James Mason et al...

The other night I was doing some random internet searching - mainly on "living fossils" such as the Coelacanth - and ended up finding this superb page detailing scores of different designs for Captain Nemo's submarine the Nautilus from Jules Verne's prescient piece of speculative fiction 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Inspired, I dug out my region 1 DVD of the 1954 Walt Disney film, looking forward to revisiting it. Unfortunately, our old DVD player is becoming a little tempermental and refused to load the disc.

In desperation, I put it in the PS3, knowing full well that it is locked to region 4 and wouldn't play the disc, as was indeed the case. What to do? I'd developed a craving for a 1950s adaptation of a Jules Verne novel, preferably starring James Mason.

Fortunately, I have a region 4 disc of Henry Levin's 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth, another childhood favourite. While still fun, it's a poor substitute for 20,000 Leagues..., that's for sure. On the plus side, it's colourful, James Mason and Arlene Dahl have a terrific love/hate relationship, much of the effects work was terrific for the time (they sure had some cojones to shoot daytime scenes on a beach and then stick matte paintings on the top to place the location footage inside a gigantic subterranean cavern), and Bernard Herrmann provides a typically wonderful score, all thundering timpani and moody church organs.

It would have taken balls to even attempt

an effects shot like this in 1959.

On the minus side, Henry Levin's direction is static, the film takes a little too long to get going, some of the sets and effects work have not dated well, and James Mason's Oliver Lindenbrook lacks the magnetism and sex appeal of his Captain Nemo. Not to mention the terrible songs shoe-horned in to the film due to the presence of Pat Boone. I might be being a little harsh, but I was really in the mood for James Mason with a beard, Kirk Douglas singing to a friendly seal, Peter Lorre's shiftiness, and a fight with a giant squid. Some iguanas with rubber appendages stuck on to turn them into Dimetrodons just didn't do it for me tonight.

I followed up with another favourite of my youth, Jack Arnold's 1955 giant-spider-run-amok flick Tarantula. This one's full of classic 1950s stiffness, with characters stopping still to deliver exposition to each other, and a bizarre mix of progressive feminism and sexism in the character of of Stephanie 'Steve' Clayton (Mara Corday), a clever scientist in her own right who quips "beauty must come before science" as she absents herself from the lab to keep a hair appointment. The giant spider itself is superbly realised for the most part through high speed photography of a real tarantula matted into location photography (often the shadows of the spider were also matted in, providing an extra kiss of realism), and it would be remiss of me not to mentioned an early uncredited role for Clint Eastwood, playing one of the fighter pilots who come in at the end to napalm the beast to oblivion.

Score of the week

Psycho (Bernard Herrmann, 1960)

As a kid, one of the television shows I enjoyed watching after school was 'Simon Townsend's Wonder World'. It was kind of a light infotainment show for younger viewers, and they would often use cues from film scores in their segments. So it was that I first came across the electrifying main title theme from Psycho, used as the background for shots of Angela Catterns running madly around an old house.

I knew about Psycho and its score, of course. I'd never seen the film, but I'd read about it and the music in many film books and magazines, and had read the pulp Robert Bloch novel it was based on. I had to wait until the end credits of 'Wonder World' to find out what the music was (I always scrutinised the end credits to find out what music they used) and was delighted to discover that I'd finally heard Psycho. And it was brilliant!

I finally caught the film a couple of years later on television. This was before the internet, and even before home video. I'm talking about an age where it was possible for a film - many films even - to become myth, possible to remember if you'd seen them at the pictures but otherwise not readily available for perusal. The television schedules were scoured for late night screenings of items like Tarantula and The Green Slime. That thrill of stumbling across a rare screening of a thirty or forty year old film is a thing of the past in our age of video (or anything) on demand.

I didn't need to sneak out of bed at 1:00 am to see Psycho however - it screened one weekday afternoon, and I excitedly sat at the television and watched. Despite the fact that I knew every plot twist (from reading the novel, which the film is quite faithful to in most respects, a notable exception being the characterisation of Norman Bates), the film gripped and terrified me. And the score had me thrilled from start to finish. It was typical of Bernard Herrmann's genius that when given a restricted budget to produce the music, he turned it to an advantage - limiting his musical palette to string instruments only, providing the perfect sonic counterpart for Hitchcock's black and white film.

The score for Psycho keeps springing surprises - immediately after the urgent rush of the main title theme (brilliantly matched by Saul Bass' startling title design), Herrmann abruptly changes tack, providing slow descending notes for the languid montage of Phoenix, Arizona which opens the film. He scores the clandestine romance of Marion Crane and Sam Loomis (Janet Leigh in her signature role paired with the hot but wooden John Gavin) with a 'desolate falling pattern'* which never quite resolves into a melody, allowing dissonance and plucked string tension to creep in as Marion steals $40,000 from her employer, before revisiting the urgency of the main title theme - this time denoting panicky flight - as Marion leaves town, finally pulling over at the Bates Motel. The thematic material making up the score becomes more varied with the introduction of Norman Bates (another major deviation from the source novel is having the narrative discover Norman at the same time as Marion, rather than crossing back and forth between his story and hers), including the unnerving three note motif for madness which would later reappear in a similar context in Herrmann's final score for Taxi Driver, and most memorably the shrieking terror of the infamous shower murder.

This last is the most well known piece from the score, one that is still imitated by kids in the schoolyard - although they're more likely referencing The Simpsons or one of the many other films or shows which have riffed on the famous cue. It stands alongside John Williams' two-note theme for the shark in Jaws as an immortal piece of film music.

There are several different recordings of either the entire score or suites from it on CD, although the original film recordings have not been made available in commercial form outside of an isolated score track on a 90s laserdisc. 

Herrmann conducted a recording of nearly all of the score in 1975, and although it's at a slightly slower tempo than most of the music in the film, it has precision and clarity.

Conductor and film composer Joel McNeely recorded the complete score in 1997, and it ranks as the best recording of the score available.

In 1998, Danny Elfman and Steve Bartek arranged and recorded the score for use in Gus Van Sant's experimental shot for shot remake of the original film, and produced a terrific and energetic version, surprisingly faithful to the original score - at least on the album. Van Sant and his sound team couldn't help themselves from screwing around with a couple of the cues in the film, especially noticeable ones like the shower murder.

Australian film maker Richard Franklin made a remarkably good sequel to Psycho in 1983. Although Franklin and his Psycho II composer Jerry Goldsmith wisely decided to create their own sound for the sequel, the film kicks off with a replay of the shower scene, for which Goldsmith provided a terrific recording of the cue 'The Murder'.

* with thanks to Steven C. Smith and his terrific biography of Bernard Herrmann, A Heart at Fire's Center