Bernard Herrmann: Last News

Landmark’s E Street Cinema screens a classic film as part of its “Retro Replay” series, and each month brings a different organizing theme.On Tuesdays in July, for example, the venue screened a different road movie in its #RoadLife series, with films as varied as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, The Hangover, and Mad Max: Fury Road.August brings with it a celebration of Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic achievements, not least for the fact the Master of Suspense was born on the 13th of the month in east London.Kicking off the “Happy Birthday, Mr. Hitchcock” series at downtown D.C.’s E Street Cinema is a screening of one of the filmmaker’s most ambitious and entertaining works, North by Northwest (1959).Cary Grant plays a Madison Avenue ad man who is mistaken for a CIA operative by some very bad men, led by the silken-voiced James Mason, while Eva Marie Saint steps into the role of blonde femme fatale. A thin, equine Martin Landau is chilling as Mason’s No.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If would be hard to name an artist in any medium who illustrated Flaubert’s famous maxim of creativity (“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work”) better than Ennio Morricone. Morricone, who died in 2020 (at 91), was certainly one of the greatest composers of movie soundtracks who ever lived. But even if you consider him next to his fellow giants (Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Nino Rota, Hans Zimmer, Max Steiner), Morricone scaled his own wild peak, inventing his own kind of beauty, his own transcendent cacophony.

Chris Willman Music WriterKenneth Wannberg, composer and Emmy-winning music editor who worked on nearly half of all John Williams’ films dating back to the late 1960s, died Jan. 27 at his home in Florence, Oregon.