Bernard Herrmann Movies

Independent film director Gus Van Sant attempts a first in American film history: a shot-by-shot remake of the classic 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. With a few minor, modern-day changes (including filming it in color), his version is essentially the same film with a different cast and the same Bernard Hermann music. Psycho was and still is the story of Marion Crane (previously played by Janet Leigh and now by Anne Heche), an adulterous woman who steals a stack of money from her boss and hits the road hoping for financial freedom. Pulling over in an old motel for the night, she meets the creepy owner of the Bates Motel, Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn doing his best Anthony Perkins), who lives with his jealous nagging mother. Most people know the film Psycho for what happens next -- the shower scene, where Marion is brutally stabbed in the most over-analyzed scene in movie history. The money, the car, and Marion's remains are quickly sunk in a nearby swamp. As a detective (William H. Macy) and Marion's sister Lila (Julianne Moore) come looking for her, they begin to uncover the dark mysterious secret lurking in Norman Bates' life. ~ Arthur Borman, Rovi

Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear provided the director with a box-office success to follow up the critical success of the previous year's Goodfellas. After serving a lengthy prison sentence for a sexual assault, Max Cady (Robert De Niro) comes calling on the man who served as his public defender, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte). Max begins a campaign of harassment against the man and his family because Bowden buried a report that would have in all likelihood acquitted Cady of the charges against him. Bowden's shaky ethics continue in his personal life as he is considering beginning an extramarital affair with colleague Lori Davis (Illeana Douglas), since he and his wife, Leigh (Jessica Lange) have had a difficult time coming back together since he has admitted to previous indiscretions. Cady infiltrates the family most insidiously by cultivating a relationship with the Bowden's troubled teenage daughte, Danielle (Juliette Lewis), who is all the more susceptible to Cady's advances because of her parents' problems. Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, the stars of the original film, have cameo appearances in this version of Cape Fear. De Niro and Lewis were both nominated for Academy Awards for their work in the film. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

Better known as It's Alive III, Island of the Alive details the further exploits of the murderous mutant infants introduced in director Larry Cohen's It's Alive! (1974). Said infants are shipped off to a desert island, where they are completely cut off from civilization. The government intends to eliminate the penned-up infants, but Michael Moriarty, the father of one of the babies, organizes a protest against this wholesale slaughter. It is clear to anyone who can read that director Cohen is drawing parallels between the quarantined children and society's treatment of AIDS victims. The strength of Cohen's direction and storytelling prowess is slightly weakened by some inadequate special effects in the closing scenes, wherein the babies reproduce and wreak havoc on the Mainland. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Writer-director Larry Cohen followed his ragged but interesting horror hit It's Alive! with this sequel, which surpassed the original in both creativity and technical expertise. The story opens as another expectant couple, Eugene and Jody Scott (Frederic Forrest and Kathleen Lloyd), are paid a surprise visit by a stranger who turns out to be Frank Davies (John P. Ryan), the father of the original monster baby from the previous film. Davies warns the couple that their unborn child may be similarly at risk, and thereby in mortal danger from a nationwide task force dedicated to destroying the monster infants. Despite their initial apprehension, the Scotts eventually place a tenuous trust in the stranger, who explains that the children are not subhuman animals, but may actually represent the next step in human evolution -- a view shared by members of an underground organization devoted to the protection and study of the children. Davies secretes Eugene and Jody in this group's hideout so that they can attend to the birth of the child in safety. Discovering that their newborn is indeed one of the same mutants, the Scotts undergo a traumatic test of familial integrity, much like that of the Davies family in the previous film. Their emotional turmoil is further compounded by an assault on the compound by members of a rival underground dedicated to eradicating the monster babies, which leads to a grim and violent confrontation. This time out, Cohen is far more assured at the helm, stabilizing his vision with a more elaborate script, higher budget, and good performances. On the downside, the monster-baby FX haven't particularly improved since the previous outing, but Cohen has the good sense to keep the little rubber beasties fairly well-hidden. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

"All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap. In Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s drama, insomniac ex-Marine Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the neon-lit streets. Chronically alone, Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even with such other cabbies as blowhard Wizard (Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who agrees to a date and then spurns Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a porno movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by Scorsese), the increasingly paranoid Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating Betsy's candidate, Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis' bloodbath turns him into a media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind?

Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era. Scorsese and Schrader structure Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of John Ford's late Western The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes, also ground Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died), Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through Travis' point-of-view, where De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence. Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on President Ford's life, Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted Reagan assassin and Foster fan John W. Hinckley. Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting Rocky. Anchored by De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man," Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Horror journeyman Larry Cohen, writer and director of numerous quirky horror projects, made his first foray into the genre with this low-budget cult favorite about a murderous mutant baby on a suburban rampage. The story opens with a delivery-room massacre as the newborn child of Frank and Lenore Davies (John P. Ryan and Sharon Farrell) answers the doctor's slap by tearing him to pieces -- along with a few other medical personnel -- before fleeing the hospital for whereabouts unknown. The subsequent hunt for the killer baby creates a rift between Frank, who wants the child destroyed, and Lenore, whose maternal instincts convince her that her child is not deliberately homicidal but merely frightened and defending itself. The baby's bloody rampage continues with several murders (including the creepy scene in which the terrible tyke savages the neighborhood milkman), until it is cornered by Frank and a police task-force. At the crucial moment, Frank has a sudden change of heart and tries to defend the infant from the police. Despite painfully low production values that render the monster scenes a bit silly (Rick Baker's creepy-looking but inarticulate baby model was simply pulled along on a string), Cohen's concept shines through, presenting a skewed but sincere interpretation of family values that could only be pulled off in the horror genre (see also Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes for another example). The script makes passing suggestions that the mutation was a result of an inadequately tested fertility drug, a concept explored more fully in the sequel It Lives Again and quite extensively in the third installment, Island of the Alive. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

This mystery, adapted from an Agatha Christie story, tells the tale of an ambitious British chauffeur who marries his American employer, one of the richest women in the US and persuades her to buy a palatial country estate. She literally loves it to death and that is where all the real trouble begins. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

A curious young physician can't resist looking through a hole in the wall into the neighboring apartment. He becomes a voyeur as he watches an amorous couple having sex. When he looks through the hole another time and fears the girl is dead, he manages to enter her apartment, finding her chained to the shower rod and drugged. He alienates his girlfriend when he has an affair with the rescued neighbor girl. A final look through the hole in the wall finds the young doctor staring down the barrel of a gun. The screenplay was written collaboratively by Wim Verstappen and directors Pim De La Parra and Martin Scorsese. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

This Francois Truffaut thriller is based ona novel by William Irish (aka Cornell Woolrich), whose books had been adapted by Alfred Hitchcock on many previous occasions. Jeanne Moreau stars as a woman whose fiancé is nastily murdered by five men. Utilizing a series of disguises, the cool-customer Moreau tracks down all five culprits, sexually enslaves them, and then engineers their deaths. The ominous musical score was written by Bernard Herrmann, another frequent Hitchcock collaborator. The Bride Wore Black was initially released in France as La Mariee etait en Noir. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Melvyn Douglas made his TV-movie debut in Companions in Nightmare. Douglas plays a famous psychiatrist who conducts a group-therapy session with several high-priced professionals. One of the patients turns out to be a murderer; the truth will come out, and it will be a shocker. Gig Young, Anne Baxter, Patrick O'Neal, Dana Wynter and Leslie Nielsen are among the special guest suspects (aren't they always?) Filmed late in 1967, Companions in Nightmare was first telecast on November 23, 1968. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this romantic drama based on a novel by Betty Smith, Carl Brown (Richard Chamberlain) is a student in law school who wants to marry his sweetheart, Annie McGairy (Yvette Mimieux). However, Carl and Annie's parents knew each other when they grew up in Ireland before emigrating to America, and Carl's father Patrick (Arthur Kennedy) vehemently objects to their engagement. The young couple decide to tie the knot anyway, and Patrick retaliates by cutting off financial support to his son. The young couple deal with the usual tribulations of newlyweds while they struggle to keep their heads above water -- Carl takes a job as a night watchman, while Annie makes a few dollars babysitting for Beverly Karter (Joan Tetzel), a married woman who is cheating on her husband with Stan Pulaski (Oscar Homolka), a married man. Living in a tiny apartment on the shabby side of town, Carl and Annie get to know other people too poor or too different to fit in elsewhere in an upscale college town. When Annie becomes pregnant, she leaves Carl, not wanting to burden him so that he can continue with his education. This sends Carl into an emotional tailspin, and Patrick tries to patch up the marriage he once opposed for the sake of his son's happiness. Joy in the Morning marked the first and only feature film role for TV and stage actor Donald Davis, who played Anthony, a gay florist who befriends the young couple. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

