Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 October 27 • Monday

The Night Digger was an effectively creepy 1971 psycho killer movie with an excellent Bernard Herrmann score that makes me wonder if Herrmann saw Once Upon a Time in the West. There are a few recorded comments of his opinions about other soundtrack composers. He berated Elmer Bernstein for relying heavily on "the vamp" in his The Man with the Golden Arm soundtrack, for instance. (Bernstein took it in stride, noting that Herrmann was the greatest deployer of ostinato the genre had ever known.) And Herrmann loved Vic Mizzy's use of finger snaps in his theme song for The Addams Family. (Imagine sitting around watching The Addams Family with Bernard Herrmann!)

So here's The Night Digger, which uses harmonica as one of two front-line instruments (the other being the viola d'amore), an unusual choice since it's not a western or Americana or any other kind of movie for which a harmonica would be a natural fit. Had Herrmann seen Once Upon a Time in the West and got harmonica on the brain? We'll never know. But The Night Digger is the 880th Soundtrack of the Week.

The use of the harmonica, its plangent voice counter-balanced by the lush and dreamy viola d'amore, makes this a unique Herrmann score.

It's also classic Herrmann, perhaps not offering much that's new, though the crazy soaring and dive-bombing strings in "Mary's Death and the Road Builder" don't trigger a memory of another Herrmann cue.

Besides the harmonica it seems to be an all-string affair, a la Psycho, with particularly nice use of the harp. And the viola d'amore will remind listeners of Herrmann's music for On Dangerous Ground, another psycho-killer story.

With a stripped down and monochromatic ensemble, Herrmann nonetheless creates and impressive range of effects, blasting the audience with violent intensity, shifting chords and keys for surges of emotion.

His gift for lyricism and heartbreakingly tender melodicism is at a high point here but let's face it: his career is mostly high points.