After The Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era 1926

FROM 1931 TO 1933 HOLLYWOOD INCREASED ITS USE OF NONDIEGETIC music and began utilizing it for a more consistent and specific purpose: to convey the aura of exotic, unfamiliar worlds and to represent dreams, desires, and other altered states of mind. Crisis historiography suggests that a new technology first features multiple identities and radically divergent practices before moving toward stable solutions. The period from 1931 to 1933 saw the strongest push toward this kind of stability in the sound era to date. Musical practices did not entirely solidify during the period, as strategies still varied somewhat from film to film and from studio to studio. But for the first time since the transition to sound had provoked a representational crisis, many films began to deploy nondiegetic music for similar reasons.

In this chapter I focus on the use of the score in nonmusical films released from late August of 1931 until just before the release of RKO’s King Kong in March of 1933. My findings are based primarily on a viewing of fifty films featuring a music credit released during this time span. I begin with a consideration of general issues pertaining to the score. This includes the major reasons for the period’s increase in music, the continued use of song plugging and preexisting compositions, differences across studios, uses of jazz music, and music’s role in the emergence of lengthy montage sequences. I then closely examine several films featuring extensive uses of nondiegetic music. These scores fall into two nonmutually exclusive categories. The first category includes scores employed to reflect an unusual external environment, including Tabu (March 1931), Symphony of Six Million (April 1932), Bird of Paradise (August 1932), The Most Dangerous Game (September 1932), and Chandu the Magician (September 1932). The second category contains scores that reflect internal dreams, fantasies, or altered emotional states: Blonde Venus (September 1932), Trouble in Paradise (October 1932), and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (January 1933). To date, it has not been pointed out that these two tendencies existed in early 1930s film music. The little existing scholarship on this period has attended almost exclusively to the scores of Max Steiner (Symphony of Six Million, Bird of Paradise, The Most Dangerous Game), often suggesting that these films constituted the industry’s first tentative stabs at a full-scale movie score before King Kong and the “birth” of the Golden Age of film music.1 This chapter demonstrates that Steiner’s earlier scores fit within a broader tendency to associate nondiegetic music with locations and conditions divorced from familiar, material reality. This trend was established well before King Kong, and—as the final chapter demonstrates—would have a major impact on that film’s score.

As some scholars have noted, 1932 witnessed an increase in film music. Owing in large part to their heavy reliance on Steiner’s writings, however, scholars regularly attribute this increase to the development of rerecording.² This constitutes at best a partial explanation. As I have demonstrated in earlier chapters, rerecording had been extensively used at Warner Bros. as early as 1928, and other studios also appear to have at least sporadically used this technique. Moreover, period trade articles indicate that music increased primarily as a result of the industry’s resolution to reduce the amount of dialogue featured in a sound film. Rerecording improvements did occur in the early 1930s,³ but changing assumptions regarding the appropriate proportions between dialogue and music likely played a more central role in the increased use of nondiegetic music.

A small impetus behind Hollywood’s decision to reduce dialogue in the early 1930s was the ongoing issue of foreign markets. In the early sound era, extensive dialogue had caused problems for the exportation of Hollywood films to non-English-speaking countries. In 1929 and 1930 Hollywood often addressed its foreign markets by shooting films in several languages, thus making multiple versions of a film simultaneously. This technique proved too costly, and the industry turned in the early 1930s to dubbing.4 According to a Film Daily survey in July of 1931, however, dubbing had been deemed “unsatisfactory” in foreign markets.⁵ With multiple language versions and dubbing both problematic, the industry increasingly viewed the reduction of dialogue as a way to raise a film’s marketability overseas.

The primary drive behind the effort to reduce dialogue, however, was the belief that extensive dialogue aesthetically crippled a film for domestic audiences. In February of 1931 director Paul Sloane told Film Daily that “overwriting”—meaning the use of excessive dialogue—was “one of the major problems of producers today.” For Sloane, overwriting occurred not because less talking was needed for foreign markets but for a technological reason: sound recording offered filmmakers far less flexibility in the editing room. Where silent films could generally be edited at will, editing sound films in mid-conversation often resulted in jolting and unacceptable breaks in the soundtrack. Consequently, filmmakers regularly opted to keep long, unedited dialogue sequences in the finished film.⁶

Other industry figures, dismayed with films’ excessive dialogue, urged filmmakers to combine recorded sound with the innovative and exciting filmmaking of the late silent era. Arthur Loew, an executive at MGM, urged the industry to “get back to the pantomime which made the motion picture industry. Let’s supplement the pantomime with the gifts of speech with which the electrical gods have endowed us. But don’t let’s talk ourselves to death.”⁷ Audiences, too, expressed dissatisfaction with extensive dialogue. In a July 1931 Film Daily survey featuring responses from more than one hundred “exhibitor leaders and independent theater owners,” the journal reported that “exhibitors are unanimous in declaring that pictures contain too much and too sophisticated talk.”⁸ This perceived connection between sophistication and dialogue likely stemmed from a widespread belief that dialogue-driven entertainment constituted a more cerebral experience, as well as a tendency to associate extensive dialogue with the legitimate theater.⁹ Movie audiences may also have been responding adversely to a film actor like Eddie Cantor, whose dialogue-heavy ethnic humor appealed more to New York City audiences than to patrons in the hinterlands.10

If dialogue needed to be decreased, the industry reasoned, something else would be needed to fill in for its absence. In many cases this “something else” included more music. A survey given to ten industry figures in February 1931 indicated that “the motion picture of the near future will be a cross between present talkers and silents, with music used to heighten emotional scenes.” The survey responses also expressed the belief that “music is bound to grow in importance in pictures.”¹¹ In the same year, Film Daily reported that Jack Cohn, cofounder of Columbia, planned “a policy of silent technique plus an appropriate amount of dialogue, music and sound effects.”¹² The clearest connection between dialogue reduction and musical increase, however, can be found in a Variety article from March of 1931 titled “Action Films Help Music Revival.” According to the unnamed author, action was increasingly taking the place of extensive dialogue. “During long intervals when there is no sound from players incidental music is being inserted to fill the gaps.” The author goes on to explain, “Too lengthy breaks without sound are believed to be a strong contrast to the talk. With music the lack of talk is not noticed.”¹³

Taken together, these articles reveal key aesthetic and cultural stakes behind the period’s escalation of film music. Aesthetically, the articles reveal a representational crisis in the early 1930s, when conflicting sound models—one model featuring copious dialogue and another favoring silent film techniques—vied for prominence. Moreover, the proposed sound solution—a substitution of music for some dialogue—indicates that by the early 1930s, filmmakers had become far more conscious of avoiding stark contrasts in total sound. Rather than allowing sound components like dialogue and music to operate independently, the decrease in one sound type (dialogue) now required a compensatory increase in another type (music). This observation squares with Rick Altman’s claim that, in the early 1930s, attention to total sound became important.¹⁴ Culturally, the articles reveal the process whereby Hollywood swapped one marker of sophistication for another. If Hollywood reduced dialogue partly because dialogue was “too sophisticated,” the industry’s increased use of largely orchestral music helped the movies maintain an aura of prestige. Hollywood could eliminate a foregrounded sonic marker of prestige (extensive dialogue) that many audiences found alienating in favor of a different indicator of sophistication (orchestral music) that appealed more to the emotions than the intellect. The cultural marker of prestige shifted from an element utterly central to the narrative to a more accessible element that depended on generalized emotional associations for its efficacy.

Paramount’s A Farewell to Arms (December 1932) offers an especially good example of the period’s frequent and effective balancing of older and newer methods. Adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel and Laurence Stallings’s 1930 play, A Farewell to Arms tells the story of Frederic (Gary Cooper). Frederic is an American ambulance driver who falls in love with a British nurse named Catherine (Helen Hayes) in Italy during World War I. Catherine becomes pregnant with Frederic’s child. While on the battlefield and away from Catherine, Frederic receives no letters from her because of the overzealous censorship of his friend Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou). Sensing that something is wrong, Frederic goes AWOL and undertakes a dangerous journey back to Milan to find Catherine. Heartsick and worried about Frederic, Catherine collapses when she receives all of her returned letters. Frederic finds Catherine, who has given birth to a stillborn child, just before she dies. War, the film indicates, created circumstances that necessarily obliterate the prospect of enduring love.15

Two particular aspects of the score point toward new tendencies in the 1931–33 period. First, though A Farewell to Arms’ music is intermittent, it occupies more than 35 percent of the film, a percentage that exceeded most nonmusical films from 1929 to 1931.¹⁶ Second, the score not only centers on an originally composed love theme by Ralph Rainger (fig. 5.1), but it substantially remolds this tune to suit the narrative. In the late silent and early sound eras, themes seldom featured modifications beyond slight adjustments in tempo, key, and instrumentation.¹⁷ Here, however, the adjustments include modifying the rhythm as well. For instance, when Catherine asks a street artist to produce a cut out of her profile, the score provides a love theme with a different time signature,¹⁸ tempo, and rhythm (fig. 5.2). The love theme also features grace notes (quick notes that are not essential to the melody) and other embellishments, giving it a frolicking yet edgy feel that matches Catherine’s excited emotional state. Provided with more time than silent film orchestras, Paramount’s music staff could produce new music and craft more intricate and extensive variations on its themes.

