MRH : I was always struck by the “Main Title” because it really sets the tone for the film: this is a serious drama, and the person who's sitting at the window is this little monster, waiting to plant and nourish a viral epidemic of racism.

DS : I never really thought of this before, but it's a similar way of opening the picture the way Bernard Herrmann did in Psycho (1960) where nothing is happening for a while… Herman Stein lets you know from the titles that there's something very potent about this person; it's not just a guy riding in a bus.

It is a really strange way to score the opening, if you think about it; it is so dramatic and so urgent, and it's just a guy riding in a bus. You could've put travelogue music during it, and it would've fit perfectly, but in a completely different film.

MRH : It's also nicely synchronized, because it builds and builds and then erupts – and stops just as the bus' front doors open, and he steps out, and then the drama really begins.

DS : And it kind of leaves you a little breathless, wondering what's next. It's a great Main Title. What's funny is that a lot of people who don't know much about Herman Stein bought our CD and they've written back to me and they've commented on the Main Title and they say things like, ‘Wow, this could've been in a Warner Bros. movie. This is such a great piece of music.'

Well, he was a great composer. Warner Bros. does not own great composition; yes, they had Franz Waxman and Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold there, but it's not about the studio; it's about whether the writer can write something good and powerful, and certainly Herman incredibly capable of that.

The difference is most people didn't know it because [for the many monster films he was involved with], his name wasn't on the picture, so they heard a great piece of music and thought, ‘Well, that's good music,' but they had no idea who wrote it.

[On The Intruder] he was finally getting his credit on a good picture and people could see what he did, and he thought that this was going to be the beginning of the next phase of his career, and unfortunately it didn't happen. He ended up doing a lot of TV work and everything, but this was his last movie. Nobody saw the film, and by that time new generations were coming in, and he never got to build on it, which is too bad because who knows what might have happened.

Most people don't know it, but I just found out about it fairly recently that he was supposed to score John Huston's Freud, which was scored by Jerry Goldsmith… At the time it was considered a major movie, and something happened (I'm not going to go into details) and he didn't get the picture, and Goldsmith got it instead.

MRH : I think in the early to mid-fifties, that's when Huston stopped going to established American composers and worked with French composer Philip Sainton on Moby Dick (1956), and Japanese composer Toshirô Mayuzumi on The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966) – very intriguing composer little-known in North America.

DS : It would've been fascinating to hear how Herman would've scored Freud, because it was a very different type of picture, and he was capable of so many different styles. As you say, you listen to The Intruder, and say ‘Gee, this doesn't sound like Stein.' If you listen to his concert pieces, they don't sound like Stein if you're thinking in terms of traditional science-fiction works, and he wrote a lot of songs. He was arranging for big bands when he was in his teens.

MRH : I guess that explains the jazz stuff, because his jazz arrangements are wonderful.

DS : He arranged for Count Basie when he was sixteen; Stein knew what he was doing. He had a lot of fun doing those source cues because the players were the best there were. It was a really rewarding experience for him.

You can hear a lot of his jazz stuff in film like The Unguarded Moment (1956), an Esther Williams film where she's being tormented by a juvenile delinquent for Universal. It was very Elmer Bernstein-ish, but not quite; definitely jazz was a part of Herman. He didn't get the chance to use it in the kind of movie you and I are most familiar with, but when he did some soap operas and other teen films, you hear that jazz influence.

Like Henry Mancini [who also co-scored Unguarded ] he had a big band upbringing. In Herman's younger days, he was the arranger for Blanche Calloway's band. Well, Blanche Calloway was the sister of Cab Calloway, so here's this white Jewish guy touring with this all-black woman orchestra, arranging for them. That's amazing stuff!