Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema

Summary

The first​ Alfred Hitchcock film I can remember seeing was The Birds, when it was broadcast on BBC One on the evening of Sunday, 6 June 1971. I would have been nine years old, and it must have come as quite a revelation to me that this enigmatic but ubiquitous celebrity had a sideline in filmmaking. To me Alfred Hitchcock was many things, but not a film director. His was the name on the front cover of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, several issues of which I had recently picked up at a church jumble sale and devoured in a state of terrified fascination. It was also to be found above the titles of horror story anthologies called things like Stories Not for the Nervous and Stories That Scared Even Me. I was an enthusiastic collector and reader of these paperbacks, which could be picked up at any local bookshop. Best of all, there was the series of children’s thrillers which were always prefaced with the words Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in … The first one was The Secret of Terror Castle, followed by The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy and, eventually, several dozen more. The Three Investigators were teenage detectives who lived in a town called Rocky Beach, California. Pete Crenshaw was the dynamic, action-loving one; Bob Andrews was bookish and nerdy (this was who I identified with); and their leader, Jupiter Jones, was smart and mercurial and overweight and bore more than a passing resemblance, it was often remarked, to a young Hitchcock, who made several comic appearances in the novels in the guise of the boys’ reluctant sponsor. Jupiter had entered a competition and won all three of them the use of a gold-plated Rolls-Royce complete with an English chauffeur by the name of Worthington. Their headquarters was a trailer in Jupiter’s uncle’s scrapyard, hidden beneath piles of junk. For years I assumed – along with most of their readers, I imagine – that Hitchcock was the author of these novels, until I notic...