ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at acting and music through one of the most important composer/director collaborations in film history, that of Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock. The driving scenes in Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960) show how music and acting contribute to cinema’s illusion of forward-moving time, as in these scenes, the actor and the music form the centre of attention. In scenes in these and other films, Herrmann’s music carries the actors through various spaces, up and down Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, through dreamscapes in Vertigo, and into Norman Bates’s own twisted psyche in Psycho. The musical means by which Herrmann does this, that is, his use of repeated modules, focusses the audience’s attention on the characters and the actors who play them.
