Hallowe’en is fast approaching. This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s high time we get the pumpkin rolling, with an hour of fantasy film scores of Bernard Herrmann.
Just about everyone has some awareness of Herrmann’s fruitful run with Alfred Hitchcock, a collaborative relationship which yielded scores to “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest” and “Psycho,” among others. Concurrently, Herrmann worked with producer Charles H. Schneer to create a series of classic films on fantastic subjects, featuring special effects by stop-motion maestro Ray Harryhausen. We’ll be listening to selections from two of these.
Jules Vernes’ novel, “Mysterious Island,” was a sequel of sorts to “20,000 Leagues under the Sea. “ During the American Civil War, a ragtag band of Union soldiers escape from a Confederate prison by hot air balloon. A storm sweeps them off to the titular island, where they encounter pirates, a castaway and an orangutan. Indeed Captain Nemo turns up late in the narrative, though no giant creatures, as in the film (made in 1961). Herrmann has a field day characterizing an enormous crab, bee and especially bird, for which he employs a fugue!
Harryhausen’s skeleton fight from Schneer’s “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963) stands as one of the all-time classic fantasy sequences, a dream marriage of visuals and music. Herrmann, who always provided his own orchestrations, was well known for putting together unique combinations of instruments the better to illustrate the special character of a given film. In the case of “Jason,” he went in the opposite direction he had taken with “Psycho,” stripping away the strings and concentrating instead on winds, brass and percussion.
On a somewhat gentler note, Herrmann scored the beautiful spectral romance, “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1947), with Gene Tierney as a young widow who moves with her daughter to a seaside village, where she encounters the ghost of salty Captain Craigg (played by Rex Harrison). Of course, their banter leads to a hopeless attraction developing between them. Herrmann was a master at creating musical evocations of yearning, and his score for “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” is full of romantic longing.
Criminally, for a composer whose career spanned over four decades, from “Citizen Kane” to “Taxi Driver,” Herrmann received only a single Oscar, for “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (released in 1941 as “All That Money Can Buy”). Walter Huston makes a meal of his role as Mr. Scratch in Stephen Vincent Benet’s recasting of the Faust legend, transferred to the New England countryside. Director Wlliam Dieterle, who had his roots in German Expressionism, creates some truly eerie visuals, and Herrmann’s score barn-dances deftly back and forth between dread and whimsy.
Join me for fantasy film scores of Bernard Herrmann this week on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6; or catch it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.