Even as A Farewell to Arms structures much of its score around an original motif, however, the film also draws heavily on the late silent and early sound era’s tendency to use preexisting music. Doing so has considerable advantages for the film: it helps establish the setting, conveys strong emotional overtones, and amplifies character significance. During the opening credits, for instance, the filmmakers sandwich the lovers’ theme between two passages from Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien (1880), thereby signaling the film’s Italian location via a well-known composition.19 Much later in the film, the filmmakers indicate war’s threat to love. They use ominous selections from Richard Wagner and Tchaikovsky during a montage in which Frederic deserts the army and risks death in order to return to Milan and find Catherine. This six-minute cue alternates between snippets from Wagner’s opera Siegfried (1876) and the storm passage from Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini (1876). The selections from Siegfried feature harsh, low-pitched brass and a steady drumbeat, which helps to underscore Frederic’s dangerous and hellish journey. Francesca da Rimini echoes A Farewell to Arms’ narrative by describing lovers trapped in a violent storm in hell. The composition’s repeated downward runs invoke both the subterranean location and the fierce storm. The dramatic power of Wagner and Tchaikovsky, when applied to A Farewell to Arms, conveys the overwhelming impact of war—a force so frightening and totalizing that it will ultimately squash the lovers’ dreams of a permanent union.

Yet another prominent preexisting composition is used during the film’s final moments. Wagner’s “Liebestod” from the opera Tristan und Isolde (1865) accompanies Catherine’s death. This intensely emotional music adds dramatic thrust to the film’s tragic ending. For knowledgeable audience members, the use of this preexisting piece would have invoked additional resonances. Not only do both narratives feature starcrossed lovers, but the score further connects the two sets of lovers by playing the “Liebestod” when Catherine dies in A Farewell to Arms. In Tristan und Isolde the lyrics from this aria suggest the possibility of a dead lover rising after death. In A Farewell to Arms this notion of rising after death is furthered by the image, which shows Frederic lifting Catherine toward a brightly lit window. By paralleling Frederic and Catherine with these legendary characters, the music implicitly elevates the lovers into archetypes. For musically knowledgeable audience members, Frederic and Catherine function as representatives of the profound and damaging impact of war, not simply as two lovers who happen to lose each other.

B films, however, rarely contained nondiegetic music outside of the opening and closing credits.20 The B film’s limited time and financial resources constituted the main reason for its lack of nondiegetic music. Tight production and postproduction schedules often made it difficult to create a coherent film, and the addition of a score would have been an unnecessary and often impossible luxury. B films were also frequently rented to exhibitors for a flat fee rather than a percentage of revenue, meaning that a certain amount of money was guaranteed regardless of film quality.²¹ Working within such a system, B filmmakers had little incentive to focus on an element that did not make a clear and direct contribution to narrative or action scenes.

One rare B film that bucks the musical norm is Halperin Productions’ White Zombie (August 1932). The nondiegetic score—compiled by Abe Meyer—helps convey the film’s exotic location (the West Indies) and supernatural elements (zombies and hypnotism). When villain Legendre (Bela Lugosi) transforms leading lady Madeline (Madge Bellamy) into a zombie, for instance, Meyer includes passages from Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Gaston Borch’s Incidental Symphonies, and Hugo Riesenfeld’s Death of the Great Chief. In the climactic finish two compositions by Hen Herkan play as Legendre and his zombies fall off a high cliff to their deaths.22 Though the use of any music at all was ambitious for a B film, Meyer clearly inserted the music in a manner that would not have been time intensive. Rather than taking the extra time to match music with specific actions or dialogue, Meyer instead provides only general mood music to fit each narrative situation, which allows him to create the score simply and quickly. With few exceptions B filmmakers in the early 1930s avoided the time and expense of a score.

Though the major studios placed varying emphases on nondiegetic music, they remained unified in their desire to continue to plug songs for marketing purposes. Even with the decline of the film musical in 1931 and 1932, Hollywood found opportunities to promote music. In certain cases a film could become remarkably overt about its song-plugging aims. In Fox’s After Tomorrow (March 1932), Pete (Charles Farrell) gives the sheet music of the film’s theme song “All the World Will Smile Again After Tomorrow,” by James Hanley, to his fiancée, Sidney (Marian Nixon), as a present. Later, Pete suggests that they try out the song on the piano, and the film provides a close-up of the sheet music cover, which features the song’s title and composer. The song then becomes the lovers’ tune: they both independently hum the tune the following morning. The film continues to covertly plug the song by featuring several additional scenes in which the sheet music is visible on the piano in the background. After Tomorrow thus offers not only a story about a couple in love but a model of how sheet music should be consumed, from purchasing it as a gift to leaving it on the piano for everyone to enjoy.²³

As with early synchronized scores, these reiterations of the theme song simultaneously serve narrative and song-plugging purposes. Narratively, Joan’s love for Jim is somewhat difficult to fathom given Jim’s generally unpleasant disposition. However, the film’s reiteration of the theme song indicates why she works so hard at winning Jim. “Take Me Away” is a torch song about wanting to fall in love and be taken far from an immoral urban environment. The lyrics seem to match Joan’s inner desires and ultimately suggest that her marriage is the escapist solution she has dreamed about.24 At the same time that the song illuminates Joan’s psychology, however, it also functions as a self-sufficient entity. Every time the song plays on the soundtrack, it retains its jazz orchestration and is heard in its entirety, never concluding until the end of the chorus. The song is thus preserved as a stand-alone commercial product, just as it would be in phonograph or sheet music form. Not surprisingly, the trailer promotes the song in a similar manner: after Joan sings a few bars, the rest of the trailer essentially consists of a set of images and texts synchronized to an instrumental version of the complete song. Musicals may have declined in 1931 and 1932, but Hollywood never abandoned its song-plugging aims.

Curiously, in these and other films of the early 1930s, jazz music is nearly always grounded in the diegesis. Rain, for instance, features classical and jazz idioms early on. Music in a classical idiom accompanies a montage of falling rain, while “St. Louis Blues” coincides with the first appearance of Sadie. Yet while Rain never indicates that the classical piece is anything other than nondiegetic accompaniment, the film strongly implies that all of the film’s jazz music emanates from the diegesis. Not only does Sadie explicitly play “St. Louis Blues” on her phonograph later in the film, but numerous shots place the device rather conspicuously in the foreground, as if to further remind the audience of the tune’s diegetic identity. Jazz music in Ladies They Talk About emanates explicitly from the radio in the jail’s common room and the phonograph in Nan’s jail cell. Thus, while filmmakers capitalized on the transcendental connotations of orchestral music by allowing it to regularly exceed diegetic boundaries, jazz music generally remained tied to a diegetic environment associated with deviance and criminality.

Linking jazz to a particular sound source could impact a film’s message in specific ways. In both Rain and Ladies They Talk About diegetic jazz music articulates an ambivalent attitude toward female agency. Are these deviant women agents of their transgressive behaviors or merely victims of modernity? Stanfield points out that having Sadie actively generate the jazz soundtrack via a phonograph record implies a degree of agency in her actions,26 yet the phonograph’s presence within the diegesis also suggests that modernity may have corrupted her. A similar situation occurs when Nan plays “St. Louis Blues” on her phonograph to mask the sounds of an attempted jailbreak. This action indicates her choice to engage in criminal behavior, yet the modern phonograph and accompanying jazz music also imply that the urban world may have molded her into a criminal. This complex mix of agency and victimization helps explain why Sadie experiences a religious conversion and Nan ultimately falls in love with a radio evangelist. On these films’ terms both characters—despite criminal behavior—are also good-hearted victims of urban life.

If playing diegetic phonograph records of jazz music can suggest that the female has a degree of choice in her criminal behavior, a rare instance of a nondiegetic jazz-inflected score instead holds modernity entirely culpable for criminality. From the beginning of United Artists’ Street Scene (August 1931), Alfred Newman’s score—which combines symphonic and jazz elements—is tied explicitly to modern life in New York City. The film begins with a shot of the cityscape and then provides a montage of New York City waking up and engaging in morning routines. This opening was likely influenced by Rouben Mamoulian’s stage production of Porgy (1927), which similarly opens with a series of city activities and sounds. Elmer Rice’s stage play of Street Scene (1929), which calls for city noise throughout the play, may have also been an influence.²⁷ Newman’s jazz-inflected music accompanies the opening montage, thus linking jazz to the general routines of city dwellers rather than the actions of specific characters. The opening montage includes cats, dogs, horses, and humans, indicating a montage of types instead of individuals. Further linking jazz to the rhythms of the city, the music often adjusts to individual shots: the image of workers chipping ice contains pizzicatos, while slow-paced music accompanies a horse who is too hot to walk. Newman’s opening music thus belongs exclusively to the city: it symbolizes the city’s routines, lifestyle, and general milieu. If this link to modern life were not already clear, the opening music also bears more than a passing resemblance to George Gershwin’s famous jazz-inflected Rhapsody in Blue (1924), a piece already strongly associated with the modern world by 1931.28

Once the film begins focusing on individual characters in the city, Newman’s music disappears. Like the prizewinning play on which the film was based, Street Scene focuses on a single working-class New York City block. Life is crowded, lacking in privacy or peace. Tenants are subjected to constant city noise, frequent gossip, and harshly judgmental neighbors. Underlying such gossip and judgmental behavior is the sense that city life provokes a feeling of helplessness over one’s life. It erodes one’s dignity. Characters’ failings and struggles are on display for all to see: a woman and her children are evicted, a Jewish man is repeatedly bullied in public, and a married woman named Anne Maurrant (Estelle Taylor) is seeing a milk collector behind her husband’s back.

The pivotal scene occurs late in the film when Anne’s husband, Frank (David Landau), enraged at catching his wife cheating on him with the milk collector, murders them both. During this event, the jazz-infused score unexpectedly returns. Frank walks down the street toward his apartment building, looks toward his bedroom window, and realizes that his wife is with another man. A drum roll matches Frank’s upward glance, followed by heavy brass staccato notes that accompany his movement toward the apartment.

