Spellbound

I think it would be fair to say that most of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous and best films were scored by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, but both before and after his work with Herrmann, Hitchcock employed the services of many fine composers. Perhaps none were finer than Miklos Rozsa who almost predates the Herrmann/Hitchcock sound, albeit with a more romantic twist. Spellbound stars Gregory Peck as amnesiac who may or may not be a killer and is most famous for its Salvador Dali designed dream sequences. The film is part romance and part psychoanalysis and Rozsa taps both strands in his masterful score.

There are three main ideas, the two romantic themes and the psychotic theme performed on theremin. Although Herrmann himself made the theremin famous as the instrument of alien invasion, at the time Rozsa turned it into the instrument of psychosis. Although the uses don't seem similar, it could be argued that the instrument is being used in both cases to represent a creature we don't fully understand. Whatever the case, the novel use was a master stroke by Rozsa, even if today it seems a little cliché. Overuse does that to a good idea

The Main Theme introduces all three ideas and while there is a Love Theme track, it features both of the main themes, which are both romantic although the most memorable may sound somewhat familiar to anyone who's ever heard Han and Leia's theme by Mr Williams. Indeed the similarity is quite striking, but it should never be forgotten that Rozsa was in their first! Many films of the period seem to feature a jaunty scherzo and the Scherzo here is no different and one that actually reminds me of the more light hearted moments to Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs Muir. On the other hand the psychotic Ski Run is very much a Rozsa creation with whirling brass that are perhaps the only other moment when the age of the score shows and reminds me of an out of control horse race, galloping out of control.

Rozsa was awarded his first of three Oscars for this score and while Ben-Hur probably became the most famous of the wins, if not most famous of all his scores I can't help thinking that Spellbound is an even more impressive effort. Where Ben-Hur simply afforded an epic canvas, Spellbound required a more controlled and precise use of scoring to under pin the deeper psychology, just as Herrmann did so successfully in later films. It's a shame that Rozsa didn't work with Hitchcock again as I'm quite sure the results would have been equally, well, spell binding.