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Producers and directors were obsessed by words. They forgol that one of the greatest emotional factors in the silent cinema was the musical accompaniment. They have gradually realized that action should still come first — that, talkies or not, they are still making motion pictures. But music as an artistic asset of the film is still sadly neglected.
" I was greatly interested in music and films in the silent days and I have always believed that the coming of sound opened up a great new opportunity. The accompanying music came at last entire ly under the control of the people who made the picture. That was surely an advance on having a separate score played by cinema orchestras. The tremendous advantage of a film being musically accompanied had been demonstrated by 'silents' like Ben Hur and Way Down East. Yet when it became possible to blend film and music together in an artistic entity the opportunity was overlooked, or at least left undeveloped.
"The result is that the only dramatic use of music in talkies — leaving out of account the 'musicals' which interpolate 'numbers' rather than employ music — is the crude instance of slow music for love scenes. Anything else has been an odd stunt and not a properly worked out scheme.
''But that conventional soft music is the basis of the right ideaexpressing the mood of the scene. It is an elementarv application of it."
"Do you believe, then, that every film should have a complete musical score before it goes into production?" I asked.
* I do," Hitchcock replied emphatically. " Though by ' complete ' I do not mean continuous. That would be monotonous. Silence is often very effective and its effect is heightened by the proper handling of the music before and after.
''There is, somewhere, the correct musical accompaniment for almost any scene — music which will improve the scene. But none at all is better than the wrong music."
"But how would you relate music and action? What would you say was the underlying purpose of all film-music? Can you give me an example?" I asked.
"Well, the first and obvious use 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 — but I shall have more to sa\ about that comparison later. Music can also be a background to a scene in any mood and a commentary on dialogue, but, frankly. I have not yet made up my mind about the function of music in relation to dialogue in general. I can only give specific instances where I think it might be profitably used.""
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