The Battle of Neretva

The Battle of Neretva was one of those big war movies - like The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far - that ended up being as big a logistical nightmare as the campaign it was portraying. Shot in 1969 on a state-sponsored budget in what was then Yugoslavia,  it included Yul Brynner and Orson Welles among its mostly indigenous Serbo-Croat-speaking cast. Dubbed into English for an international release in 1971, it provided Herrmann with a vast canvas to work on, even though its original three hour running time had been whittled down to 102 minutes. Herrmann, in fact, compared the film to "a great big roast beef", overdone in parts and undercooked in others. If his music was to be the gravy, then he poured it on thick.

He assembled an army of musicians to play the most bombastic score of his career, a huge fortress of sound that towered over the film. Among the themes he included was the unused murder music from Torn Curtain (it's not recorded whether Hitchcock ever saw the picture) and a delicate melody from Souvenirs de Voyage, a clarinet quintet he had written for his wife in 1967. It's unlikely that anybody but Herrmann was aware of these self-borrowings at the time. One of the stand-out tracks is "The Retreat", which captures the futility of war with a slow deliberate march set against a long yearning melody for strings. I'm listening to that cue right now on the Bernard Herrmann At The Movies disc (Label X ATM CD 2003).  The Tribute Film Classics label is bringing out a re-recording of the score in the summer of this year.