The book of love is long and boring

Shall we be sentimental? Yes, we shall. Shall emotion well up and spill over, just a little? Yes, it will. And it has.

When I first saw this movie in a theatre years ago, I was taken aback by how profoundly I blubbered. I mean, it was real crying, not just the furtive splashing you do at the movies while you scramble around and realize you don't have a kleenex.  It got right inside me. A gusher. I know why. Try being married for a long, long time, and realizing you're nowhere near the finish line.

The few lines in this are in German, but trust me, they require no translation.

The book of love is long and boring

No one can lift the damn thing

It's full of charts and facts and figures

And instructions for dancing

But I

I love it when you read to me

And you

You can read me anything

The book of love has music in it

In fact that's where music comes from

Some of it's just transcendental

Some of it's just really dumb

But I

I love it when you sing to me

And you

You can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring

And written very long ago

It's full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes

And things we're all too young to know

But I

I love it when you give me things

And you

You ought to give me wedding rings

And I

I love it when you give me things

And you

You ought to give me wedding rings

You ought to give me wedding rings

Psycho - The Shower Scene With And Without Music

This was a real surprise. I was sure before I even saw this that the infamous shower scene from Psycho would fall completely flat without that eeeek, eeeek, eeeek, eeeek music by Bernard Hermann that helped make it so famous.

Not so, in my books.

Hitchcock knew the power of sound. He knew we hear before we see (in the womb), so sound is much more primal, even though we live in a culture which is almost 100% visual. The soothing shhhhhh sound of the shower is broken by the sssssst of the curtain being scraped back, and then the most godawful movie sound ever: the tip of the knife repeatedly entering flesh with a ruthless chttt, chttt, chttt. Though it's hard to pick up in the original, Janet Leigh's screams become increasingly erotic-sounding, with gasps and sighs interspersed, as if she's just having a particularly lusty bout of sex (illicit sex being very big in this movie, with bad women like Marion Crane paying with their lives).

Hitchcock did nothing by accident. This scene stands just fine by itself, and is maybe even an improvement because it strips back any interference with the extremely disturbing sounds of the original. The ping-ping-ping of the shower curtain being pulled down is a nice touch (though as usual with YouTube, this was clumsily edited and left out the best shot of the scene: Janet Leigh's open-eyed, staring face lying flat on the cold bathroom floor).

Which see.

TITBIT (or tidbid): I was to learn this, after the fact:

Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith writes that the music for the shower scene is "probably the most famous (and most imitated) cue in film music," but Hitchcock was originally opposed to having music in this scene. When Herrmann played the shower scene cue for Hitchcock, the director approved its use in the film. Herrmann reminded Hitchcock of his instructions not to score this scene, to which Hitchcock replied, "Improper suggestion, my boy, improper suggestion." This was one of two important disagreements Hitchcock had with Herrmann, in which Herrmann ignored Hitchcock's instructions. The second one, over the score for Torn Curtain (1966), resulted in the end of their professional collaboration. A survey conducted by PRS for Music in 2009, showed that the British public consider the score from 'the shower scene' to be the scariest theme from any film.

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