At first blush it appears that the score has changed functions. Here it is aligned with narrative events and character psychology rather than city life as a whole. Yet the jazz-infused score’s original association with general city life alters the scene’s impact. By returning to strains of jazz music, the score implies that the conditions of city life are driving Frank to murder. Such an interpretation is further indicated later in the film, when Frank’s daughter, Rose (Sylvia Sidney), asks a remorseful Frank why he committed murder. Frank responds, “I’d been drinkin’, Rose, you see what I mean. And all this talk was going around. I just went clean off me nut, that’s all.” The city’s close quarters, lack of privacy, and extensive gossip catalyze Frank’s act. Thanks in part to the jazz-inflected score, Street Scene offers a profoundly humanist film in which murders are committed not by bad people but by ordinary people overwhelmed by the crowds, gossip, and urban poverty. This decidedly pessimistic and disempowering message may help explain why filmmakers seldom used jazz as the predominant musical idiom of the nondiegetic score during the early 1930s.

The history of the montage sequence deserves far more attention than it has received. Scholars regularly state that the montage sequence conventionally denotes a passage of time.³⁰ This claim is accurate for the mid-1930s onward, but in the early sound era the montage sequence had not yet firmly adopted this convention. Instead, montage sequences evoked an emotion, sensation, or ambience even if the sequence did not denote a significant passage of time. This fact is easy to overlook and has led to erroneous claims about the period’s style. For instance, when analyzing Hollywood montages, film scholar David Bordwell writes: “Say It with Songs (1929) includes a montage of the hero in prison, with his face singing in the center and superimpositions of canted angles of prison routines; a later sequence shows a ticking clock with calendar pages superimposed. In the montage sequence, the sound cinema had found its equivalent for the expository title, ‘Time passes and brings many changes.’”³¹

Though Bordwell’s analysis of these two montage sequences may initially seem sensible, the situation is not as clear-cut as he implies. During the first sequence—in which Al (Al Jolson) sings “Why Can’t You?—the superimpositions described by Bordwell in fact do not coincide with a significant passage of time. In the scene prior to Al’s song, Al indicates to his cellmate that he will split with his wife when she visits the following week. Then, in the scene following this song, Al visits with his wife and ends the relationship. Clearly, little time has passed and few things have changed during this montage sequence.32 The “Why Can’t You?” montage instead primarily serves to illustrate the content of Jolson’s song. Through images of prison routines, the film presents the audience with an impression of the atmosphere that the song exhorts the prisoners to overcome.

Music often accompanied montage sequences in the early 1930s. Its principal contribution was to help the sequence evoke a particular atmosphere, mood, or mental state. For instance, MGM’s Possessed (November 1931) features two montage sequences: one presenting Coney Island and the other depicting Mark Whitney’s (Clark Gable) campaign for governor. Technically, both sequences mark a passage of time: characters enjoy an evening at Coney Island; time passes as Mark campaigns for governor. Yet the superimpositions and music selections plainly labor to invoke the milieu of an amusement park and campaign run. As the montage provides numerous images of Coney Island activities, the score presents tunes denoting a carnivalesque atmosphere (“The Streets of Cairo”) and specific location (“The Sidewalks of New York”). The montage showing Whitney’s political speeches, moreover, is accompanied by two rousing American band numbers: John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and Theodore Metz and Joe Hayden’s “A Hot Time in the Old Town.” Such montages primarily provide a sense of a particular activity and surrounding milieu. Music plays a key role in this task.

The use of montages and music to create impressionistic sensations provides a useful context for a discussion of the rise of the elaborate montages provided by Slavko Vorkapich in the early 1930s. Though Vorkapich’s montages typically denote the passage of time, their seemingly excessive elements constitute a flashier way for the montage sequence to continue its portrayal of atmosphere, sensation, and emotion. Consider, for instance, two early Vorkapich montage sequences in RKO’s What Price Hollywood? (June 1932). Both sequences denote the passage of time: the rise and fall of movie star Mary Evans (Constance Bennett). Yet both sequences’ visual motifs also convey the literal sensations of rising and falling. The first montage includes shots of Evans raising her head and semicircles of light radiating outward, while the second montage features images of falling newspapers, close-ups of Evans lowering her head, and semicircles of lights moving inward.

If Vorkapich’s images convey the sensations of rising and falling, music plays a crucial role in this evocation. In the first sequence, rising motives and cymbal crashes denote glorious success, while Evans’s decline in the second sequence is accompanied by dramatic downward minorkey motives (a “motive” is the smallest unit of a complete musical idea, often a mere phrase or particular rhythm). Time does pass in this sequence, but the music seems primarily involved with evoking and reflecting the sequence’s visual motifs and abstract qualities. At many other points in What Price Hollywood? newspaper headlines convey a story event and concomitant passage of time, yet these sequences feature no music. Music, often seen as an essential presence during “time passage” montages, was instead principally concerned with conveying the montage’s emotive and atmospheric qualities during the early sound era.

Though it is often assumed that montage music gives “a sense of cohesion to the series of rapid shot changes,”33 a different situation obtained in the early sound era. Music instead often attended to cues within the montage images, even if this meant separating and emphasizing each image. For instance, prior to a newspaper montage sequence in Warner Bros.’ 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (December 1932), a prison warden (Arthur Byron) allows an inmate named Connors (Spencer Tracy) to leave prison after Connors gives his word of honor that he will return. Connors becomes involved with murder while defending his girlfriend and then delays returning to jail, thus causing the warden to receive heavy criticism from both the governor and the press. When Connors finally returns, a newspaper montage conveys the ensuing events, and the accompanying music shifts rapidly to accentuate each headline. The first headline indicates that Connors’s return has saved the warden’s job, accompanied by a noble, string-oriented theme. When the image dissolves to a different headline reading “Connors Goes on Trial for Murder,” a dramatic four-note brass motif takes over the soundtrack and steadily rises in pitch, thus indicating the dramatics of the situation and also perhaps associating Connors with brass, conventionally a signifier of noble actions. When the third and final headline reveals that Connors has been convicted of murder, the cue arrives at its highest note and blasts this note several times.

The fact that the entire cue clearly comes from the same orchestra arguably provides a degree of unity to these headlines, but the music’s responsiveness to each headline serves to separate the headlines and dictate different audience responses: relief that the warden has been vindicated, anxiety over Connors’s trial, and alarm that Connors has been sentenced to death as a result of defending a good woman. Early montage music centered not on the binding together of disparate images but on the evocation of particular emotions, sensations, and milieus.

Because otherness holds an important place in the humanities, I should emphasize that my definition of “other worlds” does not entirely coincide with critical theory’s notion of otherness. In studies of subaltern groups and alterity, critical theorists like Edward Said have studied the ways in which the West has represented and defined “Other,” non-Western cultures. In his well-known study Orientalism, for instance, Said focuses on the West’s representation of Arabs and Islam to argue that the qualities often associated with non-Western cultures have more to do with the West than the “East” or “Middle East” and serve as a means to assert Western authority and superiority.34 This notion of the “Other” as a location that is geographically separate and culturally foreign to the West is partly what I mean by “other worlds,” and the stereotypical music found in these otherworldly films fuel the argument that representations of foreign locations derive heavily from Western perspectives. However, my definition of other worlds extends beyond location and cultural difference. By “other worlds,” I mean any situation that differs markedly from familiar, material reality. This deviation from familiar reality includes films set in unfamiliar locations, but it also encompasses films addressing particular ethnicities within the United States, films that are set in the distant past, or films that explore highly charged emotional states.

The association between music and other worlds had considerable roots before sound film. The notion that music contains a transcendental quality that causes it to supersede the particulars of everyday material life had enjoyed particular support during music’s romantic era, and the period contained many operas set in exotic locations.35 Musical theater in the first few decades of the twentieth century often presented narratives with fairy-tale settings, including such smash hits as Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow (1907), Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta (1910), and Rudolf Friml’s Rose-Marie (1924).³⁶ The silent era often used “exotic” cues with titles like “Indian Music,” “Oriental Veil Dance,” and “Chinese Music,”³⁷ prefiguring the close ties between music and other worlds that would exist in sound film in the early 1930s.

As we saw in chapter 3, several early sound films featuring music had been set in unfamiliar locations like the Old West (The Big Trail [October 1930], Fighting Caravans [January 1931]) or heaven (Liliom [October 1930]). And as I demonstrated in chapter 4, film musicals in the early sound era increasingly used music for films set in fairy-tale worlds or featuring outlandishly unrealistic narrative events.

Many film music practitioners of the early 1930s, including the three composers responsible for the period’s most prominent scores—Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, and W. Franke Harling—were all well versed in romantic music and musical theater and thus would have been well aware of the association between music and other worlds. Steiner grew up in Vienna, a haven for several music styles, including romantic music. He attended Vienna’s Conservatory of Music and Performing Art and also studied with Gustav Mahler, a man who, as a composer, repeatedly sought to convey transcendental experiences.38 Steiner composed and conducted numerous musical theater productions in London before he moved to New York City with the outbreak of World War I. On Broadway in the late 1910s and 1920s, Steiner conducted and orchestrated stage musicals for such prominent figures as George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Vincent Youmans.³⁹ Newman, similarly, had been schooled in classical and romantic music as a young piano prodigy. From the late 1910s through the 1920s, Newman served as conductor and music director for numerous high-profile Broadway shows, including some written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Gershwin, and Kern.⁴⁰ Harling had composed for both opera and musical theater prior to his arrival in Hollywood and had provided compositions for two fairy-tale film musicals: Paramount’s The Love Parade (November 1929) and Monte Carlo (August 1930).

