A few nights ago Taxi Driver was on TV. One interesting feature of this film is that its musical score is the last work of Bernard Herrmann. If you’re a Hitchock movie fan (as I am), you’ve heard Herrmann in several movies. He was the “sound” of Hitchcock for a period from the mid-fifties (The Trouble with Harry) to the mid-sixties (Marnie). It was Brian De Palma (influenced a lot by Hitchcock) who recommended Herrmann to Martin Scorsese.
Herrmann’s music fit the Hitchcock films very well and it’s hard to imagine those movies without his music. There’s an adrenaline in the music that helps build the suspense.
Speaking of suspense, here’s music from Psycho:
The opening of Vertigo:
Scottie’s dream:
Herrmann didn’t write the music in this next segment (The Man Who Knew Too Much) but he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra for this sequence. This has 9 minutes without any dialogue:
And the theme from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver:
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