The Film
East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan, is a filmic adaptation of the 1952 novel of the same name by John Steinbeck. The film starred James Dean in his first major film role. The plot centers around 1917–1918 and is set in central California. It is a complex story of two young brothers, Cal and Aron, striving for the attention of their devoutly religious father. Cal (James Dean) finds out that his mother is still alive, despite what he had been told, and is running a brothel in nearby Monterey. To further complicate matters, Cal also begins to fall in love with his brother’s girlfriend, Abra (Julie Harris). Incensed at the preferential treatment his brother is receiving from their father, Cal takes him to see his mother at the brothel. Shocked by this, Aron becomes intoxicated and boards a troop train to enlist for the final moments of World War I. This causes the father to have a stroke. In a final bid to get his father’s attention and affection, Cal tries to talk to him, but his father is paralyzed from the stroke. In the end, however, he finally does manage to speak and asks Cal to look after him. Cal and Abra share a kiss, and the film ends on a happy note of acceptance and redemption. The film made the list of the American Film Institute’s 400 best American films of all time and was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.
The Music
The score to East of Eden was composed by Leonard Rosenman. Just like James Dean in his star acting role, Rosenman’s commission as film composer for East of Eden was his first. The composer and director met early in the process to discuss the score, in order to find ways to make the music “inextractable” from the dramatic framework of the film. They agreed that Rosenman should be there for the production of the film and to even write some of the music before the scenes were shot. This resulted in Kazan sometimes shooting scenes to music, as opposed to the far more conventional method of the composer writing music to completed scenes. Rosenman recalls finding himself on the set at Mendocino and Salinas, working on initial musical ideas for the scenes that were about to be shot. While on location, the composer had access to a piano, and he performed his daily musical sketches for the director as they sat and discussed how it fit the scenes shot on that particular day. Because of this collaborative, concurrent method, by the time the film had a rough cut, the music did as well. The only thing left to do was to orchestrate the musical sketches and record the final score.
Abra (Julie Harris), Aron Trask (Richard Davalos), and Cal Trask (James Dean). Warner Bros. / Photofest © Warner Bros.
Rosenman recalls how his concert works were modernist and dissonant and that the director was not especially keen on having a complete score composed in this style. Therefore, the two struck a bargain whereby any music accompanying children characters would be scored in a simple, tonal fashion, whereas adults—more complex characters—would have dissonant music.
Another unusual agreement the two came to was related to the visibility of film music. It is often suggested that good film music is that which is not particularly noticed by an audience. However, Rosenman and Kazan agreed that the score to East of Eden should be more intrusive. In other words, the music should be a key component in the plot and not there to simply underscore the narrative. Rosenman stated that “the necessity for music in film is the dramatic necessity for the intrusion of an ‘unreal’ or illusionary element for the purpose of creating a new and imaginative reality.” Thus, in East of Eden, the composer wanted the music to illuminate the characters and situations and to “generate the dramatic excitement which the marriage of the arts should bring about.” He spoke of the score as being operatic, with the “arias” being spoken as dialogue by the on-screen characters rather than sung on a stage.
Rosenman took the dialogue of the film into account, showing clear consideration of the filmmaking process. He acknowledged that Julie Harris was a soprano, James Dean a tenor, and Raymond Massey (who played Cal and Aron’s father) a bass-baritone, and for this reason he designed the instrumentation and the melodic material around the vocal ranges of the main actors and actresses. Rosenman highlighted “holes” that were left in the scoring so that the dialogue could shine through unencumbered. This highly conscious approach to film scoring is undoubtedly why the score is considered one of Rosenman’s most successful and why it works with the film in such a cooperative manner.
Recognition
Unusually for a film in this book, Rosenman’s score did not receive any major or minor nominations for awards. However, there is no doubt his music helped the film’s overall success.
Four Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Two Golden Globes.
Three nominations for BAFTAs.