The un-aired Lost in Space pilot "No Place to Hide" kicked around underground video collectors' circles for close to 20 years, but until its release, first through Columbia House on tape in the late '90s and later as part of the FoxVideo DVD set Lost in Space: Season 1, it wasn't available to ordinary viewers. The first eight and a half minutes of the show are substantially the same as events in the first episode of the series, "The Reluctant Stowaway," but with two key differences: There is no Dr. Zachary Smith (and, hence, no "reluctant stowaway" -- so no saboteur), and there is no robot. There are also differences in the Robinson family's mission. Their ship, called the Gemini 12 rather than the Jupiter 2, will be traveling for 98 years, with the Robinson party in suspended animation, to Alpha Centauri. (Someone didn't do the math, as they're to be traveling for 98 years at virtually the speed of light, which would enough time to make several round trips to a star only 4.4 light-years away.) The plot changes substantially from what was used in the series at just under nine minutes into the story, as the ship encounters a circular swarm of meteors that leaves it critically damaged. The spaceship is next seen going into a low orbit around a planet and entering the atmosphere on automatic controls (with the family still in stasis) for a crash-landing. The plot then jumps ahead six months, to a recollection of events in Professor John Robinson's journal, read over a montage of space castaway life by Guy Williams. The Robinsons are seen living a spartan, but survivable, existence, and we see events that were ultimately used in episodes four and five of the series .

The castaways determine that the planet's orbit will result in a potentially lethal winter, and then discover a race of one-eyed giants, standing 50-feet tall and living in the mountains near where the ship crashed. Professor Robinson and Don West (Mark Goddard) are trapped in a cave by one of the creatures (Lamar Lundy), but are rescued when Will Robinson (Billy Mumy) arrives with a laser pistol. The travelers abandon their spaceship in the face of the coming deep freeze, and along their journey discover an ancient ruin with the mummified remains of something non-human before crossing the inland sea to safety. The latter segment contains a whirlpool scene -- the work of L.B. Abbott and Howard Lydecker -- that is still chilling. The program ends with the Robinsons setting up a new camp, not realizing that they are being observed and evaluated by a pair of aliens.

With the exception of the ending, all of this action will be familiar to longtime fans of the series from its usage in episodes one, four, and five, although some shots and scenes here run longer than they were in the finished program. Perhaps the best of these is the extended version of John Robinson's rocket-pack ride over the alien landscape in search of his missing daughter Penny, a scene set to Bernard Herrmann's hauntingly beautiful, yet moody, seascape music from Beneath the 12-Mile Reef. As John Williams had not yet been engaged to write the score for the episode (or a title theme), all of the music here is tracked in from Herrmann's scores from various 20th Century Fox feature films, including The Day the Earth Stood Still, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Beneath the 12-Mile Reef. Although less overtly suspenseful than what Williams would write, Herrmann's music gives all of this material a strangely beautiful, poetic quality -- perhaps not as suspenseful as the network wanted, but quite lovely in its way. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi