@ralf said:
@PaulR
My pupils (at the age of 16) were very impressed and thought that Herrmann did a good job with the Prelude. The shower scene was a little different though. They laughed about the melon cut sounds... Oh well - those young folks today...
I agree that it's very difficult to get your hands on Herrmann sheet music. I found the first bars from the prelude in a school book as piano arrangement. The scores are not that hard to find I think...
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@RalfCan't get the Herrmann scores anywhere, which is a pain, because the one mockup I would do would be the opening to Vertigo - just for the hell of it. Naturally, it would be really good! [:D] [:P]
Yes, your pupils sound very well educated - the very best score ever written to film, arguably. And also, in my view, they are quite correct to laugh at certain points in Psycho because a lot of it is supposed to be funny in a typical perverse Hitchcockian way. That was the nature of Hitchcock - humour and lots of pratical and dirty jokes on and off the sets of all his films.
@Wellsdeckers
That is of course quite correct. Psycho set the seal on the genre. A style within the genre that has been copied to the point of destruction and of course Hitchcock KNEW what he had created at the time - also being the unacredited producer - thus owning a very large part of the film.
Interestingly, and perhaps not so coincidental, one of his old sparing buddies Michael Powell made a similar style of film in the same year as Psycho - called Peeping Tom. Powell was one of our foremost directors of all film history - a genius of sorts. Ironically, Peeping Tom was slaughtered by the critics and destroyed Powell's reputation totally - whereas on the other side of the Atlantic, Psycho didn't get accepted by critics all that well either, and yet, made Hitchcock one of the most bankable directors of all time, if he wasn't already.
Nowadays, both Psycho and Peeping Tom are regarded as classics within their particualr genre and obviously quite rightly so.
Of the nine or so films Herrmann scored for Hitchcock, not one of them was even nominated for an Oscar - not even Vertigo, North by Northwest or Psycho. In the year 1960, when Psycho was released (no joke intended) - nominations for filmscore included Sparticus, The Magnificent Seven etc.
Naturally, the Academy gave it to Exodus. Who the f88k remembers that these days. [:D]
