CHAPTER 3

The Unit B Years

1952–1964

In 1948, film commissioner Ross McLean and the NFB’s executive and political managers decided to organize the Board’s production teams into six units, each with distinctive goals, subject areas, and stylistic latitude.1 Unit A, a predominantly French-language division, was dedicated largely to the coverage of cultural topics, dance, arts, and theatre. Unit B, the predominantly English-language division, specialized in the production of animated and documentary films focusing on cultural, sociological, abstract, historical, educational, and scientific topics. (During the early 1960s Unit B also ventured cautiously into the production of feature films.) Unit C was devoted to newsreels and theatrical short films, and Unit D – which should not be confused with the later “Studio D,” the NFB’s celebrated women’s film unit (1974–96) – dealt largely with topics related to international affairs and films sponsored by the Department of National Defense. Unit E was engaged chiefly in the production and co-production of film projects for English and French television.²

In 1947, the newly hired Eldon Rathburn was assigned primarily to Unit B, the Board’s largest division with roughly forty staff members, and executive producer Tom Daly at the helm. An inner circle soon emerged within the unit – Tom Daly, Stanley Jackson, Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroitor, Colin Low, and Norman McLaren – a group of core members that Eldon referred to as “the committee.”³ He fondly recalled the group’s animated discussions and the fruitful collaborative results to which their sometimes heated arguments gave rise. Yet he also recalled how rare it was to receive clear directions from the team members, as they often seemed uncertain about the role they wanted music to play in their films.4 Beginning with The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952), Colin Low’s classic Oscar-nominated animated short film, Unit B went on to produce many of the most celebrated films in the Board’s history, with Eldon scoring most of them.⁵ Since Rathburn’s Unit B scores are among his finest, they will be our focus below. He wrote nearly 150 film scores during the 1950s and early 1960s, a volume and pace of work that is unparalleled in the career of virtually any other contemporary film composer. Since limited space prevents us from discussing more than a handful of these scores, the films we will examine have been chosen both for their broader impact as innovative documentary and animated films, and for the ways in which they embody aspects of Rathburn’s evolving style and aesthetic.

The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952)

With the legendary Norman McLaren at the helm of the NFB’s animation department, the Board’s animators were encouraged to explore more experimental work, and to distinquish themselves from the goals and aesthetics of the rapidly growing American commercial animation industry (Disney Studios, for example).⁶ Among the Board’s staff composers, it was Blackburn and Rathburn who collaborated most closely and frequently with the animation unit, and they too were caught up in the invigorating spirit of experimentalism that prevailed among the Board’s animators. By their very nature, animated film projects emancipated film directors and composers in a number of ways. Compared with the traditional documentary, these films involved no on-location sound, and they were inherently more abstract and less formulaic. “It’s a different world,” Eldon noted in 1994. “Music seems to align better with animation … I would argue that some documentaries don’t even need film; they could be just as successful in book form. You can’t say the same for animation. Animation is pure film!”⁷

Rathburn’s jaunty score for The Romance of Transportation in Canada was the first of a number of entirely jazz-inspired scores he composed in collaboration with the filmmakers of Unit B during the 1950s and 1960s. Rathburn’s interest in jazz – and his ability to understand its various languages, grooves, and sub-genres – made him unique among the NFB’s staff composers. His jazz sensibilities were also in line with emerging trends in the American film industry, where film composers were beginning to employ the jazz idiom non-diegetically. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), featuring Alex North’s ground-breaking symphonic jazz-infused score, is often cited as the first Hollywood feature film to engage jazz in this way. Rathburn, by contrast, was beginning to pair jazz with educational, animated, and documentary films during the early 1950s. Apart from Norman McLaren’s earlier use of recorded jazz in a few animated short films from the late 1940s (Begone Dull Care, 1949, set to three pieces by the Oscar Peterson Trio, for example),8 Rathburn’s jazz-inspired animated film scores of the 1950s – The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952), The Structure of Unions (1955), Fish Spoilage Control (1956), and McