Movie music maestro Bernard Herrmann scored dozens of classic cinema scenes, including Cary Grant on the run in Alfred Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST (courtesy Photofest)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Through November 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.thebernardherrmannestate.com
Taking the art of the film score to a whole new level, composer extraordinaire Bernard Herrmann had an innate sense of how to make movies better through music. He wrote scores for more than fifty films in his too-brief thirty-five-year career (he died in 1975 at the age of sixty-four), including nine by the figure he is most often identified with, suspense master Alfred Hitchcock, whom he also had a well-known falling out with. Herrmann worked with a diverse range of directors, scoring classic outings by Orson Welles, Henry Hathaway, François Truffaut, Michael Curtiz, Martin Scorsese, William Dieterle, Robert Wise, Raoul Walsh, Brian De Palma, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Henry King, Nicholas Ray, Nunnally Johnson, and others. Oddly, the New York City-born maestro, whose career began with Citizen Kane and concluded with Taxi Driver, was nominated for only five Oscars, winning for his second film, 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. He also composed concert pieces and scores for radio, television, and the stage in addition to his more famous film work, which is on display in a two-week series at Film Forum that continues through November 3. It’s an impressive body of work, including Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (October 23-24), Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (October 24), Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (October 25 in a double feature with Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry), Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (October 26-27 with John Brahm’s Hangover Square), and Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (October 30 with Hitchcock’s The Birds). On October 28, Film Forum will be screening the inspired double feature of Taxi Driver and J. Lee Thompson’s original Cape Fear (in which Robert Mitchum shows Robert De Niro how it’s done), while the psychological suspense will be turned up a notch on Halloween with the pairing of Psycho with De Palma’s Obsession. The oddest double feature is November 1’s stop-motion duo of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, attesting to Herrmann’s range. “Herrmann would have been delighted, though perhaps not surprised, at the growing amount of attention attracted by his music in recent years,” his widow, Norma, writes on the estate’s official website. “There has been interest from a whole new generation who were not even born during his lifetime.” The series at Film Forum offers that generation a great opportunity to experience Herrmann’s work for the first time, as well as allowing those who’ve grown up with his genius another chance to see it (and hear it) on the big screen.