The Alfred Hitchcock
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EXCERPTS - 7
From: Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006)
[Editor's note. Jack Sullivan is director of American Studies and professor of English at Rider University. His Hitchcock's Music
has been widely praised. Recently the American Society of
Composers, Authors and Publishers gave it the Deems Taylor Award for
best book on concert music. In the excerpt below, describing
composer Franz Waxman's contribution to Suspicion
(1941), it is characteristic of Sullivan that he combines musical
expertise with close attention to the film, including both image and
dialogue.]
CARY GRANT'S DANGEROUS DANCING: SUSPICION
HITCHCOCK'S SECOND PROJECT FOR RKO during the [Selznick] loan-out, Suspicion, made an even more daring and extensive use of waltzes than the first [Mr and Mrs Smith].
In the most celebrated scene, Cary Grant, in his Hitchcock debut,
dances up a shadowy staircase with a brightly lit glass of milk that
may or may not be poison for his ailing wife, accompanied by a dark
spin on Strauss’s “Wiener Blut” by Franz Waxman, in
his second Hitchcock picture. Grant’s character Johnnie - a
womanizer, spendthrift, liar, and gambling addict who may also be
trying to murder his wife - is continually associated with this waltz.
Usually it plays with straightforward elegance; in this scene, however,
it is weirdly distorted, a distant, bleak woodwind fragment colored by
a fateful gong. The suspicions of Johnnie’s wife, Lina, played
with eloquent vulnerability by Joan Fontaine, appear to be justified.
“Wiener Blut” is heard
six times in the film, debuting as a stylish contrast to the staid
“Dance with Reggie,” where “Lina the Spinster”
(as cue number 7 calls her) dances with a dully respectable suitor
before being swept away on the dance floor by the attractive,
mysterious Johnnie. Reggie’s music is a pallid version of 1940s
swing; Johnnie’s is Strauss, seductively arranged by Waxman.
Later, in Lina’s bedroom, the waltz wafts in from a distance,
again from a real band, an effect from Waltzes from Vienna.
“Let’s dance,” offers Johnnie, “before we . .
.” Yes,” Lina interrupts, “let’s dance.”
“Wiener Blut”
represents Johnnie’s allure and glamour, often seconds
before Lina wonders whether he is a fraud. The couple’s
“Honeymoon Montage” includes waltz fragments (written by
Waxman) from Italy, Paris, and London; in the final shot, the waltz,
now “Wiener Blut,” continues as the newlyweds dance
privately, then is subverted by dissonance as Johnnie suddenly asks her
for one hundred pounds. In later scenes, the meaning behind the waltz
shifts with Lina’s growing doubts. An anxious cue called
“Looking for Johnnie” reflects her worry that Johnnie has
pushed his old pal Beaky off a cliff for his money; when she finds the
two together and realizes she was wrong, the waltz erupts for full
orchestra. As Beaky recounts his near death on the cliff, her
fears are revived; but when he points out that Johnnie
saved his life, she is flooded yet again with relief. Through these
huge mood swings, the waltz plays on, its significance continually
changing.
In Rebecca,
Waxman used conflicting themes to enact struggles between characters;
here, the conflict is entirely in Lina’s psyche and is evoked by
a single, ever-changing cue called “Suspicion.” Marked
“Molto Appassionata” in the main title, this cue
sounds seductive and dangerous, its line dropping as it attempts to
soar, its exotic harmonies shadowed by chromaticism. This tight,
monothematic structure is revealed immediately in the cue sheet, which
lists twenty-five “Suspicion” cues, nearly half the score.
The opening variations suggest over-the-edge sexuality as Lina falls
suddenly and obsessively in love. Johnnie meets Lina on a train, a
prime location for significant Hitchcockian encounters, to the teasing
strains of a countermelody (similar to the courtship cue in Rebecca)
associated with Johnnie’s flirtatious charm, often before the
main melody creeps in with a suggestion of something darker.
Hitchcock hated the
film’s title, forced on him by RKO after audience tests; he
thought it unspeakably tacky and instead wanted the film to be called Johnnie.