The use of extensive nondiegetic music in conjunction with fantasy, exoticism, and desire offered filmmakers several distinct advantages. By using music in a style that related to the film’s unusual setting, filmmakers could convey the unique aura of a particular location. Additionally, since virtually every film set in a contemporary urban area shunned nondiegetic music in this period, an extensive film score could help establish a clear separation between the “other world” and familiar reality. Music could help characterize various ethnic groups and provide implicit commentary—from the cultural perspectives of the time—on the (in)appropriateness of interracial coupling. Nondiegetic music also offered an opportunity to explore and describe a character’s interior state. Most broadly, nondiegetic music’s lack of spatial anchoring in reality served as a useful corollary to a filmic world or emotional state that possessed an equally tenuous connection to mundane reality. As the following case studies demonstrate, in the early 1930s film music practitioners capitalized on all of these advantages.

In 1932 Steiner composed three extensive scores for RKO films—Symphony of Six Million, Bird of Paradise, and The Most Dangerous Game—that used music to characterize environments unfamiliar to most audiences. A good deal of credit for the scores’ existence is due David O. Selznick, who served as executive producer on all three films.41 Selznick was an early champion of film music, asserting in 1932 that “without an undercurrent of music, a film play is cold.”⁴² This section examines two of these scores: Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game. The following section situates Steiner’s score for Bird of Paradise in the context of several near-continuous scores in 1931 and 1932.

Scholars have devoted relatively little attention to Steiner’s music for Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game,⁴³ instead providing numerous analyses of his score for the following year’s King Kong. This is unfortunate because the scores for Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game constitute major contributions to the industry. Both scores contain music for just over 50 percent of the film, a substantial amount for dramatic films in 1932. The scores also feature early efforts to associate extensive nondiegetic music with settings unfamiliar to most audience members: the Jewish ghetto of New York City in Symphony of Six Million and an island run by a diabolical madman in The Most Dangerous Game. Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game also feature a nearly unprecedented level of musical attention to narrative events in a dramatic film. Still, both scores are better understood as a synthesis of prior practices rather than a wholly new approach to film scoring.

Symphony of Six Million’s early scenes depict the boyhood of Felix Klauber (Ricardo Cortez), his friendship with a crippled girl named Jessica (Irene Dunne), and his life at home with his family. His family includes his parents, his brother Magnus (Noel Madison), and sister Birdie (Lita Chevret) in New York City’s Jewish ghetto. Felix studies to be a surgeon and eventually opens up a clinic in the Jewish ghetto on Cherry Street. Though Felix loves helping those most in need, Magnus convinces him to move his practice uptown. There he becomes rich and famous as the doctor with the “million dollar hands” who performs trivial cosmetic procedures for wealthy women.

Time causes Felix to forget his roots, and he ignores a note on his desk from Jessica (who still lives and works in the ghetto) stating that a boy in the Jewish ghetto needs medical attention. The boy dies. Shortly thereafter, Felix must operate on his own father (Gregory Ratoff), yet the operation is unsuccessful and his father dies. Frustrated by his useless uptown work and convinced that he has lost his skills as a surgeon, Felix declares that he will never work again. To restore Felix’s confidence, Jessica—whose physical condition has worsened—announces that she will take a chance on a dangerous operation to fix her spine. Knowing that he is best qualified for the procedure, Felix operates on Jessica successfully, thus restoring his belief in himself and his work.

Throughout the film Steiner’s music remains tied to the Jewish ghetto—a location unfamiliar to most moviegoers—and its accompanying value system. The music generally ceases when Felix loses contact with this community. The Jewish ghetto is of such importance to the film that its presence dictates when particular themes are heard. Early in the film, for instance, a theme identified in the conductor’s score as “The Son”44 plays while Felix works as a doctor at the Cherry Street clinic (fig. 5.3). Several scenes later, when Felix considers moving his practice uptown, his recognition that such a move violates his code of using medicine to help the neediest is reflected in the score. Here, the score deforms “The Son” theme via jolting key changes and harsh chromatic notes. Up to this point one might assume that “The Son” theme will regularly follow Felix through his journey as a doctor. Yet once Felix moves uptown, this theme—as well as all other nondiegetic music—is almost entirely eliminated. Only when Felix is reminded of his roots in the Jewish ghetto, or when the practice itself is shown onscreen, does music return to the soundtrack. Felix has “lost” the music, including his own musical theme, because he has lost sight of his ethical code and abandoned his Jewish community. The values of the Jewish ghetto are so closely tied to the use of nondiegetic music that the score sometimes takes the unusual step in the early sound era of featuring a single piece of music across a scene transition to or from the ghetto, as if to suggest the overarching influence and importance of Felix’s Jewish community.

Steiner’s use of Yiddish songs further demonstrates the score’s purpose in evoking the atmosphere and accompanying value system of a Jewish community. This includes four famous Yiddish tunes—“Oyf’n Pripetshik,” “Eïli, Eïli,” “Kol Nidre,” and “Hatikvah”—several of which occur both diegetically and nondiegetically. As film music scholar Nathan Platte has demonstrated, the unsung lyrics reflect directly on the film’s Jewish community. The lyrics to “Oyf’n Pripetshik,” for instance, paint “an endearing [Jewish] family scene” while simultaneously foreshadowing Felix’s eventual loss of his father.⁴⁵ The scene in which Felix’s father dies—which according to Steiner was the first scene scored for the film⁴⁶—further affirms the score’s link to the Jewish community and its values. When Felix operates on his father, both “Oyf’n Pripetshik” and “Kol Nidre” play just before and after the procedure. Musicologist Michael Long argues that the father embodies the “ethical Jew,” loyal to his community.⁴⁷ It is thus appropriate that the score features these Yiddish tunes when the father’s life—and by extension Felix’s connection to the Jewish community—is at stake. In numerous ways Steiner’s score attends to and reflects the community-oriented ethics of the ghetto.

Released five months after Symphony of Six Million, The Most Dangerous Game features a Steiner score that helps portray an unfamiliar—in this case, horrific—environment. Harling initially wrote a score for the film, but Merian C. Cooper rejected it, apparently feeling that the music was too light.48 Based on the 1924 short story by Richard Edward Connell, The Most Dangerous Game opens with a shipwreck that immediately kills all but three men. After a shark kills two of the remaining men, lone survivor and famous big-game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) swims to a nearby island. There he finds a castle owned by Zaroff (Leslie Banks), a Russian aristocrat forced to flee his country because of the Russian Revolution. In the castle Rainsford meets Eve (Fay Wray) and her brother, Martin (Robert Armstrong), both survivors of a previous boat wreck. Rainsford and Eve learn that Zaroff moves the beacons to cause shipwrecks and then hunts the survivors on his island. For Zaroff, humans constitute the only challenging and invigorating prey. Zaroff first hunts and kills Martin, then gives Rainsford a two-hour head start before hunting him. Preferring Rainsford’s company to Zaroff’s, Eve accompanies Rainsford into the jungle. After a lengthy chase sequence on the island, Rainsford outsmarts and eventually kills Zaroff.

As with Symphony of Six Million, The Most Dangerous Game features nondiegetic music for just over half of the film. One purpose for the extensive use of music in The Most Dangerous Game may have been to cover for the sparseness of dialogue during certain scenes. Many moments that feature music have little or no dialogue. Examples include the shark attack, Rainsford’s arrival on the island, the discovery of Zaroff’s trophy room full of stuffed human prey, and, most notably, the fifteen-minute segment in which Zaroff hunts Rainsford in the jungle. More important, however, Steiner’s score helps convey the warped world that Zaroff has created, in which accepted morals are turned upside down and the privileged status of humans as hunters is inverted. Central to this concept is the score’s sole prominent theme: a minor-key tune, adapted from Harling’s score for the film,49 that is known in the conductor’s part (a reduced version of the score used by the conductor) as the “Russian waltz.”⁵⁰ Though seemingly attached to Zaroff, this theme, like “The Son” in Symphony of Six Million, functions more consistently as an evocation of a particular place and value system—in this case the twisted world that Zaroff has created.

The score’s specific connection to Zaroff’s diabolical world is first suggested during the opening credits, which feature a bugle call and a tense, dissonant motive that rises in half steps (fig. 5.4) (a “half step” is the smallest increment between notes in Western music). This music alternates with a hand knocking three different times on Zaroff’s door. Upon the third knock, the door opens, and the soundtrack features the haunting Russian waltz for the first time (fig. 5.5). The situation matches the predicament that Rainsford will soon face. By tying the film’s only prominent theme to the opening door, the filmmakers present the first clue that the score will be tied to the (diabolical) entity living behind the door. Later, Zaroff plays the Russian waltz theme on the piano and also plays the lead-in to the theme on his hunting horn. Just as Zaroff is responsible for the perilous island environment, so, too, does he seem to be the catalyst for the score that represents such an atmosphere.

Consider, for instance, Steiner’s frequent use of themes in Symphony of Six Million. For a dramatic film in the early 1930s, the extent to which Steiner constructs his score around themes is highly unusual. In addition to “The Son,” he provides recurring themes that he entitles “Jessica,” “The Mother,” “The Ghetto,” and “The Daughter.”51 Yet while the amount and frequency of musical themes were unusual in a dramatic film, musical themes had already been employed widely in opera, theater musicals, and—especially—silent films. As we saw in chapter 4, musical themes had also been used periodically in film musicals. Steiner’s primary contribution was to reintroduce the theme-driven score in a dramatic context, an approach that had fallen out of favor with the advent of the 100 percent talkie.

The extent to which Steiner closely matches his music to narrative events also constituted an unusual approach for a film outside the musical genre. Steiner sometimes provides a crescendo during tense situations that culminates in a sforzando on the moment with the greatest tension. For instance, after Felix’s father dies on the operating table in Symphony of Six Million, Felix angrily smashes a newspaper article about himself titled “The Million Dollar Hands of Dr. Klauber.” Music’s volume level rises in anticipation of this action and provides a sforzando at the smash. In The Most Dangerous Game Steiner often provides a crescendo and pause just before a key sound effect or line of dialogue. During the lengthy chase sequence, for instance, this occurs just prior to the sound of Zaroff’s arrow being released from the bow and, later, just before the sound effect of birds flying out of the trees. When Eve nearly triggers the trip line designed to ensnare Rainsford, the music features a sforzando and pauses just before Rainsford exclaims, “Look out, don’t touch that trip line!” Then, when Rainsford tells Eve that Zaroff has likely gone for his high-powered rifle, the sforzando and pause occur just before Eve exclaims, “His rifle!” By having the peak of the crescendo occur via diegetic sound rather than nondiegetic music, the score encourages audience members to transfer their feelings of tension from nondiegetic music to the diegetic situation, thus ratcheting up the audience’s affective engagement with the narrative.

