Torn Curtain had a great score by Herrmann that was abandoned by Hitchcock and replaced with a ordinary one that the studio heads wanted. At the same time Hitchcock fired Herrmann  - right on the soundstage where he had assembled that orchestra for the first rehearsal.  That was the end of their association forever.   It was because Hitchcock had been ordered by the studio heads to have a light marketable music score for the film and he obeyed them.  Herrmann did not, and  never compromised on any artistic matter even slightly.  He was right of course, since the film is a very dark espionage Cold War film - why would someone want lighter music for that?   

The Herrmann score to Torn Curtain has been recorded several times since including a very good one conducted by Elmer Bernstein.   It is for a very unusual orchestra of 12 flutes, 16 horns, 9 trombones, 2 tubas, percussion, cellos and basses only.  He wanted the flutes to sound frightening rather than beautiful and they do have a creepy, almost insane quality in the fascinating music he did for the somewhat less successful film. The film itself isn't as bad as some people seem to think - a lesser Hitchcock film is a still a very good one compared to others!  It has the amazing "Killing of Gromek" scene about which Hitchcock stated "I wanted to show how difficult it can be to kill a man."  However it was terrible that their collaboration ended with that studio-caused fiasco. 

Yes but Torn Curtain is a mish mash of a film. If you're Bernard Herrmann and you're trying to score that then you have every right to become psychotic and heavily drunk - which is what he did for while. 

Torn Curtain, while very colourful and well produced and shot etc. is the signal to Hitchcock's end really. He never came back from that - making stuff like Topaz - but then a short spell with Frenzy - and then that was really it. Herrmann was better off out of it by then. Although he would have done a good job on Frenzy because he invented and owned that genre of filmscore writing. 

Herrmann did Taxi Driver and that is proof of his particular genius. This is the golden era of filmscoring. 

When these guys scored films back then - they didn't sit on a synthesizer patch for 5 minutes farting on the keyboard and then call it avant garde - they actually tried to write for the scene. Someone - Erik? - mentioned Night Hawks. That was not Keith Emersons finest hour. This shows a brilliant keyboard player's - perhaps the best the world has seen in that particular style - shortcomings when trying to move in another direction - filmscore writing. That said, compared to a lot of synth styled filmscore bollocks I have heard, it wasn't that  bad an attempt. But therein lies the problem. You begin to justify everything that is rubbish by comparing crap with even worse crap and that's no good at all.

When you get someone writing a piece in a music/mag/blog/whatever today - telling you how good someone is today and how hard they work - that means absolutely bollocks. You can work as hard as you like but it doesn't mean jackshit if you can't deliver a pint of milk.

It was Jasen I think that mentioned Night Hawks,  a very satisfying B-grader for a pizza and Coke/beer night. However I can't even remember the score at all.

I seem to remember that they replaced Herrmann with John Addison for Torn Curtain, a composer not in Herrmann's league, but for whom otherwise I have great respect. If they wanted a comedic, quirky, parody-score, they could have done little better, as Addison's scores for Sleuth and Start the Revolution Without Me attest. He would also have been great for The Trouble with Harry (should Herrmann have been unavailable). Other than that I have not seen Torn Curtain so I don't have a specific opinion.

Actually, The Trouble with Harry was Herrmann's first film with Hitchcock, so if he had been unavailable, the film & music worlds may have been robbed of the great H&H pairing forever. I don't mention this just to nitpick, but to say this - I have always been amazed that Hitch & Herrmann first met for such a light film, yet Hitch knew that he had met his musical partner. Bernard's brilliance and their process together must have been so clear on Harry, because just from the music, you would never know that he was the right composer to stick with through to films like Psycho, or even The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was next up for them.

@William said:

Torn Curtain had a great score by Herrmann that was abandoned by Hitchcock and replaced with a ordinary one that the studio heads wanted. At the same time Hitchcock fired Herrmann  - right on the soundstage where he had assembled that orchestra for the first rehearsal.  That was the end of their association forever.   It was because Hitchcock had been ordered by the studio heads to have a light marketable music score for the film and he obeyed them.  Herrmann did not, and  never compromised on any artistic matter even slightly.  He was right of course, since the film is a very dark espionage Cold War film - why would someone want lighter music for that?   

The Herrmann score to Torn Curtain has been recorded several times since including a very good one conducted by Elmer Bernstein.   It is for a very unusual orchestra of 12 flutes, 16 horns, 9 trombones, 2 tubas, percussion, cellos and basses only.  He wanted the flutes to sound frightening rather than beautiful and they do have a creepy, almost insane quality in the fascinating music he did for the somewhat less successful film. The film itself isn't as bad as some people seem to think - a lesser Hitchcock film is a still a very good one compared to others!  It has the amazing "Killing of Gromek" scene about which Hitchcock stated "I wanted to show how difficult it can be to kill a man."  However it was terrible that their collaboration ended with that studio-caused fiasco. 