The central cue could be called “Johnnie” or
“Suspicion,” since the melody suggests both the charm of
the male protagonist and a secret side. As the film progresses,
“Suspicion” seems more apt; its colors and harmonies become
increasingly uncertain as the heroine’s doubts grow. (The
original score preserved by RKO is called Before the Fact, the working title based on Francis Iles’s novel.)
The opening scenes immediately
establish Hitchcock’s growing mastery of sound. Clock chimes,
church bells, barking dogs, and motor horns - all indelible parts of
his sound tracks by the early 1940s - blend seductively with hunting
horns in a surreal cacophony as Johnnie begins his hunt, obviously
chasing after more than foxes. Pretending to take Lina to church, he
makes an aggressive pass at her on top of a hill over shrill tremolos:
“Did you think I was trying to kill you?” he asks, setting
up the suspense. Lina declines the advance, snapping her purse shut and
declaring she would have no trouble “handling” Johnnie any
more than she would one of her horses. When she grabs and violently
kisses him at the bottom of the hill, boldly taking the initiative
after hearing her father describe her as an old maid with
“intellect and a fine, solid character,” the strings
tremble with dangerous passion.
From this point on, Waxman
subjects the “Suspicion” tune to a variety of variations
cuing Lina’s tumultuously shifting inner state. She suspects
that glamour-boy Johnnie is planning to kill her for her money
but cannot be sure; all the evidence validates her growing panic,
though her amorous feelings say the opposite. Drifting in and out of
chronic suspicion, she exists in a state of exquisite ambivalence,a
turn-on with constant cycles of tension and shuddering release
fueled by variations that are sometimes lush, sometimes sinister - and
often both at once. The “Suspicion” theme thus parallels
“Wiener Blut” as a psychological barometer, though it
continually changes. Because we really don’t know whether
Johnnie is guilty, we are as uncertain as Lina, from whose point of
view we see the action, and whose fantasies are sounded by
Waxman’s ambiguous music. (Hitchcock kept an unhappy version of
the ending on reserve, in case the censors who insisted on
Johnnie’s final innocence demurred; except for the final cue,
Waxman’s double-edged score would have worked for that version
too.) When Lina becomes too suspicious to sleep with Johnnie,
“Suspicion” sinks into despair; when he makes charmingly
contrite resolutions to mend his spendthrift ways, the music becomes
lush and consoling. Rarely does it do the expected: when Lina peeks at
a letter from the insurance company revealing that Johnny gets her
money in the event of her death, it whispers with eerie delicacy rather
than exploding into a conventional stinger chord. When she refuses to
let Johnnie take off her clothes prior to the scene of his
carrying the milk up the stairs, she nonetheless falls into his arms
and fantasizes about the first time he tried to undo her blouse, as the
score reprises the passionate “Suspicion” cue on the
hilltop. At a certain point (as in the novel), Lina seems to accept
Johnnie’s guilt and give in to it: when she looks knowingly at
the glass of milk Johnnie has brought to her bedside in exchange
for a goodnight kiss, the melody has a wispy resignation.
This intense irresolution characterizes other cues as well. As in Vertigo,
the music enacts the title. (Given the number of Hitchcock villains who
whistle, even Cary Grant’s happy “Whistling
Improvisation” sounds suspicious.) At “Isobel’s
Dinner Party,” a writer of murder mysteries who claims she can
determine if someone is a killer by his or her face takes a look
at Johnnie’s: a back-and-forth dissonance forms a question mark -
it could easily go either way. “Car Ride” begins with
silken strings as the lovers exchange endearments, degenerates into
ugly discords when Lina reveals her knowledge of Johnnie’s job
termination, then lurches back to romance when Johnny turns on the
charm. As he declares his intention to develop a spectacular sea vista,
a horn plays a lyrical but anxious solo.
In its darkest moments - the
fateful waves of sound following Lina’s interrogation by police,
the revelations of Johnnie’s employer - Waxman’s score
signals pure terror, something far beyond suspicion.
