A Hatful of Rain

By the mid Fifties Herrmann was writing regularly for television. He provided stock cues for the CBS music library in the form of a "Western Suite", "The Outer Space Suite" (channeling his own groundbreaking SF score for The Day the Earth Stood Still) and more "musical scenery" in the form of "The Desert Suite". He wrote for episodes of Gunsmoke, The Virginian and Have Gun Will Travel, and miscellaneous scores for the Kraft Suspense Theater. All this kept him busy and in 1957 he had time for only one film score, A Hatful of Rain.

Based on a Broadway play, it was - for its time - a frank examination of morphine addiction. Two years earlier had  seen the release of The Man with the Golden Arm, which had dealt with the same topic (but a different drug), and which is now remembered mostly for its striking Saul Bass title design and Elmer Bernstein's jazz-influenced score. Herrmann chose to take another route in depicting the horror of addiction, writing a see-sawing string figure overlaid with screaming horns and nervous flutterings for wind that suggests the vicious spiral in which the film's main character is caught. Legend has it that the first version of the movie's main title music was thought to be too frightening and had to be toned down.

Twenty six minutes of the score is available in the form of a suite on Bernard Herrmann at Fox Vol 1 (VSD-6052).