HITCHCOCK: Jack Sullivan and Me

[RonPrice]

HITCHCOCK

Jack Sullivan is director of American Studies and professor of English at Rider University. He has written1 a long overdue tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's musical perspicacity. Sullivan demonstrates Hitchcock’s uncanny ability to manipulate audiences not only with his striking, frightening images but also his adroit use of music, of all kinds, to heighten suspense, atmosphere and drama. He also knew when to employ silences or musical rests to maximum effect. Some of his most distinguished composers, such as Arthur Benjamin, credited him with being far more serious about music than any other director. Hitchcock was a cultured man. He had no formal music training yet was a fervent music-lover and keen concertgoer. Hitchcock came into my life in 1954 with Dial “M” For Murder. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Ian Lace’s review at Music Web International of Hitchcock's Music, Jack Sullivan, Yale University Press, 2006.

You’d been going strong, Alfred,
for thirty years before you came
into my life with Dial “M” For
Murder, with Psycho and The
Birds, their gripping music &
their memorable sounds, now
lost in my memory bank from
my childhood and teens when
the winter of my own life was
setting in early & new values1
had begun to capture my mind
& imagination long ago Alfred.

Over your long career2 you presided
over more musical styles than any
directors in history; ultimately you
changed how we thought about film
music, any film music--oh so clever.

And thanks, Jack, for your discussion
of Hitchcock’s music to influence the
atmosphere, characterization and even
storylines of his films.......Hitchcock’s
relationships with composers: Bernard
Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Maurice
Jarr and Franz Waxman--achievement,
a sign of genius; they changed the way
we watched-listened to movies-yessiree.

1 The Bahá'í Faith
2 From his work on a film in 1921, The Lodger, to his last in 1976, Family Plot

Ron Price
14 August 2009

[RonPrice]

Film director Alfred Hitchcock produced his film The Birds in 1963.(1) The essential element in Hitchcock's films is suspense and it operates on deeper psychological and moral levels than in simple 'who-dun-its.' This suspense was, it seems to me, an appropriate emotion for the year 1963. The hundred year period, 1913-2013, was and would be a traumatic one for humanity. The year 1963 was the mid-point of this period filled with convulsions precipitated in the world by "the waywardness of a godless and materialistic age."(2) One of Hitchcock's most important contributions to cinema was his recognition of the spectator's tendency to identify with the characters on the screen.

When The Birds was first screened in 1963, I was just starting out on my travelling-pioneering life and I was being asked to "gird myself for heroism."(3) -Ron Price with thanks to 1Tippy Hedren on "Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 8 January 2002 and 2The Universal House of Justice,Wellspring of Guidance, Wilmette, 1969, p.27 and 3p.60.

Little did I know, then, and
little did his audiences see
the metaphorical significance
of all those birds attacking
and screeching just after the
House was elected, trustee of
that global undertaking set in
motion a long century before.

In the intimate and private parts
of our lives, on that long, stony,
tortuous road he'd told us about,
that path of the dawnbreakers of
a previous age, that catastrophe
of undreamed of dimensions,
that fire, that consternation and
that terror which would come
to exist in the hearts of men--
that it had indeed come..........

And still we wondered why the
darkness, the world confusion.
In our own lives the birds of our
hearts too often did not sing so
caught-up in the dust-heap of
this mortal world: many a talon
claweth at this thrush of those
eternal gardens. Pitiless ravens
do lie in wait for this bird of the
heavens of God...so He told us.1

1 Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.41.

Ron Price
8 January 2002