The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much, the second Hitchcock film to have a Herrmann score, found the director on familiar ground. Very familiar, in fact - he had made the picture once before in the Thirties. Hitchcock had been toying with the idea of an American remake for some time (he had pitched the idea to his first Hollywood producer David O. Selznick in 1940), and now, supremely confident in what would be his best decade, he returned to the concept. The basic story - a family become unwittingly embroiled in an international assassination plot - remained the same, as did the picture's climactic scene that takes place during a concert at London's Royal Albert Hall.

With a much bigger budget the second time around Hitchcock elected to shoot on location (in Morocco and England) and brought Herrmann along. The composer's duties on the picture were not limited to writing the score: he played himself - spiffly turned out in white tie and tails - in the Albert Hall sequence, and Hitchcock gave him an extra credit by including a brief shot of his name on a poster as Doris Day runs into the building. The music Herrmann conducted for the big scene was not his own, but a somberly serious piece called "The Storm Clouds Cantata" by Australian composer Arthur Benjamin. It had been composed specifically for the original  movie and, although Herrmann was given the opportunity to write a new cantata of his own, he chose to reorchestrate Benjamin's piece. During breaks in the filming at the Albert Hall Herrmann regaled the orchestra with Hollywood gossip and impressed them with his encyclopaedic knowledge of music. As a parting gift the musicians gave the composer a book inscribed "To Bernard Herrmann, the Man Who Knows So Much".

In fact, there is very little original Herrmann music in the film. He wrote a striking prelude for the opening titles, a thrilling percussion sequence for the chase through the market place in Marrakech, some standard moody bass clarinet for suspense, and a brief comedic piece for the struggle in a London taxidermist's shop. All together it was the least amount of music he had written for any film. This explains why the full score has never surfaced on disc. The Prelude was recorded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the Sony Film Scores CD (SK 62700) and the Benjamin Cantata is a curious inclusion on Elmer Bernstein's Bernard Herrmann Film Score Tribute (Milan 71000-2).

In fact, the most recorded piece of music from the film was not by Herrmann, but by the songwriting duo Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Although it was not written to order for the film, "Whatever Will be, Will Be (Que Sera Sera)" won the Oscar for Best Song in 1956 and quickly became a popular standard. Surprisingly, given his later antipathy to the practice of shoe-horning songs into movies to sell records, Herrmann defended its inclusion in the picture. "It was not a predmeditated attempt at song-plugging," he said. "All pop hits are accidental. Like gold, it's where you find it."