“Anagrams,” the most shivery example, begins with a
Mussorgskian chord when Lina sees “Murder” on the game
board, evoking a subjective montage of Beaky being thrown off a cliff,
his screams mingling with garish brass clusters. When Lina opens
Johnnie’s drawer and discovers The Trial of Richard Palmer, the story of a notorious poisoning case, a massive wave of sound resembling the ocean music in Rebecca
crashes through the scene. When Johnnie locks the door following
Isobel’s dinner party and leads Lina up shadowy stairs to the
bedroom, a long bass pedal provides shuddery commentary.
Suspicion
has striking musical correspondences with other Hitchcock movies. Lina
writes an “I’m leaving you” letter to Johnnie over
the hum of a pedal point, then tears it up, a forecast of Judy’s
letter and its music in Vertigo. In haunting echoes of Rebecca,
a novachord quivers through Joan Fontaine’s panic, and mysterious
glissandos sweep upward as she opens bedroom curtains. Waxman’s
score also anticipates later films: the foreboding woodwinds
introducing “Inspector Hobson” and the wandering harmonies
as Lina is introduced to Johnnie’s employer foretell similar
sounds during the Herrmann era.
The most dramatic parallel
is literal: “Too Fast,” a crescendo of speed and panic,
later lifted by Selznick for the ski sequence in Spellbound.
This double-duty cue comes at the controversial end, where Johnnie
turns out to be not a killer but a Hitchcock wrong man, the object of
Lina’s fearful projections. Many have complained that this is a
false happy ending, but it is consistent with Hitchcock’s
preoccupation with obsession. He is always more interested in how
people perceive reality and deal with troubling epiphanies than
in who-done-it. In the end, Johnnie is absolved by music, and Lina
is liberated from her mental torture. Whether we fully believe the
happy outcome depends to a great extent on how convincing we find
Waxman’s harmonies. The near-fatal car scene, in which Johnnie
saves Lina’s life as she thinks he is ending it, is energized by
an ostinato that collects all the anxiety the movie has generated,
bringing it to a point of no return. Released by Lina’s cathartic
scream, the bottled-up terror of “Too Fast” turns into a
new version of the main theme, which appears in minor-key fragments
surrounded by breathless tremelos as Lina realizes that Johnnie planned
to poison himself rather than her and that he is guilty only of
financial improprieties: “If only I had understood,” she
cries, accusing herself of self-absorption, vowing to start the
relationship over, and demanding an equal openness from Johnnie. He
declares himself “no good. . . . You can’t change people
overnight.” But the metamorphosis in the score, the ascending
patterns moving painfully toward resolution, suggest change is
possible; the music slowly takes a U-turn with the car and with the
newly hopeful characters as the fragments come together, now ringing
with chimes in consonance and closure, a satisfying symphonic
resolution after so much disharmony and paranoia. This major-key
peroration of “Suspicion,” which might now be called
“Trust,” tells the final story: the concluding shot catches
the reunited couple as they drive away so that we cannot see the
expressions that have replaced their anguished close-ups. The
credibility of the ending is tightly linked with that of the music.
The fatal threat turns out to have
all been in the heroine’s head, a stream of fantasy cued by
lusciously fearful music. Hitchcock’s next exploration of a young
woman’s dire suspicion about a charismatic man [Shadow of a Doubt]
would again use waltzes as a psychological keynote, but this time the
threat would turn out to be real, indeed far worse than imagined.
EXCERPTS 1 - Michael Walker on "Confined Spaces" in Hitchcock
EXCERPTS 2 - Tony Lee Moral on Marnie
EXCERPTS 3 - Thomas Leitch on Irony; Jamaica Inn
EXCERPTS 4 - Lesley Brill on Mr and Mrs Smith
EXCERPTS 5 - Jane Sloan surveys critical writing on Hitchcock
EXCERPTS 6 - Donald Spoto on Stage Fright
All material © copyright the individual author and 'The MacGuffin', muffin@labyrinth.net.au
Last modified 6 January, 2008,
using Nvu 1.0 and Windows XP Home Edition.