Not that I'm an authority on the subject (or anything for that matter[:(]) but from what I understand, they wanted the lighter score to bulster Julie Andrews ' career as an up and coming vocalist/Pop star.  I think they even wanted Hermann to write her a radio friendly Pop song that she could sing.  At the time, the James Bond movies were kind of heading in that direction and considering the subject matter of Torn Curtain it seemed, to the studio anyway, only fitting to follow the James Bond lead (Iknow they are not exactly the same type of film but to the studios...)  The darker score that Hermann composed contrasted with what Julie Andrews' publicist/manger/agent wanted when they were trying to brand her.

I'm just surprised that Alfred Hitchcock went along with that.  He wasn't bound to the studios demands.  He was always given artistic freedom because the studios knew that he would deliver the goods.  But then again, they might have given him more artistic freedom but he would have to throw Hermann under the bus?

I don't think Torn Curtain was any signal to Hitchcock's end. It was just a situation of dealing with the changing commercial film scene.  As Paul points out Frenzy was just as good as earlier films.  In fact, it was shockingly modernistic when it came out - as with Psycho, a bit too much for some critics.  

The reason that Hitchcock didn't stick up for Herrmann on Torn Curtain is that nobody did that in those days.  Not a good reason I know, but there was no such thing as "The Art of Cinema" - it was just business and you had to do what the people in charge demanded.  Hitchcock was keenly aware of that and he dropped Herrmann like a hot potato.

That is a good point about Trouble with Harry - it is a very light film to have been the first Herrmann/Hitchcock.  Though it is a really good one with a delicious ironic humor throughout.  Hitchcock wanted to make everything look very picturesque and beautiful so the corpse that keeps popping up was all the more irritating.  Herrmann echoes that throughout the score with the beautifully idyllic string theme being interrupted by a loud four-note motif in the brass!

@PaulR said:

When you talk about films today, you cannot compare what goes on in them musically with years ago. 

There is a simple reason for this:  the composers of films in the past of Hollywood were all classically trained musicians, many of them from Austria who immigrated during the war, and had a huge influence on the quality of music being done in the studios.  Though Herrmann was an American of course, he was a conductor also and did all of his own orchestrations.  

One thing concerning orchestration by Herrmann that I am fascinated by is the TV scoring he did.   In the films, he is famous for his various orchestrations - such as Jason and the Argonauts which used only brass, woodwinds and percussion,  or King of the Khyber Rifles which had a large section scored by percussion alone., or Mysterious Island which had a huge woodwind ensemble along with the normal compliment of strings and brass and was used very effectively to depict the wonders of the island. However, in his TV scores HE WENT EVEN FURTHER and did some of his most experimental scoring as well as serious scoring, such as the incredibly beautiful score he did for the Twilight Zone "Walking Distance" episode - a mere half-hour teleplay score that was so good that it was recently recorded by the Scottish Philharmonic along with Fahrenheit 451.   Or the amazing scores he did for the Alfred Hitchcock Hour where he was hired as a regular composer and used it as a way of experimenting with all sorts of instrumental combinations never used normally in scoring.  For example, one episode he did was scored for a large bassoon and contrabassoon ensemble only.  It was just as effective as film scoring for the particular episode as any normally orchestrated score and was one that blew me away in how original his orchestration could be.  You could tell he was thinking - how can I use this particular group of instruments to do the most possible for this score, almost as a challenge as a composer/orchestrator.   

One thing that makes discussion about Herrmann ironic nowadays is the idea that today's composers have found various approaches to avoid writing much music but still score the scene. 

Herrmann had many years ago done something similar with his non-leitmotif approach, which rejected Steiner and Korngold and instead used a very simplified motif development which was not keyed to characters or scenes.  In other words, he was already doing the minimalism that people think is so unique today in many current composers.  The difference was that he did it with great musicality, resulting in beautfiul scores as opposed to simple musical sound effects.  

For example - Vertigo.  it is NOT a big operatic score like Korngold (or John Williams or Howard Shore in LOTR) even though people like to make comparisons to Liebestod, etc.  It is all simple motifs, very minimally developed in  direct relation to the film scenes.  There are some elemental motifs tied to the film scenes - like the "Carlotta" Spanish influenced rhythm, the swirling "vertigo" motif or the bitonal brass chords depicting dangerous heights  - but that is it.  They are more motifs tied to an overall psychological theme instead of a Wagnerian memory aid (oh yeah, that's Siegfried now!)  All of it in Herrmann is a musical development for each scene.  And so it ends up being more direct as well as more musical, even though it anticipated today's simplified scoring techniques.

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Herrmann uses the big Moogs I think for a score. Herrmann like to go low.

There is a 3 part series coming up on BBC4 called music in cinema or something like that on Thursday. 3 parts. First part is orchestral.

I'll take bets on this. I'm betting it's going to be crap but would like to be proved wrong. But I doubt it. [|-)]

Herrmann actually used modular Moog synthesizer on the score to "Sisters" the early Brian de Palma film about insane homicidal separated Siamese twins, which is much better and more original than his later famous films.   The film is not great though it is an interesting psychodrama, but the music is FANTASTIC!    It has a big part for glockenspiel, also,  an appropriately insane orchestration, which though a very late score for Herrmann was one of his most experimental.