I've already explained about Torn Curtain many times. He was fired by Hitchcock during the recording of the Torn Curtain score because Hitchcock was a sniveling wretch of a human being with no guts. Had he had any guts, he would have told the imbeciles from the studio to fuck off and mind their own business. The issue with Torn Curtain is not anything to do with the score. It's to do with the fact that the FILM does not understand what it it's meant to achieve. Is it a comedy? No. Is it a thriller? No. Is it a comedy thriller? No. Well then WTF is it?
Not even Hitchcock knew that and neither did anyone else. Ergo, the film is a flimsy example of the genre that Hitchcock worked in and none of it was helped by the fact the the two main actors, Julie Andrews (yes she was paid MORE than Paul Newman) and Paul Newman and were both hopelessly miscast. They took up almost all of the budget of the film btw.
Audiences can't be expected to watch a fucking so-called thriller/comedy/bollocks when the female lead could break into the Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious song at any given moment and take it seriously. And that, among other things, points to the Herrmann score. If you watch clips of the Herrmann score to Torn Curtain you immediately see that the film is way too lightweight to sustain a score like that based on my previous colourful comments. Herrmann didn't DO lightweight!!!!!!! The film had to collapse under that onslaught. So he was fired.
So Hollywood producers suddenly think they've done their bollocks and get in a composer they think is more user friendly. The score needs a song. The score needs to be COMMERCIAL because the film needs to be commercial. Hitchcock cannot understand, because his ego won't let him. That the failure of the film in the rushes stage have nothing to do with Herrmann. Hitchcock was a great director, but he was a fucking coward too. And it's also a fact that Torn Curtain and the subsequent fiasco with Herrmann also marked the demise of his career. People when talking about films, always seem to forget about the time they were made in. Very important. At the same time I was watching Torn Curtain at the cinema (no videos or DVD's in those days) a film like Goldfinger was released and it's natural that studios in those days compared films on an impact for impact basis. Very much a hangover from the recently defunct studio system of course and the competitiveness of all of that.
Bernard Herrmann, on the other hand, hated Hollywood and thus moved to England for 6 months out of every year a little later on. While some of the films he scored were not memorable, you can usually find something in a Herrmann score. For instance, Fahrenheit blah blah blah is a crap film with a great score. No one remembers the score because the film is crap. That's always the problem. If you're going to make a crap film, for God sake at least get a good cinematographer in. Then you can at least watch well filmed crap.
But in the end; literarily the end, Herrmann came good with a seminal score for Taxi Driver. I'd like to hear any of the current crop of wankers in Hollywood come up with a score like that. What a lot of people forget, particularly with something like Psycho and the now extremely famous scoring for that film is, Herrmann, as indeed most film scorers, is sitting looking at something with NO SOUND to start from. Can anyone come up with something as good as that today.
NO!!!!!
That's what makes Herrmann, although not necessarily loved by all, the greatest film scorer in his particular genre of all time.
The difference between someone like Herrmann and todays scorer is basically computers. Most stuff today sounds like computer driven music and that is great if you're say, a Hans Zimmer fan, no musical knowledge, no education of any kind, can't play a musical instrument, can't get a girlfriend, like video games and are probably 12 and a poof.
Good evening.