Steiner further fuses music and image in The Most Dangerous Game via mickey-mousing. When Rainsford swims ashore and then collapses, for instance, a modest sforzando matches his collapse. In the next sequence, the score provides loose mickey-mousing by climbing upward in pitch as Rainsford climbs a ridge. Then, as Rainsford approaches the door to Zaroff’s castle, staccato notes match each step. Unlike so many disengaged musical scores from the prior period, Steiner’s scores remain attentive to diegetic occurrences.

Both the crescendo-pause pattern and mickey-mousing serve important purposes, including closely binding music to narrative and aligning the audience with Rainsford’s and Eve’s thoughts and actions. Yet like the use of recurring themes, these techniques largely constitute a reapplication of music conventions. Using sforzandos before or after key lines of dialogue harks back to operatic recitative accompaniment. Chapter 1 demonstrated that recitatives sometimes use loud, punctuating chords before easing off or disappearing during the sung lines themselves, thus generating affect without sacrificing the comprehensibility of the lyrics. Steiner’s use of sforzandos also reflects the lineage of theatrical melodrama. In its oldest form theatrical melodrama generated affect by alternating music with spoken words. This practice continued into early twentieth-century European melodrama⁵²—a form with which Steiner was familiar. Steiner’s mickey-mousing owes much to “word-painting” techniques of opera melodrama,⁵³ and more proximately to cartoons. The term “mickey-mousing” may have originated with Selznick’s effort to equate Steiner’s scoring techniques with cartoon music.⁵⁴ In later interviews and articles Steiner also repeatedly stated that he used a click track—a rhythmic beat timed to a certain number of frames—to help synchronize his music with the image.⁵⁵ Though it is unclear whether Steiner used a click track as early as 1932, it is worth noting that this tactic, too, derived from cartoons: composer Carl Stalling used the click track during the earliest years of Disney’s sound cartoons.⁵⁶ There is much to admire in the scores for Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game, but Steiner did not “invent” the music techniques found in these films; rather, he transferred preexisting accompaniment strategies to dramatic films.

Though Steiner did not invent new techniques, he was unprecedentedly bold in his use of noticeable music, particularly in The Most Dangerous Game. Symphony of Six Million begins with quiet music, and this music gradually increases in volume as the film progresses. The Most Dangerous Game, in contrast, features music that plays at a high volume throughout the film. This music drowns out many sound effects during the lengthy jungle chase sequence. Where Symphony of Six Million favors string compositions, much of The Most Dangerous Game’s score focuses on the brass section—generally a louder, more aggressive-sounding array of instruments. Steiner also draws attention to The Most Dangerous Game’s score via frequent harsh, dissonant chords and sharp sforzando blasts played on brass instruments. Even prior to King Kong, then, Steiner had overtly signaled the score’s importance for the evocation of unfamiliar worlds and the generation of affect.

The decision to provide continuous music for the three South Seas films—Tabu, Bird of Paradise, and Mr. Robinson Crusoe—probably stemmed in part from the enormously popular 1912 play The Bird of Paradise, a production by Richard Walton Tully set in Hawaii. For incidental music Tully imported a quintet from Hawaii. The New York Times reviewer made a special note of this music, describing it as “weirdly sensuous.”57 This description may have been a response to the quintet’s use of a slack key style on steel guitars, a technique that was unfamiliar in the United States.⁵⁸ The play’s popularity sparked an overwhelming interest in Hawaiian music. The Hawaiian quintet then recorded the play’s incidental music on Victor phonograph discs, and these recordings sold well. By the late 1910s, Hawaiian recordings were some of the best-selling phonograph records in the United States.⁵⁹ The success of such music in turn impacted subsequent versions of the play. Where the original stage production featured Hawaiian music only at “realistic” moments, subsequent versions incorporated more and more Hawaiian tunes.⁶⁰ Tabu, Bird of Paradise, and Mr. Robinson Crusoe drew on this association between music and the South Seas, using extensive scores to depict the South Seas as an “other world” far removed from modern life.

Of the three films, only Tabu strives to depict Polynesia from the perspective of its native inhabitants. Tabu tells a story of doomed love between a young man named Matahi and a woman named Reri who live on the island of Bora Bora. One day, a messenger from the chief of Fanuma named Hitu announces that Reri has been selected as the virgin maiden to the gods. This makes Reri taboo, forbidden for all humans to touch. Matahi and Reri boldly flee to an island that has been colonized by Western civilization. There they try to secure the money needed for passage on a ship, only to discover that Matahi has unwittingly accumulated a massive debt and cannot pay for the tickets. Hitu soon discovers the lovers’ location, and Reri, fearing for Matahi’s safety, leaves the island with Hitu. In an effort to swim after the departing Reri, Matahi drowns.

In many respects Tabu constituted a throwback to silent and early synchronized film music. It was shot silent and later scored by Hugo Riesenfeld, a man with extensive experience in silent and early synchronized scores. Logistical issues must have played a role in the decision to shoot Tabu as a silent film with recorded music. Because Tabu was shot on location in Tahiti with native Tahitians in the leading roles, the nonprofessional cast would have struggled with English dialogue.61 Moreover, outdoor recording would have been difficult: Fox’s In Old Arizona (January 1929), probably the first sound film utilizing outdoor recording, had been released only five months before the start of production on Tabu. Director F. W. Murnau’s decision to make a silent film may also have been influenced by the industry’s hesitation toward 100 percent talking films. When Murnau left Hollywood in May 1929 to begin work on Tabu, silent films with synchronized scores still appeared to be a viable long-term option. Moreover, Tabu’s producer, David Flaherty, attests that Murnau believed in the enduring artistic quality of silent filmmaking, stating that Murnau’s choice to make a silent film was “dictated not by economic but by aesthetic considerations.”⁶²

Tabu’s shooting strategies may have occurred for a variety of logistical and aesthetic reasons, but ultimately the film’s dependence on an antiquated filming and musical accompaniment aesthetic served as a useful means to represent the film’s “primitive,” premodern setting. The notion that the South Seas remains a paradise devoid of modernity drives the early parts of the film. An opening intertitle describes Bora Bora as an island “still untouched by the hand of civilization.” When Matahi and Reri lose their paradise and flee to a different island, elements of Western culture appear. Even here, however, the couple’s cultural differences from the modern world remain vivid, including Matahi’s limited understanding of the concepts of money and debt. By employing a “nonmodern” accompaniment practice, Tabu further conveys a sense of separation between modernity and the native culture of the South Seas.

Riesenfeld further invokes silent era accompaniment through his pastiche approach to the music. The score features ample selections of classical music, including portions of a Frédéric Chopin prelude, Franz Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” Robert Schumann’s “Leides Ahnung,” an oratorio (Franz Liszt’s “Saint Elizabeth”), a Czech symphonic poem (Bedrich Smetana’s “Vltava”), and a Russian ballet (Nikolai Tcherepnin’s “Romance for a Mummy”). Like certain silent scores and many early sound scores, the filmmakers combine preexisting music with original cues, in this case by Riesenfeld, Harling, Milan Roder, Corynn Kiehl, and Tabu’s assistant director, William Bambridge.63 Riesenfeld also draws on late silent and early synchronized music by featuring prominent and recurring themes. These include a soaring theme to represent the doomed love between Matahi and Reri and an ominous low-register motif to denote the presence of Hitu.

Tabu’s score differs from typical late silent and early synchronized film music in one crucial respect. To sonically represent the festivities and dancing in the film, Riesenfeld draws inspiration from native Polynesian music, which focuses on rhythm and chanting.⁶⁴ Consequently, the score features a contrast between two musical styles: orchestral music in a romantic idiom, which Riesenfeld typically uses for Tabu’s dramatic passages, and chanting and drums, which he uses to denote native festivities. Such a variety of music would have been largely unfeasible in the late silent era, and synchronized scores also did not incorporate such extensive use of vocals. Drawing on the advantages of recorded sound, in which disparate musicians can be combined on a single sound record, the film’s Polynesian-inspired music helps articulate a distinct sense of place.

Of its considerable accomplishments, Tabu is perhaps most remarkable for devoting serious, sustained attention to the lifestyle of native Polynesians. The film restricts its perspective largely to Matahi and Reri and devotes considerable time to the presentation of Polynesian music and dancing. Subsequent South Seas films would filter the exotic world through the eyes of white characters, who often experience violent conflicts with the natives. Such is the case with Bird of Paradise, a film with an early continuous score that articulates the beauty and lure of the South Seas while simultaneously villainizing the native inhabitants.

Bird of Paradise opens with a scene in which white passengers sail the South Seas on a yacht, thus immediately signaling the film’s Western point of view. Invited by natives to come ashore for a festival, the young sailor Johnny (Joel McCrea) finds himself infatuated with an island woman named Luana (Dolores Del Rio). Unfortunately, Luana, like Reri, is taboo, this time because she is promised to a native prince. Later, during Luana’s prenuptial dance, Johnny grabs a willing Luana and takes her to a nearby deserted island. Johnny and Luana are eventually captured by the natives, who begin roasting them over a fire before Johnny’s shipmates rescue them. Though Johnny holds out hope that he can take Luana back to the modern world to be his wife, the chasm between exotic Polynesia and modernity proves to be too great. Johnny becomes ill, poisoned by an arrow. Luana, believing that she has angered the volcano god Pele, chooses to sacrifice herself to the erupting volcano in an effort to save Johnny’s life.

