FOR MANY SCHOLARS MAX STEINER’S MUSIC FOR RKO’S KING Kong (March 1933) definitively and single-handedly marks the emergence of the classical Hollywood score. Music scholar Christopher Palmer describes King Kong’s score as a “landmark,” stating that it “marked the real beginnings of Hollywood music.”1 Laurence E. MacDonald similarly uses the word landmark. He calls King Kong’s score “the single most outstanding film-music accomplishment of the early 1930s” and claims that it “helped pave the way for all of the composers who worked in film during the Golden Age of Hollywood.”2 Recent studies of film music continue to assert the primacy of King Kong’s score in film history. In A History of Film Music, published in 2008, Mervyn Cooke declares that King Kong “almost single-handedly marked the coming-of-age of nondiegetic film music.”3 For scholars and film music aficionados alike, the notion that King Kong began the era of sound film music remains a cornerstone of American film history.
With rare exceptions, however, claims for King Kong’s historical importance occur in studies that display little or no awareness of the film scores discussed in the preceding chapters. When situated within the context of these other scores, King Kong’s place in film music history changes radically. The first half of this chapter reassesses scholarly claims regarding King Kong’s score in light of the previous chapters in this study. Rather than offering a brand-new film scoring method, King Kong constitutes a continuation of an early sound film tendency, discussed in the previous chapter, of tying film music to “other worlds” of fantasy. Similarly, while scholars claim that King Kong’s use of an original symphonic score, deployment of musical themes, and musical attention to narrative events initiated the classical Hollywood score, these elements were not new to King Kong. Instead they had been used extensively in earlier scores, including those composed by Steiner. Ironically, the elements of King Kong’s score that were unusual for the period—particularly the presence of harsh, dissonant chords and the use of music to convey scale—generally did not find their way into subsequent classical Hollywood scores. My intent here is not to deride King Kong’s impressive score but to situate it within its historical context in order to demonstrate the already rich sound film traditions from which it emerged.
The second half of this chapter examines King Kong’s influence on film music in the year following its release. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, King Kong’s musical techniques had little immediate impact on subsequent film scores. Though the 1933–34 season featured an increase in nondiegetic music and a tendency to tie such music to other worlds, this was a continuation of general early 1930s film music practices and does not constitute evidence of King Kong’s overwhelming influence. Moreover, King Kong’s more unusual musical strategies—particularly the close and regular synchronization between music and narrative cues—remain absent from the vast majority of scores in the 1933–34 season.
MUSIC AND FANTASY IN KING KONG
To reassess the nature of King Kong’s contributions to film music history, one must first examine the range of innovations currently ascribed to King Kong by film music scholars. Of all the score’s techniques, perhaps the most commented-upon element has been King Kong’s linkage between nondiegetic music and fantasy elements in the film’s narrative. King Kong’s opening scenes—which depict harsh, pragmatic realities in an urban setting—feature no music of any kind. In New York City, filmmaker and explorer Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), fearing trouble from the authorities, must quickly find a leading lady for his next film before sailing with his production crew to unknown waters. On a city street Denham encounters Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) when she swoons from hunger. He offers her the job, which she accepts.
King Kong continues to avoid music during the next few scenes, which depict the ship’s voyage. When the ship approaches the mysterious, mistshrouded Skull Island, however, nondiegetic music occurs for the first time. Nondiegetic music continues during nearly all of the fantastical scenes on Skull Island. The party arrives on the island and witnesses a tribal ceremony in which a young native woman is being prepared as a bride for Kong. The native chief (Noble Johnson) sees Denham, halts the ceremony, approaches the party menacingly, and forces them to leave. That night, the natives abduct Ann from the ship, open the giant doors, and lead her up some steps where she is tied to two posts as an offering to Kong. Kong appears and takes Ann to his lair. Along the way, Kong fends off many aggressors, including a tyrannosaurus. Denham and company set off in pursuit, but they are thwarted first by a brontosaurus and then by Kong himself, who sends everyone in the search party but Denham and Ann’s love interest, Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), to their deaths. Upon reaching his lair in the side of a cliff, Kong partially disrobes Ann and tickles her. Driscoll saves Ann from possibly worse fates, and he and Ann escape Kong by climbing down a vine. Enraged at losing his prize, Kong breaks open the giant doors and destroys the native village before being subdued by a gas bomb and captured by Denham. With the exception of the tyrannosaurus battle, nondiegetic music accompanies all of these outlandish Skull Island sequences.
Music continues through many of the final scenes set back in New York City, where the marvelous world of Skull Island and the familiar, modern environment blur together. Denham shackles Kong, brings him back to New York City, advertises him as the Eighth Wonder of the World, and displays him to an astonished theater audience. Wrongly believing Ann to be in danger, Kong breaks free of his shackles and goes on a rampage through New York City. Eventually finding Ann, Kong grabs her and climbs to the top of the Empire State Building. Kong’s concern for Ann becomes his undoing: he puts Ann down to keep her out of danger from approaching airplanes, and the pilots take advantage by shooting him and mortally wounding him. Kong picks up Ann one final time and lovingly pets her before plunging to his death. With the exception of Kong’s battle with the airplanes, music plays continuously throughout these final, fantasy-infused New York City sequences.
For some scholars, King Kong’s connection of nondiegetic music to fantasy helps evoke the island’s unreal, irrational aura. Film music historians James Buhler, David Neumeyer, and Rob Deemer contrast the opening New York City scenes with the island. Where the early New York City scenes feature no music and thus constitute a “rationally organized sound space,” the island uses extensive sound effects and nondiegetic music to foster the sense of a “primitive, pre-rational (because pre-linguistic)” and enchanted space. Though music is anchored once more to the diegesis back in the New York City theater, the authors point out that when Kong breaks free of his shackles, nondiegetic music again reigns supreme. Musically, as well as narratively, New York City reverts to a prerational state. The authors thus argue that throughout King Kong the presence of nondiegetic music helps evoke a world of fantasy and irrationality.4
Musicologist Robynn Stilwell similarly sees King Kong’s music as evoking an aura of fantasy, but she focuses on the liminal boundary between diegetic and nondiegetic music. Stilwell points out that when Denham and company arrive on the island, the music is difficult to classify. The image depicts native dancing and drumming, while the soundtrack features brass, strings, and woodwinds, in addition to drums. Such music is not precisely diegetic, as it features instrumentation plainly not visible in the image or likely in that setting. Yet it is not exactly nondiegetic either, because it retains clear connections to the dancing and drumming. Stilwell describes this as a “fantastical gap” between diegetic and nondiegetic boundaries. She writes, “The phrase ‘fantastical gap’ seemed particularly apt for this liminal space because it captured both its magic and its danger, the sense of unreality that always obtains as we leap from one solid edge toward another at some unknown distance and some uncertain stability—and sometimes we’re in the air before we know we’ve left the ground.”5
Such claims typify the general scholarly approach to King Kong. Though both analyses of music and fantasy are accurate and astute, the scholars’ decision to discuss King Kong and not an earlier film score perpetuates the scholarly neglect of earlier uses of film music. As we saw in chapter 5, the absence of music in a “realistic” urban environment and its presence in an exotic fantasy world were already fairly standard practices in 1931 and especially 1932. What marked King Kong as unusual was not a musical decision to tie music to fantasy but rather a narrative decision to depict urban reality and exotic fantasy in the same film and to blend them together in the final act. Though previous films like Paramount’s Tabu (March 1931), RKO’s Bird of Paradise (August 1932) and The Most Dangerous Game (September 1932), United Artists’ Mr. Robinson Crusoe (September 1932), and Fox’s Chandu the Magician (September 1932) had used music to imply a separation from known urban reality, they avoided depicting the modern world. Bird of Paradise even excised the scene from the play version in which Johnny brings Luana back to the United States. King Kong, by spending ample time in both “realistic” and fantastical locations, makes their division and eventual blurring a major theme in the film. Yet musically, Steiner’s score reiterated earlier practices pertaining to the use and nonuse of music rather than forging a new purpose for film music.
If Steiner’s use of music for King Kong’s fantasy scenes fit within period practices, so, too, did his use of music to create what Stilwell would later call the “fantastical gap” between diegetic and nondiegetic music. This tactic epitomizes what I have termed “diegetic withdrawal”—the practice of featuring music with a possible source in the image before allowing music to drift into clearer nondiegetic terrain. In choosing to use ambiguously designated music early in the film, Steiner adheres to this popular early sound era strategy. Steiner’s use of the “fantastical gap” between diegetic and nondiegetic boundaries is unusually nuanced for the period, as it makes especially clever use of implied music generated by the natives. Yet, conceptually, diegetic withdrawal was common well before King Kong’s release.
