This essay concerns a notorious case of misguided genetics on the silver screen, but it begins with a brief musical mystery that led me to the film in the first place. Along the way, the story passes by Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Roy Boulting, psychopathic killers, Down Syndrome, an American Nazi, Lionel Penrose, Francis Galton, and (in the “Lagniappe” section below) a Virginia medical official who pleaded with legislators to emulate Hitler’s sterilization program.
Musical Mystery and Epiphany
Kill Bill: Volume One has a famous scene in which Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) whistles a jaunty, but creepy tune as she struts through a hospital, preparing to murder Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman). When I first saw the movie in 2003, that whistled melody sounded terribly familiar, and, being a musician, it drove me batty trying to recall why I knew it. In the pre-Spotify world, music sleuthing was far more difficult than it is today. I couldn’t find out much about the song, and I put the question aside for a long while.
Sometime later, I was listening to some cinematic music and up came the theme from Martin Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver, composed by Bernard Hermann. Hermann was a prolific composer, best known for his classic film scores for Alfred Hitchcock (e.g., Vertigo, Psycho, The Man Who Knew Too Much) and Orson Welles (e.g., War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons). The theme from Taxi Driver begins with long, angst-ridden chords and rattling percussion. Then, at around 0:50 in the video below, it breaks into a slow, sensuous saxophone solo. As the sax wailed out, it hit me—that melody is nearly identical to the whistled tune from Kill Bill: Volume One. It soon veers in different directions, but with two tiny variations, the correspondence of the early notes is (to my ears, at least) unmistakable. Whoever wrote the melody for Tarantino, I thought, might have accidentally plagiarized from Hermann’s 27-year-old score.
By the time I made the connection, web searches for music had greatly improved, so I went online to find out who wrote the whistle song from Kill Bill, and the composer turned out to be … … Bernard Herrmann. The song was Twisted Nerve—the theme for a 1968 psychodrama by the same name, directed by Roy Boulting. I had seen the name in Herrmann’s discography but didn’t know the film. Below is that theme song. Martin Durnley (Hywel Bennett) is a psycopathic murderer who often pretends to be a mentally disabled innocent named “Georgie.” Here, he whistles it while stalking Susan Harper (Hayley Mills).
I figured that, either Herrmann’s Taxi Driver theme was either a sly homage to his relatively obscure Twisted Nerve theme, or, prolific composer that he was, Herrmann unintentionally recycled a motif from his earlier score. It’s appropriate, since Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is nearly as disturbing as Martin/Georgie. And, having Tarantino’s deranged Elle Driver whistle the song is a clear homage to Boulting’s deranged Martin/Georgie.
By the way, I’ve never found any other mention of the similarity of these songs. You listen. You decide if I’m right. Let me know if anyone else has ever noted the connection.
Eugenic Nonsense
Years later, when I finally saw the hard-to-find Twisted Nerve, I was immediately disturbed by the film’s mangled treatment of human genetics. Martin/Georgie is a murderous lunatic. It turns out that his childlike pose is an imitation of his institutionalized older brother, Pete, who has Down Syndrome (called “mongolism” in the film). The implication is that there is a genetic link between the two brothers’ mental conditions—which is utterly without any real-world scientific basis. Just to be sure the viewer makes that connection, one scene features a faux academic lecture by a Professor Fuller (Russell Napier) on the purported links (nonexistent in reality) between Down Syndrome and familial insanity.
The spurious genetics echoed longstanding tropes from the eugenics movement, but Twisted Nerve was late to that game. The credibility of eugenics slowly dissolved in America in the 1920s and 1930s, and its respectability was shattered by the overtly eugenicist nature of Nazi Germany. But Twisted Nerve came 23 years after the collapse of the Third Reich. However, the film does, in fact, have an overt connection to Nazism and eugenics. The title comes from a poem, “Slaves,” by George Sylvester Viereck (1884-1962). Viereck was a German-American writer who was imprisoned in the U.S. in the mid-1940s for his propaganda work on behalf of the Nazi regime.