Recording
John Adams, London Sinfonietta, The Film Music of Leonard Rosenman: East of Eden, Rebel without a Cause, Nonesuch, 1997. This is a compilation of Rosenman’s film music. It includes nine tracks from East of Eden and a further six from Rebel without a Cause. ***
Bibliography
Limbacher, James L. Film Music: From Violins to Video (Essays & Index of Films). Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974.
—ML
The Film
In his early films Beetlejuice (1988) and Batman (1989), director Tim Burton demonstrated a flair for comedy laced with absurd and often darkly dramatic moments. With the help of his longtime musical collaborator, Danny Elfman, this unique blend of stylistic ingredients brought to fruition his next film, Edward Scissorhands, in 1990.
This film is a modern Frankenstein story in which an old inventor (Vincent Price) has made a creature who looks human but lacks hands. Edward (Johnny Depp) later recalls that he was prevented from receiving lifelike hands due to the inventor’s sudden death.
Edward lives alone in the inventor’s old mansion atop a mountain that overlooks a suburban housing development. Peg Boggs (Dianne Wiest), who lives in the suburb with her family, canvasses the neighborhood as an Avon lady, but has little luck selling her products to her neighbors. One day she impulsively drives up to the mansion to find new customers. When Peg meets Edward his appearance initially frightens her, but she soon sympathizes with his plight of being alone and having an unfortunate skin condition. She invites Edward to her home where she hopes her products will help him. Thus begins Edward’s experiences in suburban living.
Joyce (Kathy Baker) watches Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp) make magic with his hairdressing skills. 20th Century Fox Film Corporation / Photofest © 20th Century Fox Film Corporation
The Music
The film’s score benefits from Danny Elfman’s flair for the unusual in terms of orchestration. The first music heard in the film features wordless voices and low strings that accompany the Twentieth Century Fox logo, which is already covered in snow as snowflakes continue falling. Immediately after this image, the film’s credits begin with the repeated sounds of a celesta and harp in a waltz-like rhythm. These delicate and tinkling tones provide a harmonic background for the film’s first and most prominent theme, a waltz idea first performed by wordless voices and strings. After a few seconds the English horn sounds a melancholy version of this theme, which is based on a seven-note motif of longer and shorter tones in an alternating pattern. The wordless singing by the Paulist Choristers of California adds a uniquely eerie flavor to this music, which injects a fantasy atmosphere that prevails throughout much of the film.
Following the credits, the music continues in the opening scene where an elderly lady (Wynona Rider in old-age makeup) begins to relate the story of Edward to her granddaughter as a bedtime story. During this scene, the music continues with wordless voices and a melody that uses a three-note motif that resembles the last three tones of the opening waltz theme. Unlike the music for the credits the music in this scene is in a major key and provides a more uplifting atmosphere. At the end of this scene, we get the first glimpse of Edward as he looks out of the old mansion at the suburban neighborhood located at the base of the mountain. Elfman’s opening cue ends with gentle major-key harmonies after more than five minutes of continuous music.
Another minor-key waltz idea, this time with a lyrical flute melody, is featured as Peg drives up the steep road that leads to the mansion. A menacing flavor by way of loud, low-pitched brass chords is added to the music to suggest the possible danger that lurks inside the house. When Peg enters the garden on the way to the house, wordless voices, harp, and celesta are added to convey the wondrous shapes of the shrubbery. This view of Edward’s topiary gives the viewer a preview of his landscaping skills that will be put to later use once he starts living in the suburbs.
The music in the flashback scene, where Edward remembers the old inventor’s laboratory in the mansion, has rhythmically driven fast-paced music with the persistent use of repeated tones in an “oom-pah, oom-pah” pattern that emulates moments in Elfman’s earlier music for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
One of the most memorable musical moments in Scissorhands occurs when the neighborhood ladies line up with their dogs so that Edward can give the pets a grooming. Before long, one of the women suggests that Edward do a makeover of her hair. Thus the ladies receive the benefit of Edward’s ingenious talent. Throughout this scene, Elfman’s music is prominent, with two alternate musical ideas used in one continuous cue. The first is a slow-tempo piece in the Spanish style of the habanera that features strongly accented beats, with strings prominently featured in the melody. The other is a very rapid-paced theme with a solo violin playing a boisterous gypsy-style melody. At the end of the scene, when Peg is escorted to the lawn chair for her turn to get a new hair style, the music segues into a second slow rendition by strings of the habanera idea.
