Journal of Popular Film & Television (2002) - Weird Vibrations: How the Theremin Gave Musical Voice to Hollywood's Extraterrestrial "Others"

Details

• article: Weird Vibrations: How the Theremin Gave Musical Voice to Hollywood's Extraterrestrial "Others"
• author(s): James Wierzbicki
• journal: Journal of Popular Film & Television (2002)
• issue: volume 30, issue 3, pages 125-135
• DOI: 10.1080/01956050209602849
• journal ISSN: 0195-6051
• publisher: Heldref Publications
• keywords: "Hitchcock and Selznick" - by Leonard J. Leff, Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, Chicago, Illinois, David Neumeyer, David O. Selznick, Dimitri Tiomkin, Elisabeth Weis, Franz Waxman, Gregory Peck, H.G. Wells, Henry Mancini, James Wierzbicki, John Belton, John Williams, New York City, New York, Roy Webb, Royal S. Brown, Spellbound (1945), Wendy Chapman Peek

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Abstract

Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick responded favorably to the theremin-flavored sketch that Miklos Rozsa concocted for the scene in which the film's male protagonist (played by Gregory Peck) first lapses into a possibly murderous trance (Brown 274). Then, Rozsa said, "they wanted to use it everywhere in the picture" (Prendergast 69). After Rozsa's -- and Samuel J. Hoffman's -- contribution to Spellbound won an Academy Award for best score, "the theremin gained instant status as an emblem for the unbalanced side of the human psyche" (Albert Glinsky 254). Before long, the Hollywood press corps concluded that "the theremin [was] Rozsa's trademark just as the sarong [was] Dorothy Lamour's" (Palmer 33).