Month: August 2026

Leave a comment Posted on Apple TV, Bernard Herrmann, Cape Fear, Jeff Russo, Steven C. Smith

Cape Bernard Herrmann

Fifty years after his death, iconic film composer Bernard Herrmann rises from the grave.

This summer, Apple TV has one of the most popular series on television, “Cape Fear.”

Based on John D. MacDonald’s book “The Executioners” and first adapted in 1962 and redone in 1991, this is the third version of the same story.  After years of incarceration, ex-con Max Cady seeks vengeance against Sam Bowden, the attorney who put him in prison.

What makes the new version “must-hear” TV is composer Jeff Russo’s employment of Bernard Herrmann’s original score which Elmer Bernstein also used in 1991.  The opening scene of each episode is highly effective. It’s a 6-8 minute segment that builds up to a climax with a powerful blast of Herrman’s music with the block outline letters of the words “cape fear” overfilling the screen to squeeze back to normal size.

That the show is this good has little to do with Apple TV.  Lately, streaming services are cutting costs of its content.  For “Cape Fear,” Apple was looking to reduce the budget and insisted on a more modern score than composer Russo’s choice of Herrmann.

After executive producers Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese (both who hold rights to the material) held their ground, the budget remained robust and the Herrmann score was used.

More than half of the credit of why the series has captivated the public has to do with the thunderous and vertiginous bars of Herrmann’s score.

It’s a reminder how a masterful score can elevate the visual content and how few composers these days design memorable motifs.

Credit goes to Russo for headlining Herrmann’s score as if it’s a main character in the drama.  It envelops the Bowden family in a shroud of nightmarish despair, a hypnotic glue that tightly holds the suspense and captivates and sustains viewers for nine hours.

Even if the average person can’t articulate it, at a subconscious level, it enters their brain as a hallucinatory drug. We are ensnared in the maelstrom of the Bowdens’ misery, a relentless whirlpool of terror that draws us inexorably toward the abyss.

Which is why the producers should have put Herrmann’s name in the opening credits instead of burying it in the end credits which automaticlly cuts away to play the next episode ensuring that most people will never know who wrote the music. 

Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith told me he agrees. “He’s one of the reasons that this story keeps being remade – a key character in the drama and its atmosphere.”

“At least the re-use of the score is bringing him to the attention of a new generation,” Smith said.

His musical fingerprints are all over this show.  Give him his due.

Leave a comment Posted on Christopher Nolan, IMAX 70mm, The Odyssey

The Odyssey:  A Journey Worth Taking

In a year when much has been made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, another event has gained more traction across the nation about something that is more than 10 times older than that.

People are flocking to movie theatres to see a film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic poem dating back to 2700-2800 B.C. that follows Odysseus, a king who encounters monstrous obstacles in trying to sail home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.

It is doubtful many people even know the meaning of the word “odyssey” yet sold-out screenings are populating across the U.S. since Christopher Nolan’s film opened on July 16th.  No fourth of July fireworks display matches the attention of this movie event.

How strange but exhilarating.  Part of the buzz has to do with how Nolan shot the whole film on IMAX 70mm film stock, the first time that has been done for a feature-length movie.  That non-cinephiles have educated themselves about this format seeking out one of the 25 theatres in the country equipped to show the film in the proper ratio is thrilling.  Suddenly, viewing a film actually running through a projector is fashionable.

“Something old is new again” applies to this feat in other ways as well.

Since Nolan could not shoot dialogue scenes using IMAX cameras due to the noise they made, he and his technical team came up with encasing the camera inside a blimp that dampened the sound, much as filmmakers did when sound pictures came around in the late 1920’s.

Then, the idea of moviegoers leaving their homes to see this film in special theatres echoes what studios did in the 1950’s to extract people away from their TVs to see a widescreen film shot in Cinemascope.

Nolan is one of the most ambitious filmmakers in the past 25 years.  While his epic trilogy of Batman and other big-budget movies garner the headlines, it’s his clever storytelling devices of moving time intervals like pieces across a cinema chessboard that keeps audiences engaged especially in “Memento,” “The Prestige” and “Oppenheimer.”

Nolan’s unbridled passion for loving film—refusing digital cameras, demanding theatres project his products on projectors, insisting that his movies have a longer window of exclusive theatrical exhibition before they appear on streaming services—makes him a champion for the future of movies and exhibition.

I saw “The Odyssey” in an IMAX 70mm presentation and thoroughly enjoyed myself.  For three hours, I was engrossed.   While I wouldn’t declare the film a masterpiece, it is a remarkable achievement, the power of attracting a large audience for something so archaic. For that, fans should give him grace if every product he produces isn’t THE BEST.

Let’s celebrate when these rare spontaneous moments surface reminding us that people when they want to can come together in the dark for three hours to share something special.

These days we crave what little binds us.  Who knew that a piece of literature thousands of years old would capture such enthusiasm, a sign that better days are on the horizon.  Just like Odysseus, we just have to sail through some nightmares first.