Unlike Tabu, Bird of Paradise features extensive dialogue along with virtually continuous music. The score helps conceal the film’s relatively few sound effects, an issue that may have stemmed from the difficulty of recording sound effects for the sequences shot on the Hawaiian Islands.65 More important, however, the ever-present score constantly conveys the contrast between the exotic world of Polynesia and modern life. Like Tabu, Bird of Paradise has a distinctly antimodern score, employing the silent-era tactic of near-continuous music to depict a region untouched by Western civilization. Steiner’s score also foregrounds a diverse range of percussion instruments to convey this alternative world, including bells, celesta, gong, hand cymbals, marimba, timpani, and xylophone.⁶⁶ Though these are standard instruments for twentieth-century orchestral music, their presence in a film score is unusual. The soundtrack’s use of Hawaiian music, including Sol Hoopi’s Hawaiian chorus, lends a sense of authenticity to the music.⁶⁷ Johnny and Luana’s love theme, moreover, is periodically performed on the steel guitar, an instrument widely associated with the seductive appeal of Hawaii. Steiner also conveys the lure of Polynesia through his “Call of the Islands” theme—a twinkling, hypnotic two-note ostinato—in frequent conjunction with scenes of Hawaiian landscapes (fig. 5.6).

Even the rare use of silence helps articulate the lure of the islands. After continuous music accompanies a celebration involving the shipmates and natives, the filmmakers briefly eliminate music when the shipmates—back aboard the static and visually bland interior of their boat—discuss the fact that Johnny seems to have “gone native.” The music returns only when the camera cuts back to Johnny sitting by himself on deck and gazing at the island. Here, more than anywhere else in the film, the score conveys the tropics as an alternative world far removed from mundane reality, a world that can enact a pull on those who experience it.

Bird of Paradise’s use of Hawaiian music—especially the employment of a steel guitar—would seem to match the “weirdly sensuous” music heard during the stage version’s initial run. Steiner contrasts this music, however, with frequent chanting and drumbeats that denote the natives. This musical opposition helps convey the film’s dual-focus epic structure, in which the couple’s pastoral romance proves no match for cultural norms and the power of tradition.68 Yet the chanting and drumming occurs in conjunction with several other musical techniques that conventionally denote savagery or aggression, including unresolved dissonances, parallel octaves, and heavy passages for the brass. The natives’ chants are also seldom tied to lip movements of individual characters, which fosters the sense of an undifferentiated, aggressive mass. The score thus indicates that—except for Luana—the natives are merely a superstitious, belligerent, and inconvenient obstacle to Johnny’s happiness. They are not worth caring about or treating with respect.

The next month saw the release of Mr. Robinson Crusoe, another South Seas film featuring dialogue and a continuous score. The score by Newman—like Steiner’s score—harkens back to prior film accompaniment practices via extensive recurring themes. It also periodically uses a steel guitar to suggest the sensuousness of South Seas life and, again, dehumanizes and vilifies the natives. Not only does the score feature low, dissonant brass and a steady drumbeat to signal native menace, but it also mocks their impotence in the face of white male authority. When a lone native attacks the lead character, Steve Drexel (Douglas Fairbanks), with a knife, for instance, the score provides light xylophone music. The score’s implied message is arguably more offensive than in Bird of Paradise. Not only are natives aggressive and violent, but they are unimportant primitives to be laughed at and disregarded when pitted against a rigorous, white explorer. In both Bird of Paradise and Mr. Robinson Crusoe, then, the continuous score highlights the exotic location, yet it generally posits this environment as a playground that only white men can fully experience and enjoy.

Along with the sheer presence of continuous music, Chandu the Magician’s score borrows the use of recurring themes and musical “kidding” from silent-era accompaniment practices. In addition to a theme for Chandu that generally plays when he performs magic (fig. 5.7), the score also features a love theme for Chandu and Nadji (fig. 5.8) and a cartoonish, bouncing bassoon theme for Miggles (fig. 5.9). Kidding occurs during comedic moments, most noticeably via multiple uses of “How Dry I Am” when Miggles decides to drink alcohol. The film includes a silent scene: when Chandu and Nadji gaze into Chandu’s crystal ball, they can see but not hear Roxor’s efforts to get Robert Regent to reveal the secret of the death ray. Given these parallels to silent film music, it comes as little surprise that the music director, Louis de Francesco, had experience with silent-style continuous music. Four years earlier, de Francesco and J. S. Zamecnik had written the synchronized score for The Wedding March (October 1928).⁶⁹

If Tabu, Bird of Paradise, and Mr. Robinson Crusoe feature some combination of chanting, drumbeats, and unresolved dissonant brass to convey their exotic settings, Chandu the Magician employs its own tactics for indicating exoticism. Like the previous scores, much of the film’s music is in a romantic idiom, but de Francesco invokes a more specific sense of place through another method. He periodically uses scales with an augmented second (a scale progression in which one note is raised by a half step), a stereotypical signifier of the Middle East. Like the music in Bird of Paradise and Mr. Robinson Crusoe, such music conveys the sense of “native” menace posed to white visitors. For instance, when Roxor places the pale-skinned, blonde-haired Betty Lou (June Vlasek) on the auction block for Egyptian men to purchase, the score features a repeated and particularly pronounced series of scales with an augmented second. The contrast between the nightgown-clad Betty Lou and the ethnically infused score articulates fears of racial intermingling between white women and ethnic Others. Like several continuous scores before it, Chandu the Magician’s score conveys the exoticism of an unfamiliar world and the concomitant dangers of mixing with its “natives.”

Continuous music could be used to invoke the exoticism of East Asia as well. At the end of 1932, Paramount released Madame Butterfly, which featured music from Giacomo Puccini’s eponymous opera along with incidental compositions by W. Franke Harling. In an extensive analysis of this score music scholar W. Anthony Sheppard demonstrates that much of Puccini’s music—without vocals—was reused in the same narrative spots as the opera. Harling invokes silent film techniques not only by reusing Puccini’s “curse motif” but also by creating motifs for the main character, Pinkerton (Cary Grant), and the American consul Sharpless (Berton Churchill). For reasons that are not entirely clear, Harling eliminates Puccini’s reworking of authentic Japanese folk tunes in favor of his own simulated Japanese music, which includes such stereotypical “oriental” signifiers as parallel fourths and fifths, octaves, and rapid xylophone passages.70 Like Tabu, Bird of Paradise, Mr. Robinson Crusoe, and Chandu the Magician, Madame Butterfly’s continuous score helps convey an exotic world far removed from modern American life. Far from a technique that was abandoned in the early sound era, continuous scores remained an asset for early 1930s filmmakers seeking to depict “otherworldly” locales and their native inhabitants.

The continuous scores for the films examined above principally convey external worlds featuring exotic or unfamiliar environments. Three other films from the period use intermittent music primarily as a reflection of the internal dreams, desires, and states of mind of leading characters: Columbia’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Paramount’s Trouble in Paradise, and Paramount’s Blonde Venus. The scores play a key role in the films’ cultural explorations of interracial mixing, class, and marriage. All three scores also include important contributions from one of the unheralded composers of the early sound period: W. Franke Harling.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen, a daring film directed by Frank Capra, raises the stakes for the portrayal of interracial love. Prior films like Bird of Paradise, Mr. Robinson Crusoe, Chandu the Magician, and Madame Butterfly all presented a romantic relationship between a white man and a nonwhite, “exotic” woman. All four films treat this relationship as an unproblematic instance of love, offering little or no condemnation of the couple’s feelings for each other. However, when an “exotic” man and a white woman fall in love in a patriarchal culture, the situation forces the filmmakers to proceed far more carefully. As cultural historian Richard Slotkin points out, romances between white men and nonwhite women at least “have the saving grace of preserving the political and moral hierarchy of a male-dominant ideology. In the reverse case, the non-White male assumes a tutelary and commanding role over the White woman and is implicitly permitted to penetrate her body and to mingle his sperm (figuratively his blood) with her ‘blood.’”71 Slotkin demonstrates that in American culture, such mingling constitutes a “horror” that extends all the way back to Mary Rowlandson’s seventeenth-century story of Indian captivity.⁷² Complicating matters further, filmmakers in the early 1930s were subject to Production Code guidelines, which prohibited the depiction of miscegenation. Though the Code was not as comprehensively enforced as it would be a few years later, filmmakers did face constraints in this period.⁷³ Studio correspondence indicates that the movie industry’s trade association—the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)—was concerned with sex between “whites and negroes only.”⁷⁴ Still, filmmakers needed to exercise caution when depicting the relationship between any ethnically “Other” man and a white woman.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen spends its entire running time examining the circumstances and motivations that might lead a white woman to love a Chinese man. Harling’s score plays an important role in this examination. Though the score occupies a mere 16 percent of the film, it becomes crucial for articulating the cultural clash between East and West by highlighting the reasons why the white, New England–bred Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck) falls in love with the Chinese General Yen (Nils Asther).

Beginning with the opening credits, the score strongly foregrounds the theme of a cultural clash between East and West. Over the Columbia logo, the film provides a conventional Western orchestral tune, centered primarily on the brass section. As the image dissolves to the film’s title—which is written in English but features curved “Chinese-style” lettering—a chime and then a gong interrupt the Western theme. This is followed by two other conventional signifiers of the “Orient”: parallel octaves and a xylophone.

Sheppard argues that by having this “lush amorous music” play when the Swedish Asther—in less grotesque yellow-face makeup—kisses Stanwyck, the score “helps to erase any negative connotations of this Asiatic face and forces us to accept, rather than be shocked by, this (fake) interracial kiss.”75 One might add that the score’s shift from “oriental” music to Western music also reflects Megan’s own evolving feelings on Yen’s suitability as a romantic interest. The film’s invocation of silent-era images and sounds, however, plays an equally crucial role in articulating Megan’s inner transformation. Yen’s gallant rescue—along with the mask he wears—is reminiscent of Zorro, a Spanish character made popular by the silent film The Mark of Zorro (1920), starring top leading man Douglas Fairbanks. Yen and Megan’s steamy embrace harkens back to the silent films of the famous screen lover Rudolph Valentino, who in movies like The Sheik (1921) had titillated audiences by rescuing and seducing damsels in distress. Parallels between the Sheik and Yen run deeper. Like the Sheik, Yen is Western-educated, kidnaps his love interest, and resolves that she will fall in love with him. Valentino was associated with a range of ethnicities: he was actually Italian, was known as the “Latin Lover,” and played a supposed Arab in The Sheik who ultimately proved to be of English and Spanish descent. By referencing these more acceptable ethnic “Others” associated with Zorro and Valentino and by using a type of romantic music similar to what would have been heard in a late silent era movie palace, the dream sequence demonstrates Megan’s emerging fantasy that a Chinese man, like Spanish or Latin men, could be an acceptable romantic interest.

The most definitive musical depiction of Megan’s emotional union with Yen occurs in the final scenes of the film. Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), Yen’s concubine, betrays Yen to his enemies. To keep Mah-Li from being put to death, the naive Megan offers her life to Yen should Mah-Li betray him a second time. Mah-Li betrays him again, and Yen subsequently summons Megan to his room. When Megan arrives, Yen plays a classical song on his phonograph. Both the phonograph and the musical idiom are conventionally associated with the “civilized,” “cultured” West. Their presence perhaps reminds the audience that Yen has attempted to win Megan not by rough conquest but by impressing her with fine food, drink, art, and impeccable manners. Dialogue during the scene reiterates this concept: Yen at one point reminds Megan that he could have forced himself on her but chose to try to win her affections. Apparently torn between her love for Yen and the social stigma of this interracial match, Megan refuses Yen’s advances. Yen gives her permission to leave the palace, yet Megan returns to his room, having “Orientalized” herself by donning heavy eye shadow and wearing a Chinese gown. Much as Mah-Li did earlier, Megan kneels by Yen’s side and promises never to leave him. During this scene, the music heard previously on the phonograph returns. Megan, the score implies, returns not because she promised her life to Yen but because she is finally besotted with him. Like the recurring song on the soundtrack, Yen’s cultured manner and exotic allure remain fixed in Megan’s mind.

Though ostensibly a comedy, Trouble in Paradise also offers a subtle yet poignant exploration of the limitations imposed by class difference in the permanent fusion of lovers. Harling’s original score reflects Gaston’s idealist fantasies of living a life of wealth, romance, and sophistication with a beautiful and perfect woman. In prior Lubitsch musicals like The Love Parade (November 1929) and One Hour with You (February 1932), song-based themes helped articulate a character’s internal state. In a manner similar to these musicals, Trouble in Paradise features excerpts of two popular song-based themes—“You’ll Fall in Love in Venice” and “Trouble in Paradise.”76 Both songs help demonstrate that Gaston yearns for a lifestyle and lover that are ultimately unattainable to someone of his class.

The audience first sees Gaston as he stands on a balcony staring meditatively into the distance and waiting for the “baroness” (fig. 5.10). An instrumental version of “You’ll Fall in Love in Venice” plays on the soundtrack, and it contains a dreamlike quality through strings and high-pitched strumming on both the mandolin and harp (fig. 5.11). Gaston then demands that his butler create a perfect romantic evening worthy of “Casanova, Romeo, Juliet, or Cleopatra.” The dreamlike “You’ll Fall in Love in Venice” thus initially seems to reflect Gaston’s idealist fantasies of romance, sophistication, and perfection. After Lily arrives, “You’ll Fall in Love in Venice” more frequently recurs to reflect Gaston and Lily’s relationship. The song plays as Gaston removes Lily’s wrap, during their ensuing intimate moments in the hotel room, and later in the film when the lovers plan a return trip to Venice. Yet by first associating the theme exclusively with Gaston, the film introduces Gaston as a dreamer. He is a man who yearns for a life that he, as merely a “self-made” crook rather than a man born into high society, can only briefly impersonate.

Gaston’s dreams are also implied through the film’s second theme, “Trouble in Paradise,” which the filmmakers consistently connect to the relationship between Gaston and Mariette. Here the reiteration of the theme often occurs during moments when the film conflates sexual desire and dreams, thus implying that Gaston and Mariette’s union must remain a mere fantasy. “Trouble in Paradise” (fig. 5.12) first plays during the opening credits, which include an image underneath the film title of a fancy antique bed floating in the clouds (fig. 5.13). The bed is made for two, which implies sex, but the clouds that surround the bed remind the audience that beds are also places for dreaming.

“Trouble in Paradise” does not play again until after Gaston first meets Mariette, and the filmmakers once again link the theme to a bed. As Mariette searches for her checkbook in the next room, Gaston wanders into what he presumes to be Mariette’s bedroom and admires her antique bed, which bears a resemblance to the bed in the opening credits (fig. 5.14). The theme once again accompanies an object related to sex and dreams, but both elements are suggested in other ways here as well. Gaston’s wandering uninvited into a bedroom in Mariette’s home presumes a heightened level of intimacy, while his open admiration for the bed emphasizes economic disparity: given Gaston’s working-class flat, he can only dream about sleeping on such a beautiful bed. Gaston initially enters the room in an effort to find Mariette’s safe, but his admiration for the bed squares with the fantasies that the film’s dialogue and score have already established.

Later, a string version of “Trouble in Paradise” plays during a sequence in which Gaston and Mariette go out dancing and then nearly succumb to sexual temptation. Once again, “Trouble in Paradise” corresponds to a merging of sex and dreams. As the camera stays resolutely fixed on a clock in Mariette’s home, she and Gaston return from their night out and Gaston tells her, “You dance like a dream.” When the two finally go to their separate rooms, lush strings play “Trouble in Paradise” as Gaston nearly enters Mariette’s bedroom, and Mariette—the audience then learns—waits to lock her bedroom door until Gaston has closed his. By frequently playing “Trouble in Paradise” during these evocations of both dreams and sex, the score indicates that Mariette constitutes the perfect, dreamlike lover that Gaston has always sought, yet lightly implies that their union must remain a mere fantasy.

The impossibility of their union is verified in the penultimate scene, in which Gaston is forced to admit to Mariette that he is a notorious thief. In dialogue that again connects their relationship to dreams, Gaston explains, “Tomorrow morning, if you should wake out of your dreams and hear a knock, and the door opens, and there, instead of a maid with a breakfast tray, stands a policeman with a warrant, then you’ll be glad that you were alone.” Yet Gaston’s criminal status alone does not account for his necessary departure. The film also reveals a class bias in Mariette. When Gaston informs her that Giron (C. Aubrey Smith), a trusted friend of Mariette’s family, has been robbing her for years, she refuses to report Giron to the police owing to his stature and close friendship with the family. Gaston retorts, “I see. You have to be in the social register to keep out of jail. But when a man starts from the bottom and works his way up, a self-made crook, then you say, ‘Call the police, put him behind bars, lock him up.’” This speech, like much of the dialogue, is mildly tongue-in-cheek, and one could argue that Gaston is merely scheming to keep himself out of jail. Yet his claim about economic privilege remains entirely consistent with his working-class flat. The score has helped to foreground his idealist equation of happiness, beauty, and romance with wealth and privilege. Trouble in Paradise thus becomes a film that is not merely about the yearnings of a thief but explores the desires of any lower- and middle-class person who might envy the advantages of the wealthy.

In Trouble in Paradise, nondiegetic music moves even more firmly toward the depiction of dreams, desires, and psychological states. Harling matches Gaston’s idealist and unattainable dreams with ephemeral, affective music detached from the diegesis. Around the same time, Paramount released a far odder film with music that evokes very different psychological states.

As scholars have pointed out, Blonde Venus defies any straightforward reading, sending out cues and suggestions that pull the viewer toward contradictory interpretations.77 This is partly due to script revisions demanded by both the MPPDA and Paramount studio chief B. P. Schulberg.⁷⁸ It is also partly due to director Josef von Sternberg’s tendency to present key character decisions offscreen. Such a method resulted in a disjointed narrative containing elements of maternal melodramas, the “fallen woman” genre, and backstage musicals. Yet this disjunctive quality serves the film’s purposes, as it helps depict the unreal aura of new love, the nightmarish deterioration of a family, and ultimately the importance of maintaining the fiction of enduring love. Music, with its connotations in the period of fantasy and a removal from reality, becomes an important collaborator in conveying such themes.

In Blonde Venus’s opening scene Ned (Herbert Marshall) and his friends discover six showgirls swimming naked in Germany’s Black Forest. Ned immediately falls for a showgirl named Helen (Marlene Dietrich) and refuses to go away unless she agrees to see him after her evening show. The film abruptly dissolves to New York City some time later: Helen and Ned are married with a five-year-old named Johnny (Dickie Moore). Ned has contracted a life-threatening illness and needs money for treatment in Europe. Helen returns to the stage and receives a substantial sum of money from a millionaire named Nick (Cary Grant), implicitly for sleeping with him. Ned travels to Europe for treatment, and Helen begins seeing Nick regularly, even moving into an apartment that Nick has paid for. When Ned returns early from Europe, he learns of Helen’s infidelity and orders Helen to give him Johnny and leave for good. Instead, Helen takes Johnny and flees south. The trip becomes increasingly nightmarish for Helen. With the police on her trail she has difficulty finding work and eventually—the film implies—turns to prostitution. Deciding that she is “no good,” she gives Johnny to Ned and then, in a startling reversal depicted only in a short montage, sails to Paris and becomes a major musical star. There she meets Nick again, and the two become engaged and sail back to New York City. Nick arranges for Helen to see Johnny. After bathing Johnny and putting him to bed, Helen and Ned apparently reunite for good.