In his lecture, the film’s Professor Fuller quotes from Viereck’s poem, which suggests genetic or physiological determination of one’s moral qualities:
No puppet master pulls the strings on high,
Portioning our parts, the tinsel and the paint;
A twisted nerve, a ganglion gone awry,
Predestinates the sinner and the saint.
Viereck’s poem continues:
Each, held more firmly than by hempen band,
Slave of his entrails, struts across the scene,
The malnutrition of some obscure gland
Makes him a Ripper or a Nazarene.
Before Twisted Nerve hit the theaters, it was pre-emptively attacked as misleading and harmful to the perception of mentally disabled people—and in particular those with Down Syndrome. Internet information on the film consists of scattered snippets, so I’ll quote from the Wikipedia entry:
Letters of complaint were sent to the British censor before the film's release, including one from the National Association for Mental Health. The film's medical adviser, Professor Lionel Penrose, asked for his name to be removed from the film. Roy Boulting said these complaints caused him "shock and surprise and a deep sense of regret and depression." This led to the filmmakers adding a voiceover just prior to the credits which said: “In view of the controversy already aroused, the producers of this film wish to re-emphasise what is already stated in the film, that there is no established scientific connection between mongolism and psychiatric or criminal behaviour.”
Ironically, Lionel Penrose, the academic who severed his relationship with the film over its eugenic-like misinformation, was the Galton Professor of Eugenics from 1945 to 1963 at University College London (changing his title in 1963 to “professor of human genetics”). Penrose’s chair was funded by and named for Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Again, from Wikipedia:
According to his successor, Professor Harry Harris, Penrose “never liked the name 'eugenics,’” because it seemed to him to be too much associated with uninformed and dangerous policies of racial purification." Harris also reported the "long delay" in changing this name was due to "legal problems" associated with the original donation from Francis Galton and described how Penrose simply ignored the "eugenics" element of his job title.
Boulting was apparently gobsmacked by the criticism, as he seems to have thought that his film would make a positive contribution to public awareness of mental health issues. One of the sharpest criticisms of the film was that it would have been relatively simply to edit out the scenes purporting to associate Down Syndrome with criminal behavior by relatives. That, however, did not happen, so a rather good suspense thriller is marred by its dissemination of medical nonsense.
Lagniappe
Tomorrow’s Children
Hollywood tried on a number of occasions to deal with eugenics. Tomorrow’s Children (1934) is a bizarre period piece. Diana Sinclair plays the protagonist, a pleasant, eloquent, industrious young woman whom the state orders sterilized because, in the words of the film’s social worker, “Most of the past three generations of your family have been feebleminded—congenital cripples and habitual drunks.” Film enthusiasts may enjoy the following two-minute clip because it is such an over-the-top, stereotypical example of 1930s cinema. I’ve seen the whole film and will add that, while it’s clearly meant to be anti-eugenics, it is at times comically inept. The deus ex machina ending completely muddles the important message the filmmakers aimed to disseminate.
This clip was made in 1934, and, for all its cinematic shortcomings, it’s clear that the filmmakers had a good grasp of how eugenics was fomenting widespread human rights abuses in America and industrialized terror in Germany. Earlier this week, I noted in another essay that in that same year, 1934, a leading state medical official in my native Virginia pleaded with the legislature to expand the state’s forced sterilization program. His rationale? “The Germans are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are.”
No idea about any connection in Herrmann's work, but maybe Herrmann was inadvertently channeling someone else's music which he may have heard. I listened to the theme and was immediately reminded of Harvey Brook's "Harvey's Tune", a sax 'solo' from the album SuperSession, by Al Kooper Mike Bloomfield and Steve Stills, from ..... 1968.
It is on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMlOY4vnQ7Y
That album has an 11 minute version of Season of the Witch! Also on youtube.
To my untrained ear, the tunes are variations on a theme.
The bigger question in my mind is whether that was Michael Caine coming out of the phone booth to ask for change. Sure sounded like him, but he'd have been much younger then.