ONCE UPON A TIME, movies didn’t have music. Sort of. That is, they didn’t have sound. Silent pictures, you will recall, weren’t just pictures without dialogue. This wasn’t Kabuki theater or something. Filmmakers lacked the technology to attach sound to those black-and-white frames zooming by the lens at eighteen frames per second. Even then, however, there was music. Musical scores, the printed kind, were distributed with prints of the movies, and each movie house had to find a way to produce the music. Many big-city movie houses, the fancied-up movie “palaces” especially, had their own orchestras. Other theaters a notch or so down might have had the mighty Wurlitzer Theater Organ, a work of art in itself and capable of all sorts of sounds. Obviously, while this was a manageable strategy in New York or Chicago, it was tougher to pull off in East Left-Out, Saskatchewan. So East Left-Out, like most smaller communities, would have had a piano. And it would have had an in-house pianist or two (it’s tough work, after all, to tickle the ivories for multiple shows every day) whose job it was to interpret the score and make it work with the film. On the one hand, this system was great for musicians, who with the advent of the movies found a host of new job opportunities. Indeed, one of the arguments against the talkies when they came in had to do with all the musicians’ jobs that would be lost overnight. And in ways no one could notice, it was pretty great for audiences whether they knew it or not. Every performance was guaranteed unique, since no pianist would ever hit exactly the same notes in exactly the same way, no matter how hard he tried, in any two screenings of a movie.
That second strength, alas, was also the weakness of the system. From the studio perspective, there was no quality control. Was East Left-Out’s pianist any good technically? Did he understand movies enough to sync up his playing in meaningful ways? Was he sober? For drink was the downfall of more than one accompanist during the heyday of live music at the Odeon. Eventually, of course, we moved into sync-sound and put all sorts of local music types out of business. But the accompaniment did get more predictable.
I usually don’t tell you what to think, but every once in a while, I make an exception if the outcome is really important. This is such a once. It has to do with best. You know, there are no bests of anything and “best” is subjective and all that, right? Well, no. Here’s a best. There is one—and only one—best development of a theme. Why is it best? Because it cannot be bettered. Because it was adapted to a cigarette ad for about a thousand years and adopted by a Disney ride. Because, first of all, it was composed by the great Elmer Bernstein, one of the gods of movie music. But mostly because of how it was employed in the film.
Don’t know the theme? Bet you do. Try this: bum-BUM-ba-bum, ba-ba-ba-BUM-ba-bum. Doesn’t ring any bells? Still, you’ve likely heard it. If you are of a certain age, the only way you cannot know it is to never have watched television. You never saw the Marlboro Man without it.
It starts small. Themes often do, but this is different. It’s missing some elements—a lot of elements. We encounter this stripped-down version when we first meet the hero. When he offers to drive the hearse up to the town cemetery because certain racist elements won’t allow an Indian to be buried there, we get some rumblings in the percussion section of a still-unformed theme. A stranger, another hard case like our hero, borrows a shotgun from the stagecoach to ride along, the staccato brushings of the lower strings kick in, and when he walks across the street in front of the hearse, suddenly we have the sprightly woodwinds hinting at the lyrical introduction and telling us he’s on the right side of this business. Now, we think, we’re getting somewhere. But not just yet. There’s some dark business, and a countertheme comes in heavy, dissonant, and in a minor chord. It tells us this adventure won’t be a lark. But with resolve and a quick gun, our heroes get the body to the cemetery.
Later, it turns out some Mexican villagers have come to town looking for guns to buy—or, as our hero convinces them, to hire. Eventually, he decides he’ll need several friends, a gang that can handle thirty or forty banditos. And he sets about trying to round up his posse. As he does so, we return to the theme, adding just a little bit more with each successive addition, no one of them completing the piece, each adding to it just a touch more, and each time the music swells again. And again. And again. Until there are six of them riding with the campesinos back toward the village, and the theme is complete—almost. It’s big and bold, it swells and bounces, it’s terrific. But there’s something missing. And someone. A youth, a villager who has rejected the life of a “dirt farmer” to become a gunslinger, unaware that the men he idolizes are already passé, desperately wants to join them. It takes a day and a night, but when he does, we are complete. The music fills in some missing parts in the middle and mounts to its full glory as we follow the—okay, seven—heroes; happy now? A great seven. In fact, The Magnificent Seven. Another thing that makes it great is that the initial theme accompanies Yul Brynner, whose mere presence will enhance any piece of music. Or film. In 1960 he was the toughest man in the world. At least the world of the movies. He deserved the most macho theme of them all, and he got it.