Other scholars focusing on music and fantasy in King Kong have instead stressed music’s role in the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Palmer writes that King Kong’s score “demonstrates, for the first time in the ‘talkies,’ that music has the power to add a dimension of reality to a basically unrealistic situation: in this case the survival of prehistoric monsters … in a modern urban civilization.”6 Cooke, after mentioning the “producers’ concern that their animated gorilla puppet would provoke laughter rather than terror,” states that King Kong’s “nondiegetic music is therefore a locus classicus of the promotion of suspension of disbelief.”7 Claudia Gorbman and Kathryn Kalinak reach a similar conclusion by focusing on the logic behind the presence and absence of music. Describing King Kong’s first use of nondiegetic music, Gorbman writes, “The music initiates us into the fantasy world, the world where giant apes are conceivable, the underside of the world of reason. It helps to hypnotize the spectator, bring down the defenses that could be erected against this realm of monsters, tribesmen, jungles, violence.”8 Kalinak affirms the purpose of this musical entrance: “The presence of music signaled the entry into the fantastic realm, facilitating the leap of faith necessary to accept Kong as real. The score became a crucial element in films of this genre where music inherited the responsibility of creating the credible from the incredible.”9 For all these scholars King Kong’s historical importance lies in its use of music to absorb audiences in the narrative and make them forget the patent unreality of the situation.
The use of music to suspend disbelief admittedly has less of a lineage in earlier sound scores. Though a film like Chandu the Magician had already featured a supernatural tale in conjunction with extensive music, such fantastical plots were sparse in the early sound era. Yet the very notion that King Kong’s nondiegetic score helps audiences to accept the fantasy world of Skull Island deserves closer scrutiny. Like many aspects of early sound film music scholarship, this claim can be traced to Steiner himself, who suggests in his memoirs that the producers wanted a score because they were concerned that “the gorilla looked unreal and that the animation was rather primitive.”10 Period reviews, however, indicate that the audience’s acceptance of King Kong’s “monsters” remained an issue even with the addition of extensive music. Variety reported that it took “a couple of reels” for the audience to become “used to the machine-like movements and other mechanical flaws in the gigantic animals on view” and later writes: “A most tolerant audience at the Music Hall broke down now and then, but on the whole was exceedingly kind.” The reviewer also states that the most convincing illusion in the film was the Kong-tyrannosaurus fight, which is the only scene on Skull Island that lacks music.11 It is thus difficult to assess whether—or to what extent—King Kong’s score truly popularized the notion that a film score could aid in the willing suspension of disbelief. At the very least, pre–King Kong scores demonstrate that the use of nondiegetic music to convey an unfamiliar, exotic, or fantastical world was not a concept that sprang full-blown from the heads of King Kong’s filmmakers. Rather, it was a logical application of a preexisting film music assumption.
KING KONG: THE BIRTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE?
Many scholars assert that King Kong’s score constituted the birth of the classical Hollywood score, inaugurating the Golden Age of film music. This section outlines several key areas in which King Kong’s music ostensibly points toward this practice. While King Kong does indeed feature several attributes of the Golden Age, these were not particularly new or original. Moreover, in some cases the score uses techniques that would not reflect subsequent film music practices.
Original, symphonic music. For some scholars, Steiner’s score constitutes a watershed moment owing to its presentation of original music. Writing in 1979, film music historian Tony Thomas claims that King Kong “left no doubt in any producer’s mind about the value of original music in filmmaking.”12 Though not quite as definitively, Royal S. Brown similarly asserts, “The original music by the specially bred composer that perhaps more than any other launched the classical film score was Max Steiner’s King Kong.”13 A recent film history book by musicologist James Wierzbicki stresses the importance of King Kong’s use of original and symphonic music. Though Wierzbicki acknowledges Steiner’s previous scores for Symphony of Six Million (April 1932), Bird of Paradise, and The Most Dangerous Game, he still claims that Steiner’s score for King Kong was his breakthrough because it established the “‘symphonic-yet-original’ model that Hollywood film music would follow for the next several decades.”14
Why King Kong’s original music should be especially noteworthy, however, remains unexplained in these accounts. As I indicated in chapter 5, original music had been on the rise well prior to King Kong’s score. Not only had several previous Steiner scores featured predominantly original music, but films such as United Artists’ Street Scene (August 1931), Paramount’s Blonde Venus (September 1932), and Paramount’s Trouble in Paradise (October 1932) had also made key use of original compositions. Though many films in the past few years had continued to use preexisting music, original music would not have been viewed as especially innovative.
The belief that King Kong holds importance for its “symphonic” qualities may stem from Steiner’s memoirs, where he states that the score required an eighty-piece orchestra. This number is indeed large, as it approaches the size of a full symphony orchestra, which typically features around one hundred members. Scholars have since determined, however, that Steiner greatly exaggerated this number, placing it instead at forty-six pieces.15 This was still a substantial orchestra for the period, but it hardly constitutes a radical change to film music practices. In the previous year, for instance, RKO’s Symphony of Six Million score featured an orchestra of thirty-five, and Paramount’s The Big Broadcast (October 1932) boasted a twenty-eight-piece orchestra.16 King Kong’s orchestra size, though large, would not have signaled a new film music approach.
Two-themed opening credits music. According to Cooke, “Kong illustrates all the features that were to remain typical both of Steiner’s dramatic scoring in particular and Golden Age narrative music in general.”17 First on Cooke’s list of typical Golden Age features is the film’s two-themed opening, which “presents two contrasting idioms, one aggressive (the monster) and the other romantic (the object of his affection).”18 King Kong’s title scene indeed offers two clearly contrasting idioms: fast-paced, brass-heavy music during the opening credits and a slower, lushly orchestrated string-oriented passage over a subsequent title card featuring a quotation. As I demonstrated in chapter 3, however, the use of opening music to preview a central theme was an established characteristic of films from 1929 onward. Even the specific strategy of presenting two contrasting musical idioms during the opening credits had been fairly typical beginning in 1929, and Steiner’s score merely continues this strategy.
Themes. For many scholars King Kong’s use of themes—especially a three note descending motive that denotes Kong (fig. 6.1)—constitutes a key precursor to classical film music practice. Palmer, in a chapter revealingly titled “Max Steiner: Birth of an Era,” notes the presence of Kong’s theme in a variety of circumstances, including Kong’s first appearance, his escape from the New York City theater, and the moments just prior to his death. Palmer focuses especially on the use of themes to articulate inner feelings, arguing that just before Kong falls to his death, “The Kong theme and Fay Wray theme … actually converge and become one, thus musically underlining the explicitly-stated parallel between the story of King Kong and Ann Darrow and the old fairy-tale of Beauty and the Beast. Here the music is required, perhaps for the first time in an American film, to explain to the audience what is actually happening on the screen, since the camera is unable to articulate Kong’s instinctive feelings of tenderness towards his helpless victim.”19 Cooke also remarks upon the use of Kong’s theme, describing it as a feature of the Golden Age and making similar comments about its recurrence.20
FIGURE 6.1 The “Kong” theme from King Kong.
Transcribed from Platte, “Musical Collaboration in the Films of David O. Selznick,” 66–67.
Such claims for King Kong’s usage of musical themes, though not inaccurate, distort the score’s historical importance and the nature of King Kong’s score as a whole. As my previous chapters have demonstrated, themes were common in sound film well before 1933. Even films containing very little music often featured at least one repeated theme. In the year prior to King Kong, themes had played key roles in genres ranging from musicals (Paramount’s One Hour with You [February 1932]) to dramas (Paramount’s A Farewell to Arms [December 1932], Columbia’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen [January 1933]), not to mention Steiner’s own 1932 scores.
