Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann

A fascinating documentary. A member of Aaron Copland's circle, Herrmann - after a stint in radio - made an auspicious start with the music for Citizen Kane, and went on to compose some fifty more scores before his last for Scorsese's Taxi Driver. In that time, he made his 'anti-Hollywood style' - he was all for the primacy of the expression of interior psychological states - a standard option. There are testimonies from his ex-wife and various other composers and critics (including Scorsese and Chabrol), and lots of his unforgettable music. Personally, he seemed to be an arsehole: irascible, egocentric and cold. He considered his film work second-rate by nature. He wanted to be a conductor of a major symphony orchestra, something he got to do only as an actor for Hitchcock in The Man Who Knew Too Much.