July/August 2007 2007 Commentaries

ARTICLE TOOLS

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It's no surprise that Jack Sullivan's Hitchcock's Music, has gotten so much press. The title alone gets anyone thinking about the most searingly memorable wedding of image and music ever filmed. Do I need to specify? The violin shrieks as Janet Leigh is knifed to death in the shower in Psycho.

However, one could reasonably ask what Sullivan was going to fill out the pages of his book with besides that scene. Hitchcock fans may think of the eerie theremin on the soundtrack in Spellbound; then the creeping triplet figure under the opening credits of Vertigo seems to have made a certain impression. But Sullivan is interested in more than these easy scores, as it were. Hitchcock's Music argues that Alfred Hitchcock was especially sensitive to music for a director, and that throughout his oeuvre, Hitchcock applied music in so studious a way as to render it a kind of character in itself.

Despite having always enjoyed Hitchcock, I had never been aware of this as a defining trait of his, and so I took Sullivan's book as an occasion to watch no fewer than 30 of Hitchcock's 50-odd films—that is, all of his films considered to have passed the test of time. (With the exception of The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, I left out the twenty-and-change films he made in England before coming to America, most of which were forgettable programmers, with rather sparse music due to budgetary constraints, as Sullivan acknowledges.) And after approximately 72 hours—no, not continuous!—of soaking in Hitchcock's fusions of story and sound, I judge Sullivan's thesis to succeed only partly.

His argument reminds me of the historiography of Broadway musicals, in which a guiding theme is the emergence of the "integrated" musical: the songs ...