More problematic still, discussions of King Kong’s themes tend to suggest that each theme is clearly differentiated. In a highly unusual move for the period, however, Steiner frequently blends the film’s three major themes: “Kong,” Ann’s theme—known as “Stolen Love” in the original score21 (fig. 6.2)—and “Jungle Dance” (fig. 6.3). Music scholar Peter Franklin points out that all three themes derive from the same descending three-note figure denoting Kong.22 Consequently, Steiner often produces music that seems to consist of a single cohesive musical idea yet features a mix of themes. During the ceremony in which the natives offer Ann to Kong, for instance, the modulation from “Jungle Dance” to “Stolen Love” and back to “Jungle Dance” is so smooth that the passage plays like a single piece in sonata form, with an exposition, development, and recapitulation. Then, just after Kong first appears onscreen, “Stolen Love” is repeated rapidly, with the first note of every other repetition beginning a half step higher on the scale. When the music reaches its highest note and begins what one might expect to be the final reiteration of “Stolen Love,” the subsequent descending melody shifts to Kong’s theme. Capitalizing on the similar downward contours of its three main melodies, King Kong often blends its themes rather than marking a clear separation between them.
Such blurring was rare in the early sound era, which almost universally featured clearly individuated themes. Yet this blurring would also be rare in the Golden Age, which far more commonly continued to present identifiable and clearly distinguishable themes. Ironically, considering King Kong’s reputation as the first classical Hollywood score, one of its musical features that truly was unusual in the period would generally not characterize subsequent practice.
FIGURE 6.2 The “Stolen Love” theme from King Kong.
Transcribed from Platte, “Musical Collaboration in the Films of David O. Selznick,” 66–67.
FIGURE 6.3 The “Jungle Dance” theme from King Kong. “Kong,” “Stolen Love,” and “Jungle Dance” all feature a lengthy first note followed by a descending scale. This enables Steiner to weave together the themes in a manner that sometimes renders them difficult to distinguish.
Transcribed from the conductor’s score, King Kong music files, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Mickey-mousing. In addition to themes, scholars single out King Kong’s use of mickey-mousing as a key attribute of the narrative cueing tendencies of the Golden Age of film music. Gorbman, for instance, points to the moment when the native chief walks toward the island’s visitors, and the music matches each of his steps. Nathan Platte also sees Steiner’s mickey-mousing as an ingredient of the Golden Age of film music, and MacDonald argues that the “split-second synchronization of music with visual movement” is “perhaps the single most noteworthy aspect of Steiner’s score for King Kong.”23
King Kong’s musical attention to narrative via mickey-mousing indeed constitutes a central music tactic. Escalating the mickey-mousing techniques found sporadically in his own previous scores as well as in musicals like Paramount’s Love Me Tonight (August 1932) and The Big Broadcast, Steiner makes the close synchronization between music and action a consistent priority in King Kong. Seemingly every prominent upward or downward movement in the image receives a corresponding rise or fall in the music, including Ann’s forced march up the steps to be sacrificed, the brontosaurus’s periscope-like rise out of the water, and Ann and Driscoll’s climb down a vine to escape Kong’s lair—to name only a few. Other types of action are also given mickey-mousing: sharp sforzandos when Driscoll jabs Kong’s fingers with a knife, harp plucks (reminiscent of Jeanette disrobing in Love Me Tonight) when Kong plucks off Ann’s clothing, trills when Kong tickles her, and cymbal crashes when Kong breaks free of his shackles in the New York City theater.
But Steiner’s enormous amount of mickey-mousing in King Kong ultimately distances the score from musical practices of the Golden Age. Where typical scores from the Golden Age use only occasional mickey-mousing, Steiner seizes virtually every opportunity to match music with a salient screen action. Cooke implicitly acknowledges this: “Steiner’s score seems dated … in its slavishly graphic mickey-mousing.”24 Steiner’s mickey-mousing is so extensive that this aspect of the score arguably holds more in common with the nickelodeon era’s interest in catching falls and cartoons’ tight synchronization between music and action than with the subsequent strategies of classical Hollywood music.25
Music and sound effects. Along with mickey-mousing, scholars have suggested that King Kong broke new ground via the score’s generation of sound effects. Film music scholar Mark Evans writes that the score “contained a vast number of musical sound effects, all invented by Steiner.”26 Though Evans provides no specifics, he may be referring to such instances as the low-pitched, rumbling brass signifying Kong’s offscreen footsteps just before he appears onscreen for the first time, or the cymbal crash that stands in for the sound of his breaking the bar of the great doors later in the film. If so, Evans’s claim that Steiner “invented” all the orchestra-generated sound effects constitutes a clear overstatement. Chapter 2 demonstrated that orchestras in late silent and early synchronized films regularly mimicked narrative sound effects in a manner similar to King Kong. For instance, Warner Bros.’ The Better ’Ole (October 1926) features timpani strikes for the sound of cannon blasts, and Universal’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (November 1927) and The Man Who Laughs (April 1928) both use cymbals to denote the shattering of glass. What is more unusual is the use of orchestral effects for offscreen sounds like Kong’s footsteps. Where early synchronized films generally used orchestral sound effects to illustrate implied onscreen sounds, here the orchestra attends also to suggested offscreen sound events. Steiner thus adopts a previous technique (orchestral sound effects) to service the sound era’s newfound interest in creating a diegetic soundscape.
Other scholars have focused on the score’s coordination with non-orchestra-generated sound effects. King Kong featured an unprecedented amount of postproduction sound manipulation to generate the noises of the island “monsters,” and scholars laud the score’s awareness of other sound elements. Cooke, for instance, claims that King Kong’s score constitutes a “landmark” partly as a result of the innovative idea of stopping the music during Kong’s airplane battle so as to allow the “deafening sound of the biplanes’ machine guns” to dominate the soundtrack.27
Once again, however, while King Kong’s score accommodated probably an unprecedented amount of sound effects, its methods for doing so were not especially innovative. King Kong’s music is coordinated with sound effects in three main ways. First, music ceases entirely during Kong’s sound-effects-laden battles with the tyrannosaurus and the airplanes. This tactic dates back to early synchronized films such as Warner Bros.’ Old San Francisco (June 1927) and MGM’s Speedway (September 1929), which halted music for an entire reel to showcase then-innovative sound effects. Second, Steiner occasionally provides a brief pause in the music in coordination with a prominent sound effect. For instance, when Kong is first introduced, the score provides three deep notes played by brass to denote his footsteps and then pauses to allow Kong’s first roar to be clearly heard before continuing with notes played by the brass. Such musical pauses for sound effects, though not common, can be found in films prior to King Kong. They are perhaps most notable in Steiner’s own score for The Most Dangerous Game, which features musical pauses to accentuate key sound effects (see chapter 5). Third, at times the volume level dips just prior to an animal sound. Yet by 1933, the practice of lowering music’s volume to favor key diegetic sounds was commonplace. In short, Steiner’s score for King Kong displays considerable attention to sound effects, but it draws on practices already developed—or at least initiated—in earlier years.
Native music. Finally, several scholars posit Steiner’s musical approach to native peoples as a key precursor to the birth of the Golden Age of film music. Both Brown and Cooke note Steiner’s use of open fourths and fifths, with Cooke remarking that such a tactic was “a useful and economic formula” that would later appear “ubiquitously in Hollywood scores for ‘other’ peoples as diverse as Native Americans and ancient Romans.”28 Yet while King Kong plainly uses these techniques, Cooke’s use of the word formula begs the question of why the film’s use of open fourths and fifths to denote the natives deserves particular mention. By 1933 this technique was entirely conventional and thus would not have seemed especially noteworthy. Gorbman has demonstrated that tom-tom beats, open fourths and fifths, and melodies featuring falling thirds had already come to symbolize Native Americans in nineteenth-century theater. This representation of Native Americans stemmed from a “European-American all-purpose shorthand” for representing a wide range of “primitive or exotic peoples” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.29 These tactics continued in early twentieth-century film music, often serving as a catchall for various “primitive” ethnic groups. Not only did tom-tom beats, open fourths and fifths, and falling thirds signify Native Americans in silent film music collections of the 1910s and 1920s,30 but these methods signified other ethnic groups, including African Americans. Joseph Carl Breil’s score for The Birth of a Nation (1915), for instance, accompanies the film’s first title (“The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion”) with tom-tom beats and a pentatonic melody (another denotation of “primitivism”) featuring a falling third.31
Sound cinema prior to King Kong continued to apply such music to natives. Steiner’s own Bird of Paradise musically depicts natives via open fourths and fifths, dissonant chords, heavy passages played by the brass, chanting, and a heavy, simplistic drumbeat. Alfred Newman’s score for Mr. Robinson Crusoe uses similar tactics. King Kong does feature a more extensive use of dissonant chords and brass than these previous sound films, partly because Steiner links these techniques to Kong as well. By featuring similar musical styles between apparently African natives and an ape, Steiner’s music both dehumanizes the natives and implicitly marks Kong as an ethnic “Other” and racial threat to Ann. Yet stylistically, Steiner’s native music remained largely a continuation of a musical tradition in which numerous ethnically “Other” groups received the same stereotypical musical treatment. Thus, while King Kong’s musical representation of the natives may recur in numerous subsequent scores, its methods derived from earlier, widely accepted conventions pertaining to the musical depiction of natives.
