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.