Blonde Venus features three Dietrich cabaret numbers, which might lead one to categorize the film as a musical. I am discussing the film in this chapter, however, because it had little in common with contemporary musicals. Rather than featuring an integration of numbers and narrative, as was the case for musicals like One Hour with You, Love Me Tonight (August 1932), or The Big Broadcast (October 1932), Blonde Venus’s numbers have little connection to the film’s narrative development. Perhaps for this reason period reviews generally did not describe Blonde Venus as a musical.79 Moreover, much of the film’s music occurs during dramatic scenes, which links Blonde Venus to other dramatic films during the period.

The nondiegetic music in the film’s opening scene helps suggest that love-at-first-sight encounters hold little connection to the realities of quotidian existence. Ned and his friends’ discovery of six naked showgirls swimming in the middle of a forest constitutes an almost too-perfect erotic fantasy. The continuous music consists of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Rondo capriccioso,” a brisk frolicking tune featuring light dance-like bow strokes on the strings. This sprightly music—which bears a resemblance to Mendelssohn’s overture to William Shakespeare’s otherworldly comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream—encourages the audience to view Blonde Venus’s opening scene as a playful, fantastical situation divorced from everyday reality. Indeed, when the scene dissolves to a shot of Johnny playing in the bathtub, the film portrays the harsher realities of their existence: Helen undertakes the unglamorous task of bathing Johnny and putting him to bed (bathing has been transformed into a sign of domesticity); Ned worries about financially supporting Helen and Johnny; and the family lives in a cramped New York City apartment. Except for a token strain of James W. Blake and Charles B. Lawlor’s “The Sidewalks of New York” to signify the location shift, these early urban sequences feature very little music. The shift from vivacious music to no music at all implies that Helen and Ned’s first meeting was an aberration, merely a brief period of sexually charged desire. The challenges associated with money and raising a child are the reality. The film further removes the circumstances of their meeting from the real world by revealing that their first encounter has literally been transformed into a fairy-tale bedtime story for Johnny, with a dragon substituted for the taxicab and princesses swapped for showgirls. Mendelssohn’s music in the opening scene thus helps create a striking separation between the fantasy of courtship and the reality of life.

When Helen flees with Johnny to the South and descends into poverty and prostitution, the film increasingly presents scenes that are fragmented and not fully connected by a clear plotline. This is at least partly due to the MPPDA’s objections to von Sternberg’s original script. For instance, in the original script a police officer arrests Helen for prostitution, and Helen appears in court in the next scene.80 The MPPDA would not approve such a scenario, however, and in the final version Helen appears in court for “vagrancy,” with no depiction of her actual arrest. The elimination of key explanatory scenes characterizes the discontinuity of Helen’s flight. Often, an image shows a wire report revealing her last-known whereabouts before dissolving to a scene with Johnny and her in an entirely different location. At one point an undercover policeman unwittingly tells Helen that she narrowly evaded the police in Baton Rouge, yet this is the audience’s first indication that Helen had even been in that city.

These continuity gaps demand that the audience fill in the blanks with likely (and illicit) explanations, thus enabling the film to evade censorship. Yet this fragmented narrative also helps subjectively articulate the surreal downward spiral of Helen’s life. Further indicating Helen’s deteriorating mental state, Harling provides ominous music cues during three montages of Ned’s and the authorities’ pursuit of Helen and a later moment in which a train takes Johnny away from Helen. These cues employ standard signifiers of danger and gloom: chromatic, dissonant brass passages; string tremolos; and fast, insistent rhythms. Though the film depicts Helen attempting to remain a diligent mother during her flight from Ned, it suggests that her poverty and forays into prostitution render it impossible for her to keep Johnny and raise him responsibly. The discontinuity and foreboding music cues can thus be read as an expression of Helen’s mental state as she gradually realizes that she must forever give up her son. Music, with its connotations in the period of altered states of reality, helps describe Helen’s dismal downward trajectory.

This leads to the film’s unsettling conclusion, in which Helen returns to Ned. As played by Marshall and directed by von Sternberg, Ned comes across as a vindictive, cruel, and bitter man, thus making Helen’s decision somewhat difficult to accept. Ned displays no sympathy or understanding toward Helen after her infidelity, despite the fact that Helen did it to save his life. Instead, Ned repeatedly directs vitriolic accusations and insults at her, and he tries to teach Johnny to forget his mother entirely. Von Sternberg also goes to great visual lengths to prevent viewers from identifying with Ned, initially introducing him with his back to the camera and later cloaking his eyes in shadow during several key scenes, a highly unusual strategy in the period.

The emerging use of nondiegetic music to depict other worlds reveals a shift in assumptions regarding whether and when nondiegetic music is acceptable in a sound film. As we saw in chapter 3, from 1929 to 1931 filmmakers reduced nondiegetic music partly to ensure the clear presentation of a diegetic sound space. Yet doing so marginalized a key tool for the generation of affect. From 1931 to 1933 filmmakers offered a solution to this problem. When films began drifting away from real-world, physical, familiar referents, filmmakers increasingly used music that was similarly disconnected from the “real world” of the diegesis. Through the use of a nondiegetic score Hollywood could convey less tangible qualities like exoticism, fantasies, dreams, and desires. The industry thus gained a key tool for the latter half of Hollywood’s ever-present dialectic: to present a “realistic,” recognizable physical environment while simultaneously entertaining audiences through wish fulfillment and the depiction of the unusual.

From a historiographical perspective this increasing use of nondiegetic music demonstrates that aesthetic “progress” often involves a movement backward to prior models as much as it constitutes an innovative move forward. On the one hand, the escalation of nondiegetic music seems to move the film score closer to the Golden Age of film music, which featured extensive, narratively attentive music with little grounding in the diegesis. Yet this increase was accompanied by several techniques that stemmed from silent era practices, including a heavy reliance on themes, a continued use of preexisting music, and a periodic tendency to “catch” screen actions. Perhaps the most salient throwback to the silent era was the period’s occasional use of continuous or near-continuous scores, a tactic that also harkened back to accompaniment practices in early synchronized films. Even the increased use of music in conjunction with dreams and fantasies arguably brought the audience closer to a silent film experience. Many elements of late silent American cinema—including the lack of diegetic sound, soft-style cinematography, and a heavy reliance on superimpositions—distanced the medium from a “faithful” depiction of reality and brought cinema closer to the quality of dreams or fantasies.⁸¹ These elements were interrupted by the “realism” of synchronized sound, which added a previously unused dimension of reality to the cinema and initially focused on recording and presenting a variety of diegetic sounds. By using nondiegetic music to depict other worlds, the early 1930s score helped to partially return cinema to a medium of dreams and rapture. Stylistic progress, in many respects, stemmed from a reuse of older methods in new contexts.

Culturally, this musical focus on exoticism, fantasy, and dreams helped audiences both escape from their known reality and explore familiar emotional states. In films like Bird of Paradise, Mr. Robinson Crusoe, and Chandu the Magician music portrays exotic worlds of adventure, romance, and—especially in the South Seas films—near paradise. Along with better-known elements of 1930s cinema like glamorous movie stars, elaborate art deco sets, and opulent movie palaces, the film score must be seen as an important tool in the early part of the decade for the creation of escapist cinema. But if music could convey exoticism and adventure, it could also help portray poverty or economic lack. In Symphony of Six Million Yiddish music helps communicate the importance of helping community members in need. Trouble in Paradise uses music to transport audiences into the mind of a character whose yearnings for a wealthy and beautiful lifestyle would have resonated with Depression-era audiences. Blonde Venus’s music conveys the emotional horror of descending to abject poverty and being unable to care for one’s own child, a situation that surely reflected the realities or fears of many audience members.

In short, early 1930s film music may have helped transport audiences to environments different from the mundane physical reality of the Depression, but some of these places or states of mind also constituted reflections and explorations of the current cultural environment. Writing about 1930s American cinema more broadly, film historian Andrew Bergman asserts, “People do not escape into something they cannot relate to. Movies [in the 1930s] were meaningful because they depicted things lost or things desired. What is ‘fantastic’ in fantasy is an extension of something real.”82 Though film music portrayed worlds separated from urban life, it also conveyed fantasies and heightened mental states that nevertheless would have been relatable to many audience members.

The association between music and other worlds remained a general tendency rather than a solidified convention in the early 1930s. For instance, while Universal horror films like Dracula (February 1931) or Frankenstein (November 1931) would seem to be good candidates for nondiegetic music because of their presentations of supernatural scenarios, the films’ relatively low budgets likely explain their avoidance of this device.⁸³ Instead, as film historian Robert Spadoni has demonstrated, other elements like muteness and the separation of voice and body helped convey a sonic “uncanny” or “otherworldliness.”⁸⁴ Studio policies and a film’s urban setting could also deter filmmakers from using extensive nondiegetic music. Warner Bros.’ Scarface (March 1932) might seem an appropriate film for nondiegetic music because of its concentrated focus on Italian American culture and organized crime. Yet by 1932 Warner Bros. had moved away from nondiegetic music. This, combined with the film’s urban Chicago setting, all but guaranteed the near exclusion of nondiegetic music in the film. Similarly, the lives of the wealthy in a film like RKO’s The Animal Kingdom (December 1932) may well have seemed like an “other world” to many moviegoers. Yet despite being produced by Selznick and featuring Steiner as music director, the film’s setting in and near New York City precludes the use of nondiegetic music.