In the summer of 1966, when I was a second year undergraduate at Cambridge, Alfred Hitchcock came to give a question and answer session in the Lady Mitchell Hall, and to screen his “favourite film” Shadow of a Doubt (1943) – the one about the Merry Widow serial killer.
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Tongue-tied, for some instinctual reason I hummed aloud the opening bars of the signature tune of his long-running TV show The Alfred Hitchcock Hour – pom/pom-pom-pom-pom/pom-pom-pom – Charles Gounod’s jolly-macabre Funeral March of a Marionette, written in 1872. For the show, it had been wittily rearranged for eight bassoons.
Hitchcock smiled, walked away a little, turned his head and with a deadpan expression said one word: “Sunrise…” I hadn’t a clue what he meant by this. It was like “Rosebud…” from Citizen Kane, I supposed. But the great man had actually spoken to me.
About 40 years later, someone sent me a DVD of FW Murnau’s film Sunrise (1927), with its original score restored, and the mystery was at last solved. The sequence in Sunrise where the peasant couple visit a photographer’s studio in the city – and accidentally knock over a headless Winged Victory sculpture, one of the photographer’s props – was accompanied by Gounod’s funeral march, the same tune with the same macabre charm as Hitchcock’s signature.
"The day Alfred Hitchcock spoke one word to me (and the 40 years it took me to understand it)", The Guardian; Christopher Frayling, Jan. 7, 2018.
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