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Appearing most often in the form of song, music is an essential component of the story in over half of Hitchcock's sound films. As in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the most distinctive aspect of Hitchcock's music is its frequent incorporation into the very conception of the film. Eight of his protagonists are, in fact, musicians:a composer in Waltzes from Vienna (1933), women singers in both Stage Fright (1950) and the American version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), a bass player in The Wrong Man (1956), a pianist in Rope (1948), a drummer in Young and Innocent (1937), and a music teacher and a musicologist in The Lady Vanishes (1938). (It is interesting to note that Hitchcock himself makes several appearances in his films carrying a musical instrument and that his favorite analogue for filmmaking is orchestration.) Aside from its personal relevance, Hitchcock's dependence on music, classical or popular, is also the logical outgrowth of his search for plot devices that are suggestive but that derive naturally from a situation, so that any symbolic or metaphorical value they might have is not so obtrusive as to stop the flow of action or reduce audience involvement. This formula is, of course, part of Hitchcock's classical approach to style, and so it is not surprising that it is particularly the British films in which songs abound — songs play an important role in every one of the Gaumont films.

Hitchcock expressed his desire to integrate musical and visual concepts as long ago as 1933, in an interview for Cinema Quarterly. His discussion focused mainly on his just-completed film, Waltzes from Vienna (1933). The film, released in America as Strauss's Great Waltz and now unavailable here for viewing, is Hitchcock's only musical (excluding the musical number for Marlene Dietrich in Stage Fright). In the interview Hitchcock reveals a fascination with the possibilities of editing film and music together. His remarks seem influenced by the work of Lubitsch, Mamoulian,

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[IMAGE: Strangers on a Train. One of Hitchcock's cameo appearances with a musical instrument.]

and Clair, who in their early musicals had sought to make the music integral with the film.[2] Hitchcock speaks with disdain of those musicals which merely "interpolate 'numbers' rather than employ music." In his film "the music had to inspire the action." Therefore, he "arranged the cutting to match the rhythm of the music. ... In the slow passages the cutting is slow, when the music quickens the mood of the melody is followed by the quick cutting." The influence of other narrative filmmakers is obvious in Hitchcock's description of the following scene in which Strauss, a young baker, conceives a tune at work. "There the action— composed of simple things like bakers kneading dough and rolls falling into baskets—moves in time with the music which is forming in the young man's brain."[3] This derivation of the music from the activity of workers sounds especially similar to the opening scene of Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932). Mamoulian's musical leads into Maurice Chevalier's singing of "The Song of Paris" as

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if the song springs forth from the orchestration provided by the rhythmic waking activities of the city—sweeping, hammering, rug beating, and the like.

Hitchcock's discussion during Watts's interview ranges far be-yond the specific needs of a musical to express a general view of the relation of film and music: "The basis of the cinema's appeal is emotional. Music's appeal is to a great extent emotional, too. To neglect music, I think, is to surrender, wilfully or not, a chance of progress in film-making." He feels so strongly about the potential value of music that he thinks every film should have a completed musical score before it goes into production. But the music should not, he says, overpower the film: "I might argue that I do not want the audience to listen consciously to the music at all. It might be achieving its desired effect without the audience being aware of how that effect was achieved."[4]

Hitchcock mentions two purposes for background music, both of which he adhered to throughout his career. One is "atmospheric": "To create excitement. To heighten tensity. In a scene of action, for instance, when the aim is to build up to a physical climax, music adds excitement just as effectively as cutting." His example from Waltzes from Vienna shows how music can eliminate the need for crosscutting. "There is a dialogue scene between a young man and a woman. It is a quiet, tender scene. But the woman's husband is on his way. The obvious [italics added] way to get suspense is to cut every now and then to glimpses of the husband travelling towards the house. In the silent days, when the villain was coming, you always had the orchestra playing quickening music. You felt the menace. Well, you can still have that and keep the sense of the talk-scene going as well. And the result is that you don't need to insist pictorially on the husband's approach. I think I used about six feet of film out of the three hundred feet used in the sequences to flash to the husband. The feeling of approaching climax can be suggested by the music."[5] Hitchcock has a sure sense here of the redundancy of "mickey-mousing," of having the music merely imitate the action, and he has boldly chosen the musical rather than the visual means of maintaining suspense. It is also interesting to note that in 1933 Hitchcock considers cutting to be more "obvious"— read clichéd — than music as a means of creating suspense.

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The fact that he has to argue that music be used subtly suggests that the general attitude toward scoring is as yet unsettled in 1933. For his own part, Hitchcock's comments about music seem to reflect a personal ambivalence at the time about whether cinematic style should be obtrusive.

The other musical function Hitchcock mentions in the interview is a "psychological" use of music "to express the unspoken," The, example he gives might be described as contrapuntal to the visuals: "Two people may be saying one thing and thinking something very different. Their looks match their words, but not their thoughts. They may be talking politely and quietly, but there may be a storm coming. You cannot express the mood of that situation by word and photograph. But I think you could get at the underlying idea with the right background music."[6]

The psychological and atmospheric functions of music are two of the ways in which Hitchcock has continued to use scoring and source music. Unlike weaker directors, he did not have to resort to scoring as a cover-up for ineffective, sagging sequences or for unmatched transitions. The one practice mentioned in the inter-view that he did not observe was having the score composed before shooting began. That was an impractical suggestion for narrative films, because it would have required shooting to be timed to precise tenths of seconds. But he did encourage composers to attend preproduction meetings.[7] More important, he achieved the same control with his strategy of incorporating familiar music into the story line.

One of the hallmarks of Hitchcock's treatment of music in his classical style is his use of familiar music to define a character or his social milieu. He does so either by linking a character with a given tune or by implying something about the character's ex-pressed attitude toward a piece of music. In the latter case there is usually a dichotomy in Hitchcock's use of music as motif: classical compositions are usually treated as a product of cultural refinement—often overrefinement—whereas popular music is treated as a more natural expression of emotion. The implication that classical music is less in touch with genuine feelings reaches its extreme with the reference to Mozart in Vertigo. As Robin Wood has argued, Mozart's music is "clearly identified with the

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superficial externality of Midge's world."[8] In Scottie's opening scene with Midge, he asks her to turn off a Mozart recording. Later, a Mozart symphony is played as a musical cure for Scottie when he is emotionally paralyzed after the supposed death of Madeleine. Realizing that Scottie is still in love with the mysterious Madeleine, Midge acknowledges defeat by telling the doctor, "I don't think Mozart's going to help at all": a poignant line that, as Wood says, "conveys her sense not only of Mozart's inadequacy but of her own."[9]

The association of classical music with social refinement creates a surprising paradox: whereas it can represent a civilization being threatened, it is often heard in conjunction with the villains who pose that threat. Hitchcock usually characterizes his villains as cultured and well-mannered and then proceeds to expose the superficiality of their refinement. The Peter Lorre character in the earlier Man Who Knew Too Much both appreciates good music and quotes Shakespeare. Like many of Hitchcock's villains of the thirties and forties, he is vaguely German, his outward refinement perhaps representing a sly poke at the cultural pretensions of the Nazis. Ultimately, this convention of the cultured, upper-class villain dates back to Victorian melodrama, where it delighted the largely lower-class audience.

Piano playing in Hitchcock's films is usually a comment on class. Two of his wealthiest women characters, Mrs. Paradine in The Paradine Case and Melanie in The Birds, play romantic pieces at the piano. In Murder, when Hitchcock introduces the home of a stage manager and his wife by showing their daughter mangling a piano sonatina, he is poking fun at their bourgeois pretensions.

The contrast between the usual roles of classical and popular music becomes quite clear when they appear in the same film. In the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much the concert piece is nearly death-dealing and a popular song is life-saving. "Che sera, sera," the song that Doris Day sings to save her son's life (her kidnapped son locates her through her voice) was written specifically for the film. Oddly enough, her actions contradict the very lyrics she sings. The words of the chorus recommend fatalistic passivity: "Che sera, sera, whatever will be will be/The future's not ours to see, what will be will be." Yet the heroine is more

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[IMAGE: Strangers on a Train. Parley Granger and Laura Elliot. Sounds in a record shop underscore the quarrel.]

successfully and actively engaged in saving both her son and society (or, at least, one statesman), than anyone else in the film.

Notorious (1946) also counterposes "stuffy" and sentimental music. Again, classical music helps define the highly civilized facade that the Nazi spies wish to maintain. The introductory shots of their headquarters, the Sebastian home, are accompanied by the sounds of a Chopin-like prelude, which is presumably being played somewhere in the house, although not on the grand piano that is a prominent part of the decor. The waltzes played later at their formal party are also meant to feel too sedate; they work contrapunctally in mood to our nervousness about the life-and-death maneuvers that Alicia and Devlin are making. Indeed, when Alicia seeks an excuse to leave her husband at one point, she tells him that she is bored with the "stuffy" waltzes being played and that she will ask the band to play some Brazilian music. At the earlier

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party of the film (which Alicia hosts in Florida), Alicia also expresses an affinity for more popular music when she chooses a sentimental foxtrot for the record player. Devlin asks her why she likes the song, and she answers, "Because it's a lot of hooey. There's nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh." However, Alicia turns out to be quite sentimental once she falls in love. She must spend the rest of the film waiting for Devlin to discard his own cynicism and to trust and express his love for her. This sentimental attachment of a heroine to a love song prefigures its more extensive development in Rear Window (see chapter 6). There, too, the heroine expresses her admiration for a love song less appreciated by a cynical man who at first does not fully return her love. In both cases the man's initial unresponsiveness to the love song symptomizes his emotional paralysis.

Hitchcock's favoring of low-brow over high-brow music can be taken as evidence of the anti-intellectuality that so offends Charles Thomas Samuels in Hitchcock's work.'" Yet, as the above examples show, it is less musical taste than moral and psychological questions that are at stake. Intellectuality and respectability are condemned only when they are masks for emotional cowardice or outright evil. It is, of course, precisely the point of Hitchcock's persona and his aesthetic to do the reverse: his artistic and moral concerns are often disguised by the trappings of a popular genre (e.g., "the thriller").

Songs are extraordinarily useful for Hitchcock because he can exploit both their direct emotional quality and the indirect associations brought to familiar songs by the audience. When he uses songs in his classical style, he usually emphasizes their associative qualities. As representatives of a culture they provide a shorthand reference to that culture. For instance, songs have patriotic associations in Lifeboat, The Lady Vanishes, and Foreign Correspondent, and childhood associations in The Birds and Mamie. When Hitchcock wants to exploit the more direct, emotional qualities of a song, he usually establishes a meaning for that song in terms of one character. For instance, songs transmit or reflect a character's guilt in Blackmail, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Shadow of a Doubt, Stage Fright, and Strangers on a Train.

Typical of the classical treatment of music is Lifeboat, which

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[IMAGE: Lifeboat. Canada Lee and Henry Hull. Chauvinistic values are attached to tunes.]

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deals with the chauvinistic values attached to songs. The film's struggle between one German and a boatful of Allies is echoed by a conflict between the songs "Du, du liegst mir im Herzen" and "Don't Sit under the Apple Tree." At first the Brooklyn cab driver, Gus Smith, objects when the Nazi, Willy, sings the German folk tune; Smith counters with the American tune. After the German saves Smith's life by amputating his gangrenous leg, however, the Americans join in when Willy sings German songs.

In The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock deals explicitly with the indigenous quality of folk tunes. Its hero, Gil, is a musicologist dedicated to preserving the musical heritage of the country of Bandrica in which the film starts. He is seen constantly with the folk dancers whose art he is recording for posterity. Hitchcock uses the dancers as a butt of humor—by catching them in awkward positions. How-ever, Gil's profession is not much worked into the thematic material of the film; it simply helps establish the innocent and indigenous qualities of folk tunes — and his own innocent, awkward sincerity as well. These qualities are also initially attributed to the tune that becomes the film's "MacGuffin." "MacGuffin" is Hitchcock's term for the relatively meaningless plot device that supplies a pretext for the action—e.g., the secret plans in a spy thriller. The vanishing lady of the title is a governess and music teacher working as a spy to carry a message to the British government; the message is encoded within a tune. When the governess first hears the tune, she says of Bandrica, "Do you hear that music? Everyone sings here, the people are just like happy children with laughter on their lips and music in their hearts." Yet in the very next scene Hitchcock once again mingles music with murder. The tune is sung by a man who is strangled as soon as he finishes his serenade. Before the governess can convey the tune to the British secret service it is the cause of a number of other deaths as well.

