Is the notion of the Kuleshov effect no more than a museum piece? Hardly. Arguments and assumptions of this type concerning the power of editing over other aspects of film technique, and particularly performance, are still very much alive. Consider, as a parallel example, Howard Goodall’s analysis of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Goodall claims that the extended sequence of shots showing Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) driving away from Phoenix would take on an entirely different emotional character if they were juxtaposed with upbeat music, rather than the unsettling harmonies and jagged rhythms of Herrmann’s score. That much is certainly true; there can be no doubting the ‘added value’[1] that sound and music bring to the film image in general, nor of the importance of Herrmann’s score in shaping our experience of the story of Marion Crane and Norman Bates in particular. Goodall cannot resist implying, however, that Leigh’s facial expression is entirely inert, and that her performance plays no significant role in conjuring up the mood of the scene. ‘What’s remarkable about [Herrmann’s cue for the scene] is how much impact it has on the pictures. Without it, what we’re looking at is someone driving along in a car, and there’s nothing dramatic, tense, or worrying about that’.[2] But what Goodall implies by this claim is manifestly false: across the sequence Leigh’s face betrays many symptoms of anxiety and agitation (nervous sideways glances, lip biting, strained squinting into the headlights of oncoming traffic as she drives long into the night). In this respect the example differs from the classic Mosjoukine case, for Leigh’s face is not expressively neutral. To be sure, a different score would interact with these facial expressions to obtain a different effect to the one actually achieved with Herrmann’s score (as Goodall demonstrates); but that does not secure the claim that Leigh’s facial expressions are playing no significant role. We are back to a version of the Kuleshov fallacy: only context – here provided by the score, rather than editing – counts in determining the meaning or emotional character of a given facial expression. In this respect, Goodall’s otherwise very compelling analysis of the musical character of Herrmann’s score and its contribution to the film strikes a false, if very familiar, note.