The Night Digger (which was known by the more prosaic title of The Road Builder in the UK) was another small British film about a psychotic killer, a genre into which Herrmann seemed to have been strait-jacketed. Based on a novel called Nest in a Falling Tree, it boasted a script by Roald Dahl, the writer of delightfully bizarre stories for children, and Saki-like tales of revenge with a macabre twist for adults. Hitchcock had made one of these (Lamb to the Slaughter) into one of his most celebrated TV shows. In The Night Digger a middle-aged woman (Patricia Neal - Dahl's wife in real life) becomes infatuated with Billy Jarvis (Nicholas Clay), a young handyman who hides a dark secret.
Just as he made an unconventional choice in scoring his previous film with an eerie human whistle, the composer elected to depict the unstable mind of Billy Jarvis through the wheezing sound of a harmonica. Two years earlier John Barry had chosen the same instrument for his plaintive theme for Midnight Cowboy, and John Williams would shortly use it for his first Spielberg picture The Sugarland Express. Rejecting any such folky Mr Bojangles associations, Herrmann made it the sound of another twisted bundle of nerves, and produced one his late great scores.
With its stabbing, churning strings, the music invites comparison with Psycho, but Herrmann also adds a warmer lyrical tone in solo passages for the viola d'amore, the instrument he spotlighted in On Dangerous Ground. Available in the form of a "Scenario Macabre for String Orchestra" on Label X (LXCD1002) and on Bernard Herrmann At The Movies (ATM CD 2003), it's one of the composers great underrated works.
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