In Foreign Correspondent the East European spies torture an Allied diplomat by repeating an American swing record ad nauseam. To judge from the film, Hitchcock seems to have taken a mischievous pleasure in seeing something so innocuous as a popular record being used as an instrument of political torture. Undoubtedly, he enjoyed irritating his audience along with the diplomat in the process.

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[IMAGE: Mamie. Louise Latham and Tippi Hedren. The children's chant, "Mother, Mother, I am ill," echoes Mamie's problems.]

Two of Hitchcock's sixties films use children's songs to mingle the sinister with the innocent. In The Birds the vicious attack of the birds on the school children of Bodega Bay is prepared for in a sequence in which the birds amass outside a schoolhouse while we listen to the children singing. The song is carefully chosen—the , verse is an accumulative story, which lengthens in lines from verse \ to verse, just as the birds are accumulating. Each chorus ends with the words "now, now, now" to heighten the suspense about when the birds will attack. Mamie uses as a motif the childhood chant that begins: "Mother, Mother, I am ill/Send for the doctor over the hill." We first hear the lines repeated by children outside Mamie's childhood home. She repeats several of the lines while "free associating" for her husband as he plays amateur psychiatrist. The

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film ends with Mamie and her husband driving away from her childhood home past children singing the same rhyme. Besides referring to both Mamie's illness and her mother's central role in her problems, the use of a child's chant is particularly appropriate because the film explores the traumatic effects of an experience she had at the age of five. The movement of the film is to get Mamie back into a childhood state so that she can remember and exorcise the effects of that experience.

In Young and Innocent Hitchcock emphasizes the rhythmic aspects of song. As in several other films the climax involves the disruption of a piece of music. This time, however, the disruption is a rhythmic manifestation of a villain's guilt rather than a hero's temporary adoption of a villain's antisocial behavior. In the film's final scene the heroine, Erica, seeks to clear a friend, Robert, who is wrongly accused of murder, by finding a man who can be identified by an eye twitch. She and the vagrant helping her sit at a the dansant in a crowded hotel ballroom at the far end of the room from the band. While the band plays (and the bandleader sings) the popular tune "The Drummer Man," the camera swoops in one dramatic shot from the couple's end of the ballroom to the band's end and into a close-up of the drummer's twitching eyes. However, although Hitchcock has let the audience in on the secret, there is little chance that Erica will spot the twitcher, who has actually committed the murder of which Robert stands accused. When Erica and her partner dance past the band, the drummer turns his back to the dancers (he has recognized the vagrant) and improvises on the xylophone, a digression from the musical arrangement for which the bandleader will scold him. It is a foreshadowing of his more radical divergence from the score later on.

Guilt in Hitchcock's world will usually manifest itself through a person's lack of control. In the drummer's case the eye twitch, an obvious symptom of his guilt — Douchet calls the tic a "visual disharmony"[11] — becomes harder and harder to suppress. (Ironically, the musician whose function is to keep the beat cannot control the rhythms of his own body.) During a break the drummer downs a handful of pills to tranquilize his too-nervous system. However, when the band resumes playing "Drummer Man," he is unable to maintain the beat. His drumming gets wilder and wilder

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until the dancers notice as well as the bandleader, and eventually he collapses. Before he dies—presumably of a heart attack brought on by the pills—he confesses, with a mad, melodramatic laugh, to the murder of which Robert is accused. There is no equivalent scene or character in the original novel (Josephine Tey's A Shilling for Candles), which attributes the murder to another character. Hitchcock first gives his villain an eye twitch as an external manifestation of his guilt on the very night of the crime. Then he has the villain assume a musician's role so that his guilt can be translated into an aural metaphor for being out of step with the rest of society.

(A visual equivalent of this asynchronism can be found in Strangers on a Train. There the villain looks straight ahead at his victim from the bleachers during a tennis game while all the other spectators rotate their heads back and forth in a unified rhythm as they watch the ball.)

Hitchcock adds a characteristic offbeat touch, as it were, by aurally extending the drummer's death—the drummer's body produces several extra loud cymbal and bassdrum crashes as he collapses onto his instruments. The drummer thus creates noise instead of music just as the dying organist did with his last chord in Secret Agent.