Here’s the thing about The Magnificent Seven theme: it is pure, old-fashioned, almost anachronistic, unembarrassed music. It couldn’t be anything but what it is. There has never been a period of popular music that would have embraced it without a movie attached. It shows not the slightest awareness that jazz had ever occurred; this is European tradition writ large. And yet, although it has been played by countless pops orchestras, it couldn’t stand alone as a traditional symphonic score. Movie music is like nothing else in the known universe. Especially perfect movie music.
Sometimes, composers become associated with specific directors. Fairly or not. Bernard Herrmann worked with just about everyone in Hollywood at some point or other. He scored Orson Welles’s first two—and probably best—films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), two by François Truffaut, even Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Say his name around people who know a bit about film, however, and you will get one name—and one name only—back: Hitchcock. Always with the Hitchcock. They made seven films together, including some of the great ones: The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. And what they will mostly know is something less than sixty seconds of shrieking strings as Norman Bates is stabbing Marion Crane in the justly notorious shower scene. Jack Sullivan, writing a Herrmann centenary appraisal in the Chronicle of Higher Education, called the moment “Hollywood’s primal scream”; no one could say it better. In many ways, however, he is hitting his peak in the others, especially Vertigo, with its constant undercurrent of dread, and North by Northwest, which mixes foreboding, danger, and whimsy in just the right proportions. Director and composer were both famously difficult at times, yet they seemed to be in perfect harmony in their screen collaborations. Even so, to dismiss Herrmann as “Hitchcock’s music man” would be to vastly underestimate his true range and his greatness.
Then what about Spielberg’s music man? For the man who gave us Indiana Jones and a killer shark has worked with John Williams on all but two of his films. And because of his Spielberg/George Lucas connections, we sometimes think of Williams as the guy who cranks up the volume on epic adventure, which is true to a point. Had he done nothing but that heartbeat drumming for Jaws and the Imperial March theme for Star Wars, he would still be remembered for a long time. But he also has written the rest of the scores for those movies as well as for the Harry Potter series, Lincoln, Catch Me if You Can, The Terminal, Angela’s Ashes, Home Alone, and films with dinosaurs, sharks, spaceships, and hidden treasures. What can we say about the scores for Lincoln, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, and Schindler’s List? That the composer shows amazing range? That he writes to the nuances of the film? That he can do anything he sets his mind to? Yes, and more. In seconds he can slide from the ethereal Harry Potter theme, “Harry’s Wondrous World,” to the Voldemort theme as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. When he scores Schindler’s List, he opts for a sparseness that is almost skeletal—minor keys, very simple instrumentation, a main theme in which Itzhak Perlman seems to be playing a solitary violin and indeed is for stretches of it, with only the slightest accompaniment at other points—almost as if to say that any ornamentation or richness would be wrong for this story. Leave the bombast to the Nazis. Instead, Williams gives us clean, simple, sad. A requiem for a lost world.
It is true that some composers “get” certain directors. Erich Korngold wrote scores for such Michael Curtiz features as Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Come to think of it, maybe Korngold really got Errol Flynn. Some seem best suited to a particular genre. Maurice Jarre seemed especially suited to big, sweeping epics: Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Man Who Would Be King (1975). You want music that swells? Jarre is the man for you. Others can—and do—work with everyone doing everything. Jerry Goldsmith received Oscar nominations for, among others, The Sand Pebbles (1966), A Patch of Blue (1965), Planet of the Apes (1968), Patton (1970), The Boys from Brazil (1978), Chinatown (1974), Hoosiers (1987), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Disney’s animated Mulan (1999). Just let that sink in for a moment. Does your head hurt yet? And the only win he garnered was for The Omen (1976). Go figure. Or there is the case of Henry Mancini, who got around a good deal in his heyday but may well be remembered for a single theme, the jazzy little slow-walk of The Pink Panther (1964). As far as I can tell, it is the only live-action movie music ever to spark a cartoon series, although the cool pink cat traipsing over the title credits probably had something to do with that. Still more specialized is Marvin Hamlisch’s arrangement and use of Scott Joplin’s rags, specifically “The Entertainer,” in The Sting (1973). What on earth would make someone look at a story of mostly white confidence grifters in the middle of the Great Depression and think, I’m gonna use ragtime music by a black composer from thirty years earlier? Only two answers present themselves: insanity and genius. I’ll plump for the latter, because the score fit the movie like a glove. Who knew? Only Hamlisch.
