusters(SNL meets Spielberg, with Bill Murray Ascendant) Silverado, Ferris Bueller(for its tone, its life view, its hero and its villain), and the spectacular one-two-three action close-out of The Untouchables(87), Die Hard(88), and Batman(89), one summer after another as the 80's closed out.