Twenty years after Young and Innocent Hitchcock again associated guilt with the loss of rhythm in The Wrong Man. Oddly enough, it is the later film that posits the idea only in an intellectual manner rather than weaving it into the very fabric of the film. The Wrong Man involves the disruption of order in the very routine life of bass player Emmanuel Balestrero, when he is falsely accused of another man's crimes. On the day before his arrest Balestrero intercedes in a quarrel between his two sons caused when one son's harmonica playing disrupts the other's piano practice. The father tells the young pianist, "Don't let anything throw you off the beat. You do well till you get mad and hit the piano." The comment is a clue to the father's character. After his arrest it is only his inner strength—his ability not to get thrown off the beat—that enables him to endure his ignominious imprisonment and trial. By contrast, his more vulnerable wife accepts in her imagination the guilt of which the husband is accused and thereby becomes psychotic. Of course, the film is a semidocumentary one, based on an actual case in which the hero was indeed a musician who might

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have used a musical figure of speech. However, the father's comment is consistent with Hitchcock's concerns in other films, and, furthermore, the quarrel between the sons is one of the few wholly fabricated episodes in the film. It exists only to develop Balestrero's character—to show that he is a good father and to allow him to say the above lines, which explain his inner source of strength.

The Hitchcock musician who does get thrown off the beat by guilt is Philip, the weaker murderer in Rope. In the play from which the film is adapted, Philip's piano playing is almost incidental. In the film version Philip is about to make his professional debut, and his ability to conceal his guilt—to control his emotions—is equated with his ability to continue playing a piece of music. (Significantly in this film based on continuous camera movement, his piece and the music for the credits is an arrangement of Francis Poulenc's "Perpetual Movement no. 1.") The man who suspects his guilt tries to force Philip's confession by operating a metronome faster and faster. Its "presto" ticking, which presumably echoes Philip's heartbeat, forces Philip to abandon his playing in distress and yell, "I can't play with that thing."

Stage Fright uses song lyrics to reflect a character's guilt. It is no accident that Marlene Dietrich is singing "Je vois la vie en rose" as a bloodstained dress is held up before her to force a public expression of her guilt. The lyrics, in fact, refer to more than the literal idea of seeing bloodstains. The song relates to the film's central concern with how one perceives the world. It is being sung by a chanteuse who has been so abused by people that she treats them in kind. Her foil is the very innocent Eve, a prelapsarian heroine who still perceives the world, like the speaker in the song, through the rose-colored glasses of love. She is so misled by her supposed love for a man that she is blinded to the fact that he is obviously in cahoots with the murderer. Thus, the song is not simply a pun on red as rosy or bloody; it refers to two ways of perceiving the world— both of them distorted extremes—one too naive and the other too cynical.

I would categorize as classical in style all the examples mentioned so far of music or song as motif. That is to say, regardless of its thematic or expressive function, the music in each case has a raison d'etre on the plot level. In a more subjective vein, there are

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[IMAGE: Stage Fright. Marlene Dietrich as chanteuse. Her songs are thematically appropriate.]

occasions when Hitchcock uses songs to get inside the feelings of a central character, but these are not so frequent as might be expected. I discount, for example, the song exposing the guilt of the drummer in Young and Innocent or the chanteuse in Stage Fright because there has been little consistent prior interest in penetrating either character's feelings of guilt before the introduction of the song. Only in Blackmail, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Shadow of a Doubt, and Strangers on a Train does Hitchcock really use song as a major conveyor of guilt, and in these cases the device is too conspicuous to be considered subjective.

I have already discussed the way Hitchcock uses songs to express guilt in Blackmail and Secret Agent. In Sabotage he uses "Who Killed Cock Robin?"—the title song of a cartoon—as a

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mirror of one person's guilt and the stimulus of another's. The Disney cartoon, which was released shortly before Sabotage, is heard by Mrs. Verloc when she steps into her husband's movie theater between the scene in which her husband confesses that he has inadvertently killed his wife's kid brother and the scene in which she stabs her husband in revenge. The part of the cartoon that we and she actually see is the sequence in which Cock Robin is slain. The audience's response is to laugh at the killing; the wife, who had smiled at first, frowns at their callousness. Hitchcock leaves it ambiguous whether we are to see the cartoon as a healthy escape from oppressive realities or as a stimulus for a murder. Certainly, the question repeatedly put by the chorus of birds— "Who, who, who, who killed Cock Robin?"—is meant to haunt the wife; we hear it repeatedly as we watch her walk back into the private rooms. Furthermore, the association of birds with the boy's murder has been well prepared. Verloc gives the boy two birds, the saboteurs' bomb is hidden in a bird cage, and the code for the explosion is "the birds will sing."[12] Like the song "Miss Up-to-Date" in Blackmail, "Who Killed Cock Robin?" specifically haunts a woman who stabs a man. In both cases the song contributes to the central moral ambiguity: the suggestion that the woman is both victim and murderer.

In these examples of songs that reflect or inspire guilt, the song is usually performed in just one section of the film. In two of Hitchcock's films the songs become recurring motifs associated with murderers. "The Band Played On" is associated with Bruno in Strangers on a Train, and "The Merry Widow Waltz" is associated with Uncle Charles in Shadow of a Doubt. In both cases the songs are chosen for their associations with the Gay Nineties period and are then linked to rather likable villains. Hitchcock undermines the innocence of the songs by showing that the surface charm of the villains masks two of the least repentant of his entire stable of villains.

In Shadow of a Doubt, Uncle Charles is even known as the Merry Widow Murderer. The transfer of the waltz from the uncle's head to his niece's is a metaphor for the uncle's corruption of the girl's innocence; he exposes her to his vicious vision of the world. (Actually, the uncle's character is itself a metaphor for the darker

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[IMAGE: Shadow of a Doubt. Teresa Wright greets Joseph Gotten. The mental transfer of a tune is a metaphor for the corruption of innocence.]

side of the girl's own nature. Hitchcock conveys this relationship by giving them psychic affinities, by shooting them as mirror images of each other, and by giving the girl the name of Charlie.) The repetition of the waltz with a concurrent dissolve to a vignette of ballroom dancers (dressed in nineties fashions) occurs three times after the opening titles marks the film's major transitions. As Gavin Lambert has pointed out, "The waltz gradually becomes less charming and more sinister, like Uncle Charlie himself."[13]

The tune becomes a symbol of the evil that young Charlie tries to prevent her uncle from spreading to the rest of her family and to the Santa Rosa community. After its introduction under the opening titles it is sometimes obvious and sometimes woven unobtrusively into the scoring. For example, when Uncle Charles arrives by train

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at Santa Rosa, the notes of the waltz do battle in the underscoring with a second melody that has an Americana theme comprising bits of folk tunes. Thus through music Uncle Charles is already felt as antagonistic to American values. (Hitchcock was very much interested in having the town of Santa Rosa represent small-town America; he shot on location and emphasized such institutions as banks and churches in the mise-en-scene.)

The first of the three crucial waltz-plus-dancers transitions occurs when Charlie notices initials on a ring that her uncle has just presented to her in a marriagelike ceremony. (This ring becomes a symbol first for her acceptance of the uncle and then for her struggle against him.) Once Charlie has symbolically married her uncle in the kitchen, his song seems to be transferred to her as well. "I can't get that tune out of my head," she complains at dinner. "I think tunes jump from head to head." The second time we see and hear the dancers and the song is at a library, where Charlie checks the initials on the ring against a news story naming the victim of the last Merry Widow Murder. At this point Charlie realizes that her uncle is probably the murderer. She determines to prevent that knowledge from spreading. When her mother absentmindedly hums the tune the next day, Charlie begs her, "Please remember, don't hum that tune." The waltz and image last recur after the niece kills her uncle in self-defense during a struggle aboard a train. She has won her life-and-death battle with her uncle, but she must carry the burden of his guilt with her forever. Moreover, she her-self, through having kept silent about her uncle's identity, is guilty of the death of another suspect, who was killed during a police chase.