Writing about native music in King Kong from a different perspective, musicologist Mark Slobin credits Steiner’s music in King Kong—as well as in Bird of Paradise—with initiating the practice of “commercial-film ethnomusicology.” For Slobin, commercial-film ethnomusicology involves the association of people in specific locations with a particular brand of film music.32 Once again, however, many previous sound films also engaged in this process. Warner Bros.’ The Squall (May 1929) featured numerous selections from Hungarian composers; Fox’s Liliom (October 1930), set in Hungary, included music in the native verbunkos style; and films set in East Asia like Paramount’s Madame Butterfly (December 1932) or Columbia’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen used stereotypical East Asian music. As Slobin himself points out, the early 1930s marked a peak of anthropological exploration.33 It thus stands to reason that many other early sound films would forge associations between a particular music style and the native peoples of a certain region. Like many other aspects of King Kong’s score, the musical treatment of natives did not initiate a sound film tradition.
KING KONG’S MUSICAL INNOVATIONS
The preceding analysis is not meant to discredit Steiner’s musical abilities or suggest that his score for King Kong is derivative or uninteresting. But ostensibly “new” practices seldom emerge from the head of a lone individual. To trace an accurate history of the period, one must recognize the extent to which Steiner drew on the assumptions and techniques found in earlier sound films. Conversely, through a more comprehensive understanding of music in the early sound era, one can also gain a new appreciation for King Kong’s more innovative—or at least unusual—musical approaches.
As indicated above, certain elements—particularly the blurring of themes and an extraordinarily large amount of mickey-mousing—differed from common practice. The sheer duration of film music also deviated from the norm. From opening to closing titles, music occupies nearly three-quarters of the film. Though the occasional continuous score in the 1929–32 period featured higher percentages of music, 75 percent was an extremely large amount of music in an intermittent score. Two other aspects of the score were also quite unusual and deserve recognition, although, like the blurring of themes and extensive mickey-mousing, they hold little in common with the Golden Age of film music.
Musical saliency. King Kong’s music constitutes a noticeable presence through much of the film. This is partly due to the music’s unusually loud mix vis-à-vis dialogue and, especially, sound effects. More important, however, Steiner’s score draws attention to itself via the frequent use of dissonant chords. King Kong was not the first to make prominent use of dissonant chords. I demonstrated in chapter 5 that Steiner incorporated this technique into Bird of Paradise and The Most Dangerous Game as well. Yet Steiner’s use of dissonance constitutes one of the most unique aspects of his early sound scores—no other composer from the period employed this technique with Steiner’s regularity. Brown, Mac-Donald, and Cooke all link Steiner’s score to modernism, with MacDonald explicitly claiming that Steiner’s unresolved dissonances “tended to emulate the French Impressionist style of Claude Debussy, whose harmonic patterns often defy traditional rules of chord progression.”34 Brown goes further in his recognition of this unusual technique, stating that King Kong’s music “would no doubt have scandalized most concert-going audiences of the time with its open-interval harmonies and dissonant chords, its tritone motifs, or such devices as the chromatic scale in parallel, minor seconds.”35
Left unmentioned in the above analyses, however, is the fact that such modernist techniques run counter to the characteristics said to embody Golden Age music. According to numerous scholars, the Golden Age typically featured music in a late-romantic idiom and constituted an “unheard” presence. Film music scholarship has thus created a paradox. While King Kong is said to begin the Golden Age of film music, possibly its most “groundbreaking” technique is one that clashes directly with the very techniques of that era. Scholars to date have avoided this contradiction, sometimes even positing King Kong as the beginning of the Golden Age and describing its harsh dissonances in consecutive sentences.36 Yet the bombastic, dissonant quality of King Kong’s music suggests that in certain respects its score served not as a model for film music but as a special case that would not be widely imitated.
Scale and sets. King Kong’s loud, salient score, combined with the music’s close attention to image details, results in another unusual method: the use of music to emphasize the film’s scale and striking settings. In a modern era of special-effects-laden action films, it is easy to forget that King Kong was a visually stunning film in 1933. Regarding the “studio and camera technology,” the 1933 Variety reviewer remarked: “Kong surpasses anything of its type which has gone before it in commercial filmmaking.”37 In particular, the filmmakers’ handling of scale in order to convey Kong’s enormous size was unprecedented and regularly singled out for praise. The Variety reviewer gushed: “In adhering to the proper perspective the technical crew has never missed. The illusion of comparative size is splendid.”38 Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times singled out the film’s use of scale in the final New York City sequences: “One step and the beast traverses half a block. If buildings hinder his progress, he pushes them down, and below him the people look like Lilliputians.” Hall also marveled at such moments as when Kong’s head fills an entire bedroom window.39
Though unacknowledged by the reviewers, Steiner’s score contributes to the convincing presentation of Kong’s size. During the jungle sequences especially, the score cleaves closely to physical actions, using music to match the movements of Kong and his pursuers. When Denham and company race through the jungle trying to rescue Ann, Steiner frequently provides short, rapid thirty-second notes. This contrasts strikingly with the music that evokes Kong’s giant footsteps, which consists of low-pitched notes more widely spaced in time. This loose mickey-mousing calls attention to the colossal size difference between Kong and the humans, thus rendering Kong all the more massive. The extent to which characters can be heard over the often-loud music also contributes to the film’s presentation of size difference. Where the gigantic monsters emit noises that generally either match or exceed the score’s volume, human noises—outside of dialogue—are more commonly at a lower volume than the music. The score virtually drowns out the generalized shouting during the jungle dance, and potential human-generated sound elements such as the footsteps of Ann’s search party are inaudible. As a result, the film suggests the humans’ impotence on the island against Kong and emphasizes the enormous differences in size between the monsters and humans.40
Music’s close coordination with images also helps direct attention to the film’s sets, another aspect that contemporary reviews singled out for praise. When an unusual, striking setting is first revealed, Steiner tends to provide a noticeable musical shift. Consider, for instance, the film’s first shot of Skull Island. In the previous scene the sailors try unsuccessfully to find the island in thick fog, and the score provides quiet music featuring a harp, strings, and distant drums. The first shot of the island (fig. 6.4), however, coincides exactly with a long, ominous note played by the brass section. This shift in music marks Skull Island as an unusual setting worthy of attention. A few moments later, when the sailors canoe toward the island, the camera provides a new shot—positioned closer to the island—that renders the island’s giant wall in more detail (fig. 6.5). Exactly coinciding with this shot change is a mild sforzando and the introduction of an oboe playing rapid thirty-second notes. This correspondence between music and establishing shot draws attention to this closer view of the island and imbues the setting with particular significance. Similarly, much later in the film the score provides a strong orchestra chord for the first shot displaying Kong’s lair, which offers a striking backdrop of the island and ocean (fig. 6.6). Thanks to Steiner’s predilection for precise musical timings with the image, the score helps accentuate King Kong’s impressive visual accomplishments.
FIGURE 6.4 Musical shifts accompany initial depictions of the remarkable and unusual settings of Skull Island in King Kong. This includes the first shot of Skull Island …
FIGURE 6.5 … a closer view of Skull Island’s walls …
FIGURE 6.6 … and the first shot of Kong’s lair. By shifting music with shot changes, Steiner’s score encourages the audience to marvel at the film’s set design.
KING KONG AND MUSIC FOR AN ACTION-ADVENTURE FILM
Earlier sound film practices—including the use of music for other worlds, the presence of original music, the soundtrack’s relationship between music and sound effects, and the use of native music—account for many of the musical techniques found in King Kong. But why does King Kong’s score also include elements that were atypical in the early sound era, including the blurring of themes, extensive music, and unprecedentedly dogged synchronization between music and image? The answer likely stems from King Kong’s oddity as an early 1930s film. Whereas films from the period commonly featured fairly extensive dialogue in contemporary urban settings, King Kong went for broke in its action and fantasy elements. According to period assumptions, both elements lent themselves to extensive music. We saw in chapter 5 that music served as a sound substitute in the absence of dialogue and that other worlds regularly featured music. Given a film that upped the ante in terms of the amount of action, Steiner—already inclined toward having music attend closely to screen events—responded with what is essentially an action score. Mickey-mousing draws attention to physical action, regular dissonance conveys the physical danger faced by the explorers, and the score’s evocation of size difference and unusual settings contributes to the sense of peril and adventure as humans grapple with colossal, prehistoric beasts.
The notion that King Kong used an action-based score may also help explain the score’s tendency to blur its major themes. For some scholars, the deliberate melodic resemblance across themes opens up levels of psychological engagement and association, particularly between Ann and Kong.41 Yet this blurring of themes in some ways also limits musical attention to character psychology. In films where themes are clearly separated, the tempo, key, and instrumentation of various characters’ themes often reveal key attributes of each character’s psyche and help trace the character’s evolving feelings. King Kong’s blurred themes, in contrast, tend to direct attention away from the mind-set of a single character. Through the regular presence of dissonant, bombastic music and blended themes, King Kong’s score often seems focused more on conveying the sense of physical action and danger than on probing internal states. Kong’s death scene, in which the score evokes sympathy for Kong by using a slow tempo and string-oriented orchestration, constitutes an anomaly in a score far more intent on portraying the horror of and physical danger imposed by Skull Island’s various monsters.
King Kong’s score thus stands as a testament both to the influence of earlier film music practices and the extent to which an unorthodox film could help push a score into unfamiliar territory. However, it may have been precisely the unusual nature of King Kong as a film that would prevent its musical techniques from being accepted as a new, durable approach to film music.
MORE OF THE SAME: THE FILM SCORE, 1933–1934
According to scholars, the impact of King Kong’s score was immediate and substantial. Thomas writes that King Kong featured “the film score that brought Steiner to everyone’s attention.” Evans states that the score’s “throbbing, pulsating quality made it an immediate classic.” More recently, MacDonald asserts, “Few scores in the history of the motion picture have had an impact as immediate as Steiner’s ingenious work on King Kong”. And Slobin posits King Kong as “the film that really drew attention to the composer’s contribution to a movie’s success.”42
Period newspapers and trade journals, however, provide no indication that King Kong’s score was heralded as a breakthrough. Variety’s review of the film does spend part of one sentence praising its “gripping and fitting musical score.”43 But few other contemporary publications provide any mention of King Kong’s music.44 This does not mean that the score remained entirely unnoticed, but it does suggest that King Kong was not immediately seen as making an overwhelming contribution to film music.
If King Kong received little attention in the press, its influence on film music in the year following its release was also minimal. The remainder of this chapter assesses King Kong’s immediate musical impact based on my viewing of forty-three films featuring music from the 1933–34 season. Despite the release of the widely seen King Kong in March of 1933, the 1933–34 season featured essentially the same musical trends and techniques found from 1931 to 1933. As in the 1931–33 period, filmmakers gradually increased their use of nondiegetic music and continued to tie music to other worlds that differed from familiar, urban reality. Where King Kong had broken the mold via a more salient score and an obsessively close synchronization to narrative details, 1933–34 films continued to provide relatively unobtrusive music and only occasionally attended closely to minute narrative cues. King Kong did not provide a new, widely accepted solution for the use of film music but rather constituted a model that was routinely ignored.
Of the films likely to imitate King Kong’s music, those depicting the exploration of dangerous, unfamiliar environments might seem to be the top candidates. One such film was Paramount’s Four Frightened People (January 1934), which features a narrative that is in certain ways suggestive of King Kong. In Four Frightened People a ship bound for New York City suffers an influx of the bubonic plague, and the ship’s four white travelers—schoolteacher Judy Jones (Claudette Colbert), chemist Arnold Ainger (Herbert Marshall), socialite Fifi Mardick (Mary Boland), and famed reporter Stewart Corder (William Gargan)—escape the ship by seizing a lifeboat and rowing ashore to the nearby Malay Peninsula. As in King Kong, the party arrives ashore to be confronted by the sound of drumming and the presence of potentially dangerous natives. To catch a freighter, the party must—as in King Kong—venture into the unfamiliar jungle and brave danger there, including water buffalo, cobras, and a hostile Sakai tribe. Like King Kong, the film concludes with scenes back in the United States, which in this case depict Ainger’s decision to divorce his wife and marry Judy.
Despite narrative similarities, however, the scores for Four Frightened People and King Kong have little in common. Where King Kong showcases the power of original music stemming from one creative mind, Four Frightened People not only features no screen credit for music but continues Paramount’s tendency to create a score via a group of staff members, in this case Karl Hajos, Milan Roder, Heinz Roemheld, and John Leipold.45 More important, unlike King Kong’s score, the music in Four Frightened People devotes little attention to scenes of danger and action. When the characters square off against a deadly water buffalo, are nearly bitten by a cobra, and face danger from two tribes, no music plays on the soundtrack. Mickey-mousing is also avoided—rapid “hurry” music to accompany Judy running constitutes one of the only instances in which the filmmakers tie music to screen action.
Instead, the score attends exclusively to Judy’s character transformation. Initially prim and sexually repressed, Judy—as a result of jungle living—eventually sheds her glasses and conservative clothing, dons revealing outfits crafted from jungle leaves and animal skins, and “blossoms” into a confident, sexual woman. Every musical cue ties to Judy’s gradually coming to terms with her sexuality, resulting in a far sparser score. Slow cello music plays when Judy realizes that she must sleep next to the men at night because of the dangers of the jungle. Later, a soaring theme (fig. 6.7) plays when she exhibits love for the first time by whispering to Carter while he sleeps and then tenderly hanging his wet socks and shoes by the fire. Soon it becomes clear that this theme represents Judy’s metamorphosis. It plays as Judy showers naked under a waterfall, when Ainger grabs her and declares to her that she is beautiful, when Judy looks at herself in the mirror for the first time in the film and puts on lipstick, and when she displays a sexy new leaf-crafted outfit for the men and enjoys their sudden attentiveness. In the next step of Judy’s sexual awakening, she takes control of her allure. The theme plays when Judy, despite being dramatically kissed by Carter, recognizes his shallowness and rejects his advances. The theme plays again when Judy and Ainger broach the topic of marriage, the final step in her transformation from spinster to mature, sexual woman. The score thus avoids King Kong’s musical attention to danger and action, instead using a clearly delineated theme to posit Judy’s character development as the central feature of the narrative.
FIGURE 6.7 Judy’s theme in Four Frightened People.
Transcribed by the author.
Universal’s S.O.S. Iceberg (September 1933) also depicts the physical danger of an unfamiliar environment. Shot on location in Greenland and Iceland, S.O.S. Iceberg tells the story of explorers stranded on an iceberg who must be rescued before the iceberg breaks and sends them to their deaths. The film was a coproduction between Germany and the United States, and the filmmakers shot two versions simultaneously: one in German, the other in English. Though the basic story remains the same across the two versions, they contain differences in footage, actors, editing, and even narrative structure and detail. I focus here on the English-language version because this was the version released in the United States.
S.O.S. Iceberg features a score by the German composer Paul Dessau, recorded by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.46 Whether Dessau would have been aware of King Kong’s score when he composed for S.O.S. Iceberg remains an open question, but his score does contain superficial similarities to King Kong. This includes the amount of music (roughly 80 percent for S.O.S. Iceberg, 75 percent for King Kong)47 and the use of music to convey the difficulties of a strange environment. For instance, when the explorers trek across the snowy landscape or try to escape from a hungry polar bear, Dessau offers dissonant chords and minor-key passages to denote these dangers. However, the score’s general lack of precise synchronism differs substantially from King Kong’s score and renders music a less salient element. A few choice actions receive music matches, such as quick cymbal crashes to represent explorer Johannes Brand’s (Gibson Gowland) repeated leaps into freezing water as he attempts to swim for help, or timpani rolls to accompany certain depictions of iceberg breakups. But on the whole the score attends only to general moods rather than specific actions.
S.O.S. Iceberg also displays a different logic behind the places where music occurs. Unlike King Kong’s score Dessau’s music attends to the concept of adventure and exploration rather than emphasizing the separation between the mundane and the unfamiliar. For instance, in an early prevoyage scene in a banquet hall, lead explorer Carl Lawrence (Rod La Rocque) discusses the expedition as a noble pursuit of scientific knowledge begun by Wegener, who died in the arctic. Where King Kong avoids music in early mundane settings, Dessau underscores even this “ordinary world” with a majestic theme. This theme then recurs at numerous points in the film, including the moment when Lawrence decides to push forward despite the danger; several times when Lawrence and his wife, Ellen (Leni Riefenstahl), embrace; and when an airplane finally rescues Brand. The theme is thus tied to a host of elements related to the voyage: the separation of loved ones, the noble pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the trip’s extreme danger. Whereas King Kong’s score draws attention to the strangeness of an exotic land, S.O.S. Iceberg’s score—by playing even prevoyage—instead helps foreground what it means to explore such a land in the first place.
Genres other than adventure films feature even fewer similarities with King Kong’s salient, hypersynchronized score. MGM’s Manhattan Melodrama (May 1934) features a modest nondiegetic score. Nondiegetic music plays for six minutes of the nine-minute prologue, which depicts turn-of-the-century New York City. When the film shifts to contemporary New York City for the remainder of the narrative, the filmmakers provide predominantly diegetic music. However, nondiegetic music does play during a scene between the gambler Blackie (Clark Gable) and his girlfriend Eleanor (Myrna Loy) on a yacht and later in a tear-jerking scene when Blackie sacrifices his life to save best friend Jim’s (William Powell) career.
Despite the presence of nondiegetic music, the musical techniques themselves hold virtually nothing in common with King Kong’s score. Unlike King Kong, Manhattan Melodrama’s music remains at a very low volume level vis-à-vis dialogue and sound effects. The score also eschews Steiner’s tendency to match music to particular moments in the narrative, providing only general mood music. The lone exception occurs just after Blackie’s death, in which the introduction of a nondiegetic harp suggests that Blackie’s noble sacrifice for the sake of his friend’s career will send Blackie to heaven. Manhattan Melodrama also does not display King Kong’s fondness for recurring themes—no nondiegetic musical themes are repeated during the film.
MGM’s willingness to use a score at all reflects the period’s increasing receptiveness to nondiegetic music. Since the coming of sound, MGM had remained the most musically conservative studio, regularly releasing films containing only diegetic music.48 Yet King Kong probably had little influence on MGM’s gradually increasing receptivity to nondiegetic music. Despite Manhattan Melodrama’s periodic use of accompanying music, by far the majority of MGM films from 1933 to 1934 continued to offer little or no nondiegetic music. This includes films set in contemporary urban locations like Penthouse (September 1933), Men in White (April 1934), Sadie McKee (May 1934), and The Thin Man (May 1934)—all of which feature New York City—and the Los Angeles/Chicago set Sons of the Desert (December 1933), a vehicle for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. That King Kong had little impact on MGM’s musical practices is most apparent in MGM’s Tarzan and His Mate (April 1934). Despite being set in a jungle far removed from civilization, the film avoids any use of nondiegetic music outside of the beginning and end title sequences.
The comedy genre, which traditionally contained very little nondiegetic music, featured a few music experiments from 1933 to 1934. Good-Bye Love (November 1933), a zany comedy produced by Jefferson Pictures and distributed by RKO, features extensive music in the background of the soundtrack (the music is credited to S. K. Wineland and Abe Meyer). Good-Bye Love’s early scenes are set in an urban environment and feature divorce, alimony, stocks, and jail. Though these topics are treated light-heartedly, they nevertheless denote harsh, pragmatic reality, and the scenes feature only diegetic music. When butler Oswald Groggs (Charles Ruggles) uses his master’s money to take a paradisiacal trip to Atlantic City, however, music with no clear source plays. Such music continues through most of Groggs’s trip and then even begins spilling over into scenes set back in the city.
Good-Bye Love’s music is extensive, with 40 percent of the film featuring music with no clear image source. Still, the film’s concern with diegetic plausibility, its frequent song plugging, and its only occasional mickey-mousing tie more closely to late 1920s and early 1930s scores than to King Kong. Where King Kong features only a few efforts to link its music to the diegesis, Good-Bye Love adheres to the tendency, found especially from 1929 to 1931, of always offering at least a faint possibility that the music is diegetic. Music thus plays only in plausibly diegetic locations, such as a hotel lobby or dance floor, and halts for a scene on the Atlantic City beach. Song plugging is extensive in Good-Bye Love, as the eponymous title song plays repeatedly throughout the film. This was a practice most closely associated not with King Kong—which features no song plugging—but with late 1920s and early 1930s musicals and select nonmusicals. Good-Bye Love’s occasional use of mickey-mousing and kidding for comedic effect also derives from early sound musicals. For instance, the film provides a stinger when a Ping-Pong ball hits Groggs in the eye and plays “How Dry I Am” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” when two women become drunk. These efforts to create humor via close musical attention to the narrative owe more to previous zany musicals like Love Me Tonight and The Big Broadcast than to the more dramatic mickey-mousing of King Kong.
In 1933 and 1934, B films—which almost universally avoided nondiegetic music earlier in the 1930s—experimented increasingly with film scores. Good-Bye Love shares elements of A and B films: it runs for only sixty-seven minutes yet features a modest star of A films in Ruggles. Universal’s horror film The Black Cat (May 1934) provides an example of extensive music in a more clear-cut B film. Though The Black Cat featured horror stars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, it contained a short shooting schedule, a low budget, and a short running time.49 The Black Cat’s score has enjoyed a large amount of attention,50 primarily because the horror genre would come to depend heavily on music to generate affect. Before 1934, however, Universal—the studio that specialized in horror films—had exhibited a marked aversion to film music, providing little nondiegetic music in its horror successes Dracula (February 1931) and Frankenstein (November 1931).51 Indeed, according to several sources, The Black Cat’s music-drenched score (some form of music occupies nearly 80 percent of the film) occurred only because Carl Laemmle Sr., the founder of Universal, was out of town during postproduction.52 Still, aside from tying music to “other worlds”—a strategy of the early 1930s more broadly—The Black Cat’s score has little in common with King Kong.
The Black Cat’s music connects quite clearly to an “other world,” in this case the twisted world of Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) and his Hungarian mansion. As The Black Cat begins, novelist Peter Allison (David Manners) and his wife Joan (Julie Bishop) are riding alone in a train compartment on their honeymoon and must suddenly share their compartment with a stranger named Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi). This encounter with Werdegast, who is tormented by the loss of his wife, constitutes the couple’s first step toward a world of obsession and madness. As Werdegast sits down in the compartment, he inadvertently jostles the couple’s phonograph player and cuts off the music. The couple no longer controls the film’s music, just as their lives will soon spiral out of control in Poelzig’s world, which features copious nondiegetic music. When an accident forces Peter, Joan, and Werdegast to stay at Poelzig’s home, nondiegetic music plays almost continuously while the plot descends into Satanism, necrophilia, and sadism. The audience eventually learns that Poelzig keeps Werdegast’s dead wife preserved in a glass case in the cellar, has married Werdegast’s daughter, and plans to sacrifice Joan in an upcoming Satanic ceremony. Late in the film, Werdegast, finally gaining the upper hand on Poelzig, begins delightedly flaying the skin off of Poelzig’s face. Like King Kong (and The Most Dangerous Game) ordinary characters enter a twisted and evil environment controlled by an extraordinary entity, and extensive nondiegetic music serves to mark off this space from safe, known reality.
Here, however, The Black Cat’s musical parallels with King Kong end. Unlike King Kong, The Black Cat’s music director, Heinz Roemheld, uses predominantly preexisting works, including reorchestrated and sometimes modified compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.53 In the 1920s, Roemheld had served as music director and orchestra conductor of the Alhambra Theater in Milwaukee, and the creation of the pastiche score would have been a familiar process to him.54 The use of preexisting compositions also encouraged a loose correlation between music and screen actions, a technique that differs considerably from King Kong’s extreme synchronization. The Black Cat’s music does consistently link characters and settings to particular themes, and on occasion narrative events and music do prominently coincide. For instance, during the scene in which Werdegast kills a black cat, one of Schubert’s primary themes from the first movement of the Unfinished Symphony coincides with Joan’s arrival in the room, and a cymbal crash matches a shot of Poelzig dramatically clenching the statue of a naked woman. According to Paul Mandell, both image and music were edited in this scene so that certain moments would “correspond to the crescendos and diminuendos.”55 The filmmakers, however, steer well clear of the punctual, mickey-mousing synchronization tactics that populate King Kong’s score.
