Michael Armstrong vs. James Bond
That Arresting Rhythm: John Addison, Bernard Herrmann and John Barry
"A Visual Torn Curtain": Opening Credits
- Torn Curtain
- From Russia With Love
From Russia With Love: Opening Credits and Commutation
Each Bond film begins with Maurice Binder’s gun barrel opening accompanied by the James Bond Theme on electric guitar and brass and then, after the pre-credit action sequence, the erotic credits roll while the title song plays. In From Russia With Love the credits present a belly dancer, to set the exotic location of Istanbul, while the words flash across her undulating body in colorful lights. Loud bursts of brass announce “Bond is Back” before an instrumental version of Lionel Bart and John Barry’s title song “From Russia With Love” starts to play on the strings. Intermixed within the arrangement, however, are snippets of the Bond Theme in order to remind the viewer constantly that this is a James Bond film 50.
The structure of Addison’s score, beginning rhythmically with loud brass chords and then moving into a theme to return to the rhythm at the end, parallels the structure of Barry’s credit music for From Russia With Love. Perhaps Addison recognized the type of score he was hired to write and poorly followed Barry’s By supplying a recognizable tune, Addison removes a great deal of the suspense from the credits in a way analagous too but not as successful as John Barry's incorportation of a title theme. To further emphasize this comparison, I have done a commutation placing the credit music from From Russia With Love onto the credit images for Torn Curtain. The similarity of the structure of Barry's music to Addison's becomes more apparent when certain structural moments of the music match with certain visual moments of the credits, namely the introduction of major names and the title.
The Bond credits, however, serve as an element external to the diegesis and a moment of pure voyeurism or what Laura Mulvey calls fetishistic scopophilia; while traditional narrative cinema usually tries to combine the visual spectacle of the woman with the story, the Bond credits make no such pretense but allow the images to exist outside any sense of linear time as it relates to the narrative 51. Instead, the passive female dances for the male gaze, serving only as erotic pleasure for the spectator (no character is even present to simultaneously enjoy), while the continuing Bond motif connotes the active male hero in the film 52. In fact, the music in the Bond films in general serves to de-emphasize narrative flow and only adds to the “cartoonish ingredients” of the film that Hitchcock seems to despise so 53. Therefore it makes sense that though Hitchcock claims to desire a score like John Barry’s, the scores of Herrmann and Addison, especially Herrmann, help establish a narrative flow and enhance the emotional subtlety of a film meant to displace action and gimmickry with psychological drama and characterization.