That's not your place

A few weeks ago, I headed off to the AFI Silver to see the movie The Artist.  The movie is about the transition from silent movies to talkies with a silent film star (named George Valentin) resisting the move.  Therefore, the majority of the movie is silent with interstitial cards used occasionally throughout the movie.  As a result, the score is a very important part in conveying emotions since there is no audible dialogue.  And the score is really amazing and includes a little bit  the score from Vertigo written by Bernard Hermann.  The score (rightly so in my opinion) is getting strong Oscar buzz (as long as the score is 80% original material, it can be nominated).  So I was surprised to read last week that Kim Novak (who starred in Vertigo), took out a full page add stating that she felt like a rape had been committed against her by the use of Bernard Hermann's score.  Ignoring the extremely poor choice of words ( which seems to belittle the violence of an actually sexual assault),  I don't think that it is really Kim Novak's place to make this argument.  The composer got permission from Bernard Hermann's estate to use some of the score and furthermore Kim Novak didn't write the score.  Also, she claims that she is the only one left to defend Vertigo because Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart are dead.  Vertigo is arguably one of Hitchcock's most famous movies (though not one of my favorites) and I'm not sure that the credit is due to Kim Novak.  I think most of the credit goes to Hitchcock and the crew that worked on the film. So to me, this arguemnt came off as a slap in the face of anyone else who worked on that film.  She totally overreacted to the situation and I think that she comes out in a poorer light than the composer or the director of The Artist (the director released a statement along the lines of Bernard Hermann was a great composer and we were lucky that were we able to pay our respect to him by using some of his work in this film).  But besides this Kim Novak rant, I highly recommend The Artist, especially for people who enjoy old movies.  The costumers, set directors, and make-up artists really capture the era beautifully and there is a great scene that feature some amazing sound design and sound editing.  And I have to hand it to the actors, they did a great job adapting to a medium that I'm sure was foreign to all of the them.  The cast is really great too, with nice supporting roles from James Cromwell, Missi Pyle, and John Goodman (who I usually forget that I like).