The musical genre constitutes a final type of film that was not significantly influenced by King Kong’s score. After its nosedive in the 1930–31 season, this genre enjoyed an equally dramatic rebound in 1933. Thanks to the unexpected success of Warner Bros.’ 42nd Street (March 1933), all the major studios rapidly increased their production of musicals.56 Rather than capitalize on the extensive nondiegetic music strategies found in King Kong, however, the musical returned to a more diegetically restrained form of film scoring.
The musical conservatism of 42nd Street likely stemmed from its gritty urban setting and backstage format. Film historian Tino Balio points out that “unlike the Lubitsch-type operettas, [42nd Street and its immediate successors] were set in the very real world of Depression America and told gritty stories of backstage life spiced with platoons of chorus girls, upbeat music, and sex.”57 With 42nd Street’s “realistic” portrayal of urban life came a hesitancy to commit to fully nondiegetic music. Paramount’s operettas from 1929 to 1932 had featured salient motifs that often cleaved closely to character actions and thoughts and even commented wryly on the diegesis. But 42nd Street provided music that was either explicitly diegetic or that played in locations where live or recorded music might conceivably be heard, such as a restaurant, several hotel and apartment rooms, and a dressing room.
In many cases the songs heard in such spaces are the same ones that would be performed in the upcoming show, particularly Al Dubin and Harry Warren’s “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” “Young and Healthy,” and “42nd Street.” Their placement generally reflects on the narrative in some way. “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” for instance, plays only during scenes involving the relationship between Broadway star Dorothy (Bebe Daniels) and her ex-partner Pat (George Brent). The application of this song is narratively appropriate. Not only does Dorothy perform the song during rehearsal, but the title also reflects the nature of the couple’s relationship. Through dialogue, the audience learns that Dorothy and Pat have become too dependent on each other, thus preventing Pat from making a living. The use of the same music onstage and off also helps unify the two spheres. It conveys what would become a staple of backstage musicals: the resolution of romantic relationships off stage matches the production of an outstanding show on stage.58
The reiteration of show tunes primarily serves song-plugging purposes, however, an approach found nowhere in King Kong. By the show’s grand opening—which includes performances of “Young and Healthy,” and “42nd Street”—the film audience has already heard one instrumental version of “Young and Healthy” and five renditions of “42nd Street.” So important is song plugging that the songs’ presence strains narrative credibility. When Dorothy meets Pat in a restaurant, for instance, a jazz rendition of “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me” plays, which suggests a possible radio or phonograph in the restaurant. Yet the song’s presence makes no narrative sense because the cast has only just started rehearsing this number for the upcoming show, where it will presumably debut. The same illogic exists for the songs “Young and Healthy” and “42nd Street,” both of which can be heard in small hotel-room parties the night before the show’s opening.
The spate of musicals that immediately followed 42nd Street exhibited much the same diegetic conservatism and song-plugging tactics. Warner Bros.’ Gold Diggers of 1933 (May 1933) and Footlight Parade (October 1933) feature predominantly diegetic music and play the show’s songs prior to the show’s debut. Musicals at other studios, including MGM’s Dancing Lady (November 1933) and Paramount’s Murder at the Vanities (May 1934), likewise use largely diegetic music and reiterate performed songs. Even a film like Warner Bros.’ Wonder Bar (March 1934), which features accompanying music for most of the film, uses the presence of a nightclub orchestra throughout the film to grant much of the music at least a semblance of diegetic plausibility.
The musical’s newfound preference for such plausibility constitutes a striking reversal of the situation that obtained in 1931 and 1932, where musicals offered some of the most audacious and salient nondiegetic accompaniment of the entire 1926–34 period. The return of the backstage musical format certainly precluded the use of nondiegetic music during the show’s numbers, but even the genre’s narrative sequences avoided the nondiegetic mickey-mousing and closely synchronized themes that characterized many early 1930s musicals. At a time when Steiner’s score for King Kong was adopting the musical’s close coordination between music and image, the musical actually veered away from these very tactics.
THE SCORES OF MAX STEINER, 1933–1934
The only post–King Kong composer to continue Steiner’s close matches between music and image was Steiner himself. Though a number of Steiner’s post–King Kong scores continue to supply only opening and concluding nondiegetic music—such as RKO’s Spitfire (March 1934)—a few attend quite closely to specific moments in the narrative. One film that does this is RKO’s Little Women (November 1933), which on the surface would seem to have little in common with King Kong. Where King Kong features extensive action sequences in a fantastical world, Little Women offers limited physical action, portraying small-town New England family life in the 1860s. This depiction of a bygone era, however, justifies the inclusion of nondiegetic music. The opening credits begin with the family’s theme played on a clavichord, an instrument primarily associated with the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and thus strongly suggestive of a long-ago era.59 Through the prominent use of this instrument, the score positions itself as part of the film’s larger project of retrieving and re-presenting the past. Further tying music with the evocation of the past, the score features a medley of well-known songs associated with the Civil War, including “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” (1864), “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1861), and “The Girl I Left Behind” (date unknown).
Like Steiner’s score for King Kong, the score for Little Women exhibits an unusually high attentiveness to narrative. During the first dialogue exchange, the children’s mother, “Marmee” March (Spring Byington), talks to an old man whose four sons have either been killed, captured, or have fallen ill during Civil War combat. The scene lasts only a minute and a half, but the score adjusts to virtually every line of dialogue. When the man mentions that his son is sick in the hospital, a string orchestration conveys the nobility of his son’s sacrifice. When the man reveals that his other three sons were either killed in the war or taken prisoner, the score shifts to a standard signifier of the Union: “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Deeply touched by his sacrifice, Marmee gives him some money, and the score reflects her sympathy for the man’s emotional troubles by providing a high-pitched, slow, sad tune on the violin. As the man wishes Marmee a Merry Christmas, a strain of “Silent Night” is heard. After the man leaves, a minor-key violin passage plays as Marmee remains visibly moved by the conversation. When she mentions to another woman that the man’s son may die, a distant bugle signifying military sacrifice plays on the soundtrack. Finally, when Marmee acknowledges, “I have my four girls to comfort me,” the main theme, which will come to signify the March family and especially the sisters’ close bond, plays. At every possible juncture in this conversation, Steiner’s score overtly shifts to reflect the newest line of dialogue. Such precise coordination between music and narrative cues can be found only in Steiner’s scores in the 1933–34 season.
The remainder of Little Women’s score does not attend to dialogue or other narrative events quite as closely. Still, the score does feature regular adjustments to reflect shifts in emotion. For instance, Steiner’s music often halts abruptly when a mood is broken. Music stops when Jo (Katharine Hepburn), musing on the secret that she has published a story, unexpectedly bumps into love-interest Theodore “Laurie” Laurence (Douglass Montgomery) on the street; when Laurie notices Jo sitting sadly by herself under a tree after her sister Meg’s (Frances Dee) cheerful wedding; and when Jo, depressed that she will not travel to Europe with her aunt, is greeted by the friendly Professor Bhaer (Paul Lukas). Music also shifts to reflect the changing emotions of the family. When Jo’s sister Beth (Jean Parker), near death, shows unexpected signs of recovery, the music switches from a slow minor-key theme to a faster tune played lightly on the strings. More than any non-Steiner score from 1933 to 1934, Little Women’s music is often coordinated precisely with narrative events.
Still, the scores for Little Women and King Kong contain important differences. Little Women eschews the bombastic, dissonant chords of King Kong and provides music for a mere quarter of the film. The score that most clearly continues the techniques found in King Kong is RKO’s The Lost Patrol (February 1934), a film that—like Little Women—featured King Kong codirector Merian C. Cooper as an executive producer. In terms of percentage, The Lost Patrol’s score exceeds even King Kong, with music playing for roughly 90 percent of the film. Like King Kong and early 1930s scores, the music’s presence can be justified by the film’s “otherworldly” setting—in this case the desert of Mesopotamia during World War I.
The Lost Patrol also shares with King Kong the use of music to suggest ever-present danger. As the film begins, the only man who knows the patrol’s position and mission is shot and killed, leaving the rest of the patrol dangerously lost. Music plays during these opening moments and then stops when the patrol members stumble on an oasis and believe they are safe from the dangers of the desert. Yet music soon returns, and members of the patrol are subsequently picked off one by one by enemy snipers. Like music during King Kong’s Skull Island sequences, then, much of The Lost Patrol’s nondiegetic music is tied specifically to scenes depicting the danger inherent in an uncharted landscape.