A lot of the music of Scissorhands is confined to short cues of thirty seconds or less. One of the more noteworthy of these occurs in a morning scene where several residents in the neighborhood leave their homes and drive off in their cars. Fast-paced music begins with “tick-tock” clock sounds played by piano and tonal percussion. Violins provide a short tuneful melodic idea with loud ominous brass chords added in. Wordless voices and bongo drums are also featured.
There are several moments of source music in the film, especially bits of recordings by vocalist Tom Jones. “Delilah,” “It’s Not Unusual,” and “With These Hands” are all associated with scenes involving the sexy neighbor Joyce (Kathy Baker).
Noted film-music commentator Jon Burlingame calls the music for Scissorhands an “underappreciated” score. That is putting it mildly. After a career that has lasted more than three decades, this music remains one of Elfman’s most imaginatively conceived film scores and one eminently worthy of inclusion on a list of best scores.
Recognition
One Academy Award nomination for Best Makeup.
The film was well received by critics, but unlike the 1989 Batman, it was not a huge box-office hit.
Recordings
Danny Elfman, Edward Scissorhands, MCA, 1990, CD. Approximately forty-six minutes of score included on this album, along with Tom Jones’s recording of “With These Hands.” Good sound. ****
Bibliography
Burlingame, Jon. Sound and Vision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks. New York: Billboard Books, 2000.
—LEM
The Film
In Empire of the Sun, Steven Spielberg directed a screen adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel based on the author’s experiences as a boy imprisoned in a Japanese detention camp in China. It was one of two films released in 1987, along with John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, featuring semi-autobiographical stories about children surviving the perils of World War II.
Empire begins in early December of 1941 with a rehearsal by a boys’ choir in a very European-style church. However, the setting is actually an upscale neighborhood of Shanghai, where many English families reside in lavish homes. One of the choirboys is eleven-year-old Jim Graham (Christian Bale), who is chauffeured to and from the church in the family’s Packard, driven by one of his parents’ Chinese servants.
When Shanghai comes under attack by Japanese bombers, crowds of people flood the streets in an attempt to find shelter. In the ensuing chaos, Jim is separated from his parents and captured by Japanese soldiers. He is loaded onto a truck with other British POWs and winds up in the Soochow Creek Internment Camp. This is a story of survival from a child’s point of view.
The Music
For Empire John Williams created an emotional accompaniment that reflects Jim’s feelings as his world changes so drastically from the contentment of his early childhood to the horrors of the Japanese camp. But instead of an original main-title theme the first music in the film is source music, beginning with a boys’ choir in an arrangement of the Welsh song “Suo Gan.” Opening shots of the city of Shanghai are followed by quick glimpses of the British sector and the church in which the choir is rehearsing. Jim is first seen as a soloist in the singing of “Suo Gan,” with the accompaniment of the choir and organ.
Following the rehearsal scene, when Jim is being chauffeured home, echoes of “Suo Gan” continue but gradually fade as the sounds of his mother playing a Chopin mazurka on the family’s piano begin to be heard; the Chopin music continues as Jim rides his bike on the grounds of his family’s lavish home.
Williams’s original music begins when Jim’s mother is sitting by his bed at night. At this point a celesta and high-pitched strings produce ethereal sounds that are followed by a flute introducing Jim’s theme, a smoothly flowing melody based on a series of seven tones.
