Alfred Hitchcock’s vicious fallout with his greatest collaborator: “Why have you betrayed me like this?”
Many great Hollywood partnerships turn to dust, some more tragically than others. For Alfred Hitchcock, his longtime musical collaborator Bernard Herrmann left him feeling betrayed, and in the end, their partnership came to its demise when the director realised they just weren’t compatible anymore.
When you find someone who feels like your creative equal – someone who just seems to understand you, and you understand them – it can be a real disappointment for this idyllic way of working to come crashing down. Hitchcock and Herrmann had first worked together in 1955, with the latter providing the score for his film The Trouble With Harry.
From that moment, the pair formed a value partnership, and he scored seven of the filmmaker’s movies. Most famously, he came up with the iconic music that soundtracked the shower scene in Psycho, but it was this contribution that inadvertently led him to make a mistake that ended his tenure with Hitchcock.
Steven C Smith, who wrote Hitchcock & Herrmann, told Variety that the reason for the pair’s fallout stemmed from the composer going against Hitchcock’s demands when working on Torn Curtain, thinking he knew best. This had worked for Psycho, but it wasn’t going to work this time. Hitchcock didn’t want a “heavy score”, but Herrmann did exactly that, believing that Hitchcock was being wrongly advised by others.
Explaining, “The reason Benny felt that he could go against Hitchcock’s wishes on Torn Curtain, I’m confident, is because Hitchcock said on Psycho, ‘Do whatever you think is best. I only have one instruction. Do not write music for the murders.’”
He added, “And of course, Herrmann ignored that, and he wrote the music for the shower scene. … Herrmann had what was the supreme triumph, I think, of his career in film when he said, ‘Hitch, I did write music for that scene. May I play it for you?’ And he did, and Hitchcock said, ‘Well, that’s what we’ll use.’”
Herrmann had the best of intentions, but clearly, he should’ve listened to his director, because at the end of the day, Hitchcock knew best. “I have a much clearer understanding now of how, when Hitchcock walked into the Torn Curtain scoring session, he was just stunned, and his thought was an understandable ‘Why have you betrayed me like this? Everything’s gone wrong, and I counted on you, my friend, and you did this to me too.’ Benny didn’t do what he was told, and he wasn’t the director of the movie. And this could have been avoided,” Smith added.
“Benny had the chance to turn it down, and they could have gotten Henry Mancini or John Addison,” he elaborated, revealing that “he was at the lowest point of his life at that moment, and I think that he was not able to view a project with the same open-mindedness that he could have if his world had not gotten very dark in his head.”
So, eventually, Herrmann was kicked off the production, and Addison did the score instead. Hitchcock and Herrmann would never work together again.
