I’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train at least six or seven times, including when it recently aired on Reel 13. With its tight screenplay adapted from the book by Patricia Highsmith (author of the Tom Ripley books), fabulously evil villain played by Robert Walker, pivotal train scenes and tense back-and-forth between Farley Granger’s Forest Hills tennis match and Walker’s evidence-planting trip to the scene of a murder, the film has always been one of my Hitchcock favorites.

Of course, music plays a huge part in Strangers on a Train, as it does in all Hitchcock movies. Many individual Hitchcock films have been studied for their music—particularly the films scored by Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the most famous film-music cue, the shower scene in Psycho—but Jack Sullivan’s detailed guide to music in Hitchcock films, which comes out in paperback on May 20, appears to be the most comprehensive. The book, Hitchcock’s Music, covers all the Hitchcock films, from the early silents to the British films like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes and the best-known films like Rebecca, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. The book, which won a 2007 ASCAP Deems Taylor Best Book of the Year award in the concert music category, is so detailed that you may feel the need to go watch numerous scenes again, just to listen to the music cues you somehow missed.

Recently I spoke to Jack Sullivan about Alfred Hitchcock’s film music, how the director’s carefully plotted approach to making movies extended to its music, and the post-Hitchcock era of film scoring.

Jennifer Melick: How far back does your interest in Hitchcock’s movies go?

Jack Sullivan: Back to my childhood. I was just old enough to probably sneak out and see Vertigo. Then right after that I saw North by Northwest and Psycho. As a kid, I remember being riveted by the music. read more