This theme returns in a sequence that connects Jim’s arrival at the camp with the second part of the film, which takes place in 1945. The music begins when Jim arrives with a truckload of fellow prisoners at the Soochow camp. When he climbs a hill and moves among throngs of prisoners, a solo piano sounds Jim’s theme with strings in the background. This music continues into the next shot, which shows a Japanese bomber being repaired. As Jim, lured by his fascination with airplanes, sees sparks flying and then puts his hands onto the plane’s fuselage, French horns and choral voices, accompanied by strings, are heard in a continuation of Jim’s theme. When three Japanese pilots approach him and return his salute, this seven-note idea gradually crescendos into a grandly orchestrated statement.
A very young Christian Bale. Warner Bros. / Photofest © Warner Bros.
At this moment, the scene shifts to 1945, with Jim’s theme continuing without a break as the thinner and taller Jim, now wearing a bomber jacket instead of his school uniform, watches a toy airplane in flight. After retrieving the plane and sending it over a fence to the Japanese boy who had launched it from the neighboring airstrip, the music suddenly shifts to a new theme for trumpets in a faster tempo that includes a soaring string melody as a high-pitched counterpoint to the trumpet idea. This buoyant music continues as Jim runs about the camp making trades involving food items and articles of clothing. Although this theme seems a bit lighthearted for a scene set in a Japanese internment camp, it signifies the unbridled spirit of Jim, who has learned the art of the deal from an unlikely mentor, an American army deserter named Basie (John Malkovich), who is also a camp detainee. This cue continues until Jim completes his errands and delivers his homework to his tutor, Dr. Rawlins, at a makeshift hospital.
Vocal sounds are a key element in Williams’s score. In a scene where allied planes are bombing the nearby airstrip and Jim sees the P-51 Mustangs from the rooftop of a building, wordless women’s and boys’ voices add an emotional element to Jim’s sense of excitement.
Another vocal highlight occurs during the war’s final days, when the Japanese have evacuated the camp and Jim wanders about in a way that mirrors his meanderings early in the film. As Jim drags along a parachute filled with food rations that have been dropped from an Allied plane, a choral theme called “Exsultate Justi” is inserted in the underscore; the vocal repetitions of the word “Alleluia” confirm that the war is over.
In the film’s final scene, when Jim is reunited with his parents, “Suo Gan” provides a last moment of underscoring that suggests his awakening from a long traumatic nightmare.
Recognition
Although Empire of the Sun was not a box-office hit, it had six Academy Award nominations.
Nominated for both Oscar and Golden Globe awards for Original Score.
Williams won a 1987 BAFTA for Music Score.
Recordings
John Williams, Empire of the Sun, Warner Bros., 1987. Contains over fifty minutes of music. Good sound. ****
John Williams, Empire of the Sun (Expanded edition), La La Land, 2014. Includes over one hundred minutes of music. Limited release of four thousand copies. Excellent sound. ****
Bibliography
MacDonald, Laurence E. The Invisible Art of Film. Second edition. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.
Matessino, Mike. Liner notes. Empire of the Sun: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. La La Land Records LLLCD1300, 2014, CD.
—LEM
The Film
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a critically acclaimed science-fiction film and is considered one of the classic Steven Spielberg tearjerkers. The film tells the story of a young boy, Elliot (Henry Thomas), who finds a short-legged alien in his back yard. Trying to find a way home, E.T. is sheltered by Elliot and his siblings, as government officials close in and attempt to take him away to be examined. The famous flying bicycle scene and emotionally charged finale helped to cement the film’s place in the history books as an all-time classic. This is backed up by its box-office takings, where it surpassed Star Wars (1977) as the highest-grossing film of all time; a record that would not be beaten until the release of another Spielberg film, Jurassic Park, in the early 1990s. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won four. Three of these were related to sound and music and another was for visual effects. It missed out on Best Picture to Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough.