Up till now we’ve been talking about musical scores and themes, that is, music written specifically for the movie in question. But over the last few decades there has been another trend: tunes cannibalized from other sources, chiefly popular radio tunes. Oh, there have always been movies that made use of popular song or even of classical or jazz melodies. An American in Paris is built around Gershwin’s tone poem, which might make it the granddaddy of such movies. But we’re talking about something a little different here, something we might call “jukebox” or maybe “record stack” movies. In Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 classic The Big Chill, a group of former hippie-activist thirtysomethings, now square, well, square but in denial, are reunited for the funeral of one of their number who has committed suicide. And one of them, Karen, has agreed to play one of the departed’s favorite tunes at the funeral. She sits down with great solemnity and begins, in equally solemn organ tones, something we pretty quickly realize is “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and in a few moments, the organ gives way to the guitar strum of the Rolling Stones’ original. It’s a very funny scene, which even the mourners recognize, their tears turning to smirks and chortles. Throughout the film Kasdan brings in the music that a group of Ann Arbor collegians would have been hearing in the late sixties and very early seventies, from Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” to Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears” to Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Nor is he the first to do this. In films ranging from the counterculture (Easy Rider, 1969, and probably the first really concerted effort), to The Strawberry Statement (1970, and a cautionary tale about the music overshadowing the film), to war (Coming Home, 1978), to, um, the rather odd (1971’s Vanishing Point), Hollywood had been interlacing contemporary music into movies at a pretty fair clip. But what The Big Chill points out is that the technique may work best for nostalgia. You doubt? Then I have a question for you.
Where were you in ’62?
Yeah, I know where most of you were. Or weren’t. The question is rhetorical. And from a movie poster. The film that wanted an answer was by a young, unknown director named George Lucas, pre–Darth Vader, pre-pretty-much-everything. And one of the actors was an unknown Harrison Ford, who would later be Lucas and Spielberg’s favorite gun-and-whip slinger. But this time, he’s just a hot rodder out in the Valley. The film, American Graffiti (1973), is full of future stars of various levels: Cindy Williams, Richard Dreyfuss, Charlie Martin Smith, Mackenzie Phillips, Paul Le Mat. In fact, there were only two name brands in the cast. The featured one was Opie. This was to be his breakout picture, the one that moved him beyond Mayberry. It did, and right into Happy Days. The star who really made American Graffiti, however, played himself: Wolfman Jack. The most famous DJ in America played, of all things, a DJ. He seemed to have psychic powers, something he had in common with Cleavon Little’s Super Soul in Vanishing Point, the record spinner with a seemingly mystical connection to Barry Newman’s hopped-up driver, Kowalsky, sending him messages for alternate routes and looming nasty surprises. Wolfman Jack also seems to see what goes on in the long night of the film, and manages to pull the exact right record at each moment. These records are not all from 1962, ranging from Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” (1954) and Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” (1957) to Booker T. and the M.G.s’ “Green Onions” (which is actually from 1962) and the Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long” (1964). Everybody’s at the party except Elvis, who was too expensive. And the movie also has the distinction for its day of having zero original music. By the time the studio (Universal) paid all the permissions, there was no money left for any music written and performed just for the film. Happily. Nothing new could have kept up.
Here’s what’s really special about American Graffiti: it’s pretty much the first time that all the music is being pushed through radios so that the characters hear it. This isn’t our soundtrack; it’s theirs. What that means is that the music can color their experience, and also that they can speak back to it, as when Big John Milner (Le Mat) says of the Beach Boys, “I don’t like that surfer shit.” One may agree or disagree with the sentiment, but it adds to character revelation. When the theme for The Magnificent Seven plays, by contrast, all Yul Brynner’s Chris hears are hoofbeats.
Let’s consider one more—or maybe two—instances of in-movie music. I’ve mentioned the two major adaptations of The Great Gatsby a couple of times now, from 1974 and 2013. Here’s a question you’ve probably never asked yourself but someone had to: how do I convey the sound of that era of excess to an audience fifty (or eighty) years later? There are many possible answers, but here are the two chosen. In the earlier Redford-Farrow vehicle, bandleader Nelson Riddle acted as musical selector, choosing various period songs and connecting them with his own incidental compositions. In the more recent film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, Baz Luhrmann and Jay Z opted for contemporary music that captured the mood, rather than for any authenticity. Indeed, the one concession to period music, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” almost feels like the anachronism when it turns up. Otherwise, the music is penned or performed by (sometimes both) Jay Z, Beyoncé, André 3000, will.i.am, Amy Winehouse, Bryan Ferry, Jack White, Lana Del Rey, Emeli Sandé, and Florence + the Machine, among other current powerhouses. The mix of hip-hop, rock, power pop, and contemporary swing sounds nothing like the music F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald would have heard when they were the Jazz Age power couple, but it conveys a sense, a feel for the era being invoked. These two approaches combine to form a question: what’s the right way? And the truth is, there isn’t one. The right way is the one that works. Neither I nor anyone else can tell you which of these is better. Oh, I can tell you what I think, but that’s only what’s better for me. The only way to know for sure is to watch for yourself. More important, to listen for yourself.
