The Bride Wore Black

Despite the language barrier (or, perhaps, because of it) Herrmann and Truffaut got on well enough during the making of Fahrenheit 451 to agree to collaborate on a second project in 1967. The Bride Wore Black, or La Mariée était en noir in the language in which the film was made, was Trauffaut's failed attempt to emulate the Master of Suspense. Based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich (author of the source material for Rear Window), it told the story of a young bride who takes revenge on the men who made her a widow on her wedding day. (A similar plot, coincidentally, to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, which appropriated Herrmann's psychotic whistling theme from Twisted Nerve.) The film did not live up to the promise of its premise. In the hands of Claude Chabrol it might have bloomed into a macabre oddity, but under Truffaut's fussy care it withered on the vine. The critics hated it and even the director would later disown it.


Herrmann build his score around a mordant version of Mendelssohn's "Wedding March", interpolating it into his own jagged sequences of horns and percussion. There were echoes of the music from On Dangerous Ground and - appropriately for a Gallic setting - a reworking of the "Memory Waltz" from The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Herrmann's experience on the film was not a happy one. The score was recorded in Paris with a French orchestra with whom Herrmann struggled to communicate. Truffaut outwardly expressed delight at the finished result, but chopped and changed some of the cues in the editing without consulting the composer. He was, at least, gracious enough to send the composer a thank you note in bad English ("Francois Truffaut is very happy man ... and he say thank you very very much for you and Norma your inspiratrice."). Norma - Herrmann's inspiration - was Norma Shepherd, Herrmann's young bride, almost thirty years his junior. 


There are eleven minutes and twenty seven seconds of the score in the form of "A Musical Scenario" on the Elmer Bernstein The Bernard Herrmann Film Score Tribute disc (Milan 71000-2), which I've been playing on a loop while writing the above.