The Trouble With Harry

In the history of film and of film music the names of Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock are inextricably bound together. Their eleven years of collaboration happily occured when both artists were at the height of their powers and it produced an unprecedented run of masterpieces from Vertigo to Marnie (yes, I'm one of those people who think Marnie is a masterpiece).

It all started with The Trouble with Harry, a whimsically macabre comedy of a body that refuses to stay buried. It's not laugh-out-loud funny like Some Like It Hot and it probably has fewer jokes than North by Northwest, but the story appealed to Hitchcock's droll sense of humour. By the mid Fifties (with Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief under his belt) Hitchcock could have convinced any studio to let him film the telephone book.

Hitchcock had already worked with a number of top rank Hollywood composers (Franz Waxman on Rebecca, Suspicion, The Paradine Case and Rear Window, Miklos Rozsa on Spellbound, Dimitri Tiomkin on Strangers on a Train and Dial M for Murder), but - with the possible exception of Spellbound - none of them had produced any stand-out musical moments. Hitchcock was quick to realise that by giving Herrmann free rein he could dispense with dialogue and exposition and tell the story purely through visual and aural means.

On their first feature, however, the music played an incidental role. The opening credit sequence - drawn by artist Saul Steinberg - establishes the mood along with Herrmann's impish music. In tone it is not dissimilar to his arrangement of Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette that was to become Hitchock's signature tune. Indeed, when Herrmann arranged and recorded a suite of the music from The Trouble with Harry in the Sixties, he titled it "A Portrait of Hitch". At that time he described the music as "gay, macabre, tender, and with an abundance of [...] sardonic wit" - a description that would fit the film's director equally well.

Unencumbered by the dark obsessions of Hitchcock's later work, The Trouble with Harry gave Herrmann the opportunity to show his lighter side. The jaunty rhythms of his score accompany the characters as they crisscross the autumnal New England countryside, and, though there are some sombre tones woven into the musical patterns, there is more light than shade in the score.

For years the music was only available in the suite that Herrmann arranged for his Decca album The Great Hitchcock Movie Thrillers (B000004261). In the Nineties Varese Sarabande produced a series of Hitchcock/Herrmann scores conducted by Joel McNeely, and The Trouble with Harry was one of them (VSD-5971).