Music often informs us not only of the meaning of a moment or scene but of how multiple moments fit together. In Mr. Turner (2014), we watch painter J. M. W. Turner (Timothy Spall, Wormtail from the Harry Potter films) paint a seafaring scene in front of his academy colleagues with all the violence he can muster. He spits on the fresh paint, blows colored powder at it, stabs and grinds with his brush, and finally rakes upward through the freshly painted and still-wet smoky fog with his fingernails again and again, all the while looking over his shoulder, evidently wishing to see what sort of impression he is making on his confreres. As he does so, Gary Yershon’s score relies on a highly agitated string section to enhance the sense of violence. The film immediately cuts to chalky cliffs—much the same color as the section of the painting we have just watched him attacking—at Margate, near the whiter and more famous cliffs of Dover. The camera pans nearer and downward, revealing grayer cliffs closer to us and, in the foreground, Turner bulling forward in his peculiar gait, somewhere between a march and a limp. A new, softer theme emerges with the start of the scene, but for the first few seconds, the agitated cello forms an undertone before vanishing. The implication is clear: Turner is getting away from the rush of his professional-social existence and settling into a quieter pace, almost as if the scenery is cleansing him of his previous aggression and competitiveness. Yershon’s score was not universally praised, although it was nominated for several awards, including the Oscar; its chief shortcoming among traditionalist critics seemed to be that it didn’t sound sufficiently like movie music—no big swells, no grand statements, and no nod to its nineteenth-century setting. Using minimal instrumentation, it employs a saxophone ensemble—the first notes of the film are played on a sopranino saxophone, whose existence, if you’re like me, comes as a surprise—and a string quintet including double bass as it relies on discordant, jazz-oriented themes. Yet it is just that unusual element that serves to illuminate such an unusual man.
And the music highlights plot as well as thematic elements. Earlier, we have seen Turner hurrying up the stairway of the academy to a decidedly martial rolling of tympani. The message is clear: this space is a war zone. That proves to be the case, as time and again we are shown the backbiting, sniping, and outbursts of artists in competition with each other. In one key scene, Turner’s sudden, seemingly impulsive insertion of brilliant red paint on the waterline of an otherwise neutral-colored scene provokes comment and criticism. What is he doing? Has he finally lost his mind? Turner’s action is impulsive, but it is also calculated to score a victory. You see, the red paint is not his; it belongs to his colleague and rival John Constable. Turner’s smaller, seemingly finished work is next to a more monumental scene on which Constable is still at work, currently placing splashes of red. Turner picks up Constable’s brush and appears to deface his own painting with the large red dot, after which he immediately exits the hall. The action mystifies the onlookers but not Constable, who puts on his coat in disgust, saying that Turner “has fired a gun,” which the uncomprehending audience swiftly denies. But he has. After a lengthy absence, Turner reenters the room, carves a curved line in the upper half of the daub, wipes away the lower half, and reveals—a buoy. His brilliant battlefield stratagem has carried the day.
The success of movie music is almost never about the quality of the music on its own. Some excellent songs have been wasted on dogs; they do not help and sometimes merely point out the inadequacy of the rest of the film. On the other hand, some musical dogs have dragged down the tone of otherwise exemplary films. And sometimes, whatever the quality of one or the other, the fit is unfortunate. An example? Figure out what on earth “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” is supposed to be doing in the middle of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Burt Bacharach is a great songwriter, although whether this is one of his great songs is another matter. That issue, however, is moot; in context the song is just wrong. On the radio in its day, it was just another serviceable pop number, but with Butch riding around the farm on his newfangled bicycle . . . oh dear. Similarly, some scores or individual tunes that might be fine elsewhere are misapplied in terms of the movie they’re supposed to be in service to. On the other hand, some merely adequate melodies have more than pulled their weight, and some that were not superb on their own, like “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca, which had a lengthy and fairly modest history before the movie, become strokes of genius with the right placement. You see, the question is never, or never merely, is this music any good, but rather, does this music make the movie better? And you know what the answer needs to be.