The Music
The score to E.T. was composed by John Williams, his sixth collaboration with Steven Spielberg. The main theme can be considered one of Williams’s most memorable, with soaring strings, majestic horns, and poignant woodwind interludes using the full capacity of the orchestral palette to create an arresting underscore to a heartbreaking narrative. There are very few film music programs at colleges or universities that do not reference the main theme from E.T. at some point in the syllabus. It truly exemplifies Williams’s neoclassical or neoromantic style to such a degree of perfection that if film music were allowed one entry in a time capsule, this score would be one of the very top contenders.
Elliott (Henry Thomas) flees with E.T. Universal Pictures / Photofest © Universal Pictures
At the start of the film, as E.T. and his fellow aliens survey plant life on earth, the music is soft and slightly mysterious, with slow-moving strings playing glissandi and pitch bends. There is no real melody of note here. E.T. is left behind, and the music turns to sadness temporarily, before the loveable alien takes in his first view of the Los Angeles area from high atop a mountain. The finale to the film, set in a similar location in the woods, sees the spaceship return for E.T., and he says his famous farewell to Elliot. The chase scene that precedes this moment is arguably the finest music ever written for such a scene, with the emotion building in the score until the almost inconceivably heartbreaking moment where E.T. departs. It would be difficult to find another scene in any film where music and image work so intensely together to leave moviegoers without a dry eye. It truly is a moment where Spielberg and Williams combine their talents to create a masterpiece of emotive cinema. Despite all of this poignant grandeur, the more nuanced use of orchestration highlights Williams as a master of his trade. The use of the solo flute to depict E.T. gives the alien character a warmth and likeability that was imperative to the success of the film, and perhaps as effectively as the grandeur of the full orchestra, it offers an emotional connection to the character and his plight.
Williams cleverly self-references his music from Star Wars during a Halloween scene. As the children are out trick-or-treating, E.T., wearing a ghost costume, spots a child wearing a Yoda costume heading toward him. Yoda’s theme from the Star Wars soundtrack is heard momentarily. To all but the trained ear, it might not register, but it is a clever (and admittedly cheeky) use of music by Williams. Indeed, the music preceding the appearance of Yoda, using playful woodwind melodic fragments, sounds very much like it belongs in the musical world of Star Wars. This link to another Williams and Spielberg film is reinforced when E.T., seeing Yoda, says excitedly, “Home! Home!” It seems to suggest that the music is not the only link between the two filmic worlds.
There are darker moments in the score. The government agents who attempt to capture E.T. are underscored with sinister organ sounds. It is a rare, but necessary moment of tension in a film that is overwhelmingly full of hope and adventure. Aggressive, jumpy percussion hits add to the scariness of these moments in the film, with the peril in the narrative matched by some of Williams’s most agitated accompaniments.
The peril soon gives way to relief, which then gives way to the chase scene and escape. The final ten minutes of the film, as E.T. says his farewells, incorporating the now famous “ouch” dialogue, is without doubt some of the most emotionally involving cinema ever created. It is everything that family-friendly Hollywood can and should be. The visuals are striking, the narrative is heartbreaking, and the music is transcendental.
Recognition
Along with two other Williams scores, Star Wars and Jaws, E.T’s soundtrack won all four major awards (Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Grammy). At the time of writing, only six scores have achieved this, with three of them composed by Williams.
1982 Academy Award for Best Original Score.
1982 Golden Globe for Best Original Score.
1982 BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.
1983 Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack.
1983 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition (“Flying Theme”).
1983 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement (“Flying Theme”).
1982 Saturn Award for Best Music.
Voted fourteenth-best American film score of all time by American Film Institute in 2005.
Recordings
John Williams, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Universal Island Records, 1992. This official soundtrack release was remastered for the twentieth anniversary of the film’s release and is highly recommended. ****
John Williams, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (35th Anniversary Limited Edition), La-La Land, 2017, two-CD set. Limited to five thousand copies, this edition includes previously unheard cues, as well as the music for the Universal Studios E.T. theme park ride. Well recommended for fans of the film. ****