In Strangers on a Train Hitchcock connects the seemingly innocuous "The Band Played On" with the strangling of the hero's wife, Miriam, by the villain, Bruno. (The tune was retained from the original novel, where it is played by a carousel. It was already a favorite property at the film's studio, Warner Brothers, and provided the title for that studio's Strawberry Blonde.) The song is first heard while Bruno is watching his intended victim and her two male friends as they ride a carousel at a fairground. To emphasize the song. Hitchcock has the three riders actually sing the lyrics of the carousel music. The significant line is the refrain, "And the

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band played on." It may be associated with the imperviousness of the world to the death of Miriam and, by implication, to death in general. The band does indeed play on while Miriam is strangled— during the murder the carousel plays this very tune. The band plays on while a man discovers her body, and it plays on while he yells for help. To emphasize his impotence. Hitchcock cuts to a high-angle shot of a Ferris wheel from which are heard many cries of help from people playing at being in danger. And the band plays on. The next time we hear the tune is at a party in Washington, B.C., which Bruno attends uninvited. He pretends to choke a strange woman but nearly does strangle her when he spots the hero's sister, who reminds him of Miriam. As Bruno falls into a swoon in which he begins to reenact the strangling. Hitchcock helps us to share that experience by playing the same tune once more.

As he did in Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock uses the key song to mark three crucial moments of Strangers on a Train. Again, the third appearance of the song marks a life-and-death struggle between the hero and the villain from whom he is trying to defend his family and social milieu. While we wait with Bruno until the sun sets so that the final confrontation can arise, the carousel plays "Ain't She Sweet," "Baby Face," and "Ain't We Got Fun." At the climax, however, it reverts to "The Band Played On." The climactic struggle takes place on a carousel gone out of control. As the carousel accelerates so does the music, so that once again Hitchcock is using music to suggest order (a spinning merry-go-round) turning into chaos (the merry-go-round eventually spins off its track). It will be recalled that in Secret Agent Hitchcock also combines circular images (coins spinning in bowls) with music turned into chaos (the sound of yodelers) when he wants to show chaos overwhelming his characters. In Shadow of a Doubt, the circular image of waltzers accompanies the music gone delirious.

Strangers on a Train is different from Shadow of a Doubt and Secret Agent, however, in that the song is never transferred to a hero or heroine. In the latter two films Hitchcock uses music as a device to indicate that the heroine feels overwhelmed by evil and guilt—the sound and visual effects communicate a moral delirium through physical means. In Strangers on a Train the song is never

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transferred along with the guilt from villain to hero. This keeping of the song association with Bruno is perhaps indicative of the central structural differences between the three films. Although intellectually Strangers on a Train is the Hitchcock film that treats most explicitly the idea of the transference of guilt, that guilt is barely identified emotionally with the hero. (Although Guy exhibits an initial guilt on learning of his wife's murder, Bruno's progressive intrusion into Guy's life is not commensurate with an increasing feeling of guilt on Guy's part. Nor do 1 think that Guy gains in self-awareness as the film progresses.) By contrast, the point of view and sympathies of Secret Agent and Shadow of a Doubt are closer to the heroine's than to the villain's. Even so, the delirium sequences are so expressionistic as to lessen some of the audience identification. (I would, however, still call Shadow of a Doubt a subjective, rather than an expressionistic, film because it other-wise conveys the heroine's feelings in subtler ways.) Not until Rear Window would Hitchcock find a vehicle that allowed him to present things subjectively throughout the film without recourse to distracting bravura effects, and in that film music plays its most important role.

1. Steven Watts, "Alfred Hitchcock on Music in Films," Cinema Quarterly 2 (Winter 1933-34):80-83.

2. Their earliest musicals are Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929), Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932), and Glair's Sous les Toils de Parts (1930), Le Million (1931), and A Nous la Liberte (1931). The British documentary unit, which was also interested in the integration of music and editing, did not begin its famous experiments with sound until early in 1934. See John Grierson, "The G.P.O. Gets Sound," Cinema Quarterly 2 (Summer 1934):215.

3. Watts, "Alfred Hitchcock," pp. 81-S3.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., pp. 81-82.

6. Ibid., p. 82.

7. Louis D. Giannetti, "Sound," in Understanding Movies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 116.

8. Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films (London: A. Zwemmer; Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Bames, 1965, rev. 1969), p. 83.

9. Ibid., p. 84.

10. "Hitchcock," American Scholar 39 (Spring 1970):295.

11. Jean Douchet, Alfred Hitchcock (Paris: Cahiers de 1'Herne, 1967), p. 21.

12. For a further discussion of the role of birds in Sabotage, see Donald M. Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1976), p. 61.

13. "Hitchcock and the Art of Suspense, American Film 1 (January/February 1976):22.

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