The Lost Patrol’s score also features many of the same techniques that made King Kong’s score so salient, including high volume music, dissonant chords, and heavy brass passages. These devices are especially prominent during several scenes in which various members of the patrol, driven insane by fear, rush into the desert, only to be shot and killed by unseen Arabs. During these scenes, music floods the soundtrack and generates the bulk of the emotional impact and sense of danger. So central is music to the generation of affect that it occasionally overwhelms narratively important sounds. For instance, when Morelli (Wallace Ford) runs out into the desert in an attempt to save his fallen comrade Abelson (Sammy Stein), the music’s volume level far exceeds the sound of enemy gunshots as snipers attempt to take Morelli’s life.
In comparison to King Kong, The Lost Patrol’s score actually escalates its coordination between sound and image tracks. Many brief musical pauses occur just before sounds that signal some alteration in the patrol’s collective mood or focus. Pauses often occur just before the sergeant (Victor McLaglen) gives the patrol an order, which emphasizes the command that the sergeant holds over the outfit and reflects the fact that the patrol must mentally shift gears by performing a new task. Music also halts when a character finds his train of thought broken by the words of another soldier. Sounds that mark key events or turning points are also preceded by a sudden pause in the music. For instance, when a soldier discovers that the Arabs have stolen the patrol’s horses, the score features a crescendo and then pauses just before a soldier shouts, “Where are the horses? They’re gone!” The music also pauses to accentuate every gunshot that results in the death of another soldier and in some cases provides a stinger to match the subsequent body fall.
The score’s attention to narrative also includes an extraordinary amount of rigorously deployed themes. A marching tune (fig. 6.8), often heard when the patrol discusses issues or operates as a team, reflects the patrol’s camaraderie and teamwork. Steiner provides themes to characterize particular patrol members: an Irish-inflected tune for the Irishman Jock MacKay (Paul Hanson) (fig. 6.9), an instrumental chorale for the religious Sanders (Boris Karloff) (fig. 6.10), a brisk dance tune for the happy-go-lucky George Brown (Reginald Denny) (fig. 6.11), and so on. The danger posed by the unseen Arabs is reflected via a chromatic theme with slow, solemn drumbeats (fig. 6.12). Steiner even provides what might be called a “command” motif, which consists of a bugle call that follows each order given by the sergeant (fig. 6.13). This bugle call reflects what might be heard on a patrol, except that this patrol never features an onscreen bugler.
FIGURE 6.8 A rousing patrol march in The Lost Patrol.
Transcribed by the author.
FIGURE 6.9 A grace-note-infused theme for Jock in The Lost Patrol.
Transcribed by the author.
FIGURE 6.10 A simple chorale for the religious Sanders in The Lost Patrol.
Transcribed by the author.
FIGURE 6.11 A breezy theme for the colorful George Brown in The Lost Patrol.
Transcribed by the author.
FIGURE 6.12 A somber theme for the Arabs in The Lost Patrol.
Transcribed by the author.
FIGURE 6.13 A short bugle call in The Lost Patrol.
Transcribed by the author.
The large number of themes recalls the earliest synchronized scores, yet Steiner’s scrupulous deployment exceeds even those films. The slightest conversational reference to the danger posed by the Arabs results in the reuse of the Arab theme. Sometimes a single medium close-up of a particular soldier serves as sufficient grounds to play his theme. Even minute shifts in conversation are enough to trigger an appropriate theme. For instance, at one point Morelli tries to tell the sergeant about his days as a music hall performer. The sergeant, distracted by the unseen enemy, mutters toward the desert, “If only something would move out there.” Despite the sergeant’s lack of attention, Morelli proceeds with his story. Where nearly every non-Steiner film score from the period would provide a single piece of music for such a conversation, Steiner instead changes themes when each person talks, providing the Arab theme when the sergeant speaks and a lighter tune in a popular idiom for Morelli’s story.
By escalating the musical matching that was already rampant in King Kong, Steiner’s music for The Lost Patrol in one sense offers an exceptionally good “fit” with the narrative. Yet ironically, the music’s close molding to the narrative draws more attention to the score’s presence. This effect is tantamount to a film that features a sound and image edit at the same moment. By doubly marking the edit, such a tactic often draws attention to the presence of editing itself. Similarly, by featuring such precise matches between music and narrative, the musical shifts become more prominent. The film industry indeed took notice, nominating The Lost Patrol for “Best Score” in the first year that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established this category. Yet the score’s scrupulous attention even to minute filmic details was an anomaly in a season that nearly always featured music with a far looser connection to precise moments in the narrative.
CONCLUSION
If King Kong’s score incorporated a number of earlier musical practices, provided techniques not typical of Golden Age tendencies, and featured little discernible impact on subsequent film production, why have scholars singled out its score as marking the birth of the Golden Age of film music? As I have noted, the history of the early sound era has seldom been a central topic for film music historians, theorists, or analysts. Consequently, film scholars have sought to capture the early sound era in a few quick strokes before moving to a topic of greater interest—generally the Golden Age of film music. In these film histories King Kong’s score has probably been singled out for particular praise because it remains a well-known film, thus constituting a readily accessible candidate for the “birth” of the Golden Age.60
The myth that King Kong revolutionized film music also survives because it offers a striking, clear-cut, and seemingly comprehensive explanation for the rise of the Golden Age of film music. That Steiner “discovered” how to use film music in King Kong affirms the “genius” of the composer. It also provides a clear cause-effect sequence in which a single film used music so effectively that it laid all of the groundwork for the subsequent Golden Age. This explanation also appears comprehensive: because filmmakers did not “understand” what film music could do before King Kong, no previous films are relevant. Closer inspection of earlier sound films, however, reveals that King Kong constitutes one of many films that furthered a series of musical trends found throughout the period: the escalation of nondiegetic music, the link between nondiegetic music and “other worlds,” and an increasing use of original music. King Kong’s score did not mark an immediate and decisive turning point; in fact, film scores in the following season merely continued these trends and ignored the more unusual elements of King Kong’s score.
Why were King Kong’s unusual musical approaches—particularly its dogged synchronization between music and specific narrative cues—avoided by virtually every other film music practitioner in the period? Again, we should remember that King Kong’s amount of emphasis on fantasy and action was virtually unprecedented in 1933 and that its score in many ways contributed to these specific appeals. King Kong’s score may have been seen as effective but only for a rare kind of film. Thus, even if other filmmakers did take notice of the score, they probably did not see many of its musical techniques as being broadly applicable.
Ironically, if one were forced to choose a film that gave “birth” to the Golden Age of film music, Steiner’s Symphony of Six Million would constitute a better candidate. In the Golden Age the score was expected to remain unnoticed.61 Where King Kong’s music sometimes constitutes a nearly overwhelming presence, Symphony of Six Million’s score is far less obtrusive, beginning quietly and only gradually increasing its volume as the film progresses. Both King Kong’s and Symphony of Six Million’s scores are cued closely to narrative events, another staple of the Golden Age. But whereas King Kong features obsessive mickey-mousing, Symphony of Six Million typifies subsequent practice through its use of regular, clearly distinguishable themes and only an occasional direct match between music and a punctual screen action. Unlike King Kong, Symphony of Six Million incorporates a dose of preexisting music, a tactic that would remain in place during the Golden Age. Finally, Symphony of Six Million was released a full year before King Kong and predates a host of other significant early 1930s film scores, including Bird of Paradise, Blonde Venus, Chandu the Magician, The Most Dangerous Game, Trouble in Paradise, A Farewell to Arms, and The Bitter Tea of General Yen. That the relatively obscure Symphony of Six Million has received minimal scholarly attention for its music further affirms that King Kong’s score has benefited greatly from that film’s fame and longevity.62
The case of King Kong ultimately demonstrates that the appeal of straightforward, dramatic explanations can exert a strong yet problematic pull on historical writing. A thorough explanation of the origins of the Golden Age needs to view the evolution of Hollywood film music not as a craft revolutionized by a single film or individual but rather as a gradual process influenced by an array of different approaches. Only through a detailed consideration of the myriad musical techniques of the early sound era can one understand the forces behind the emergence of the Golden Age. These early sound techniques and their influence on Golden Age film music constitute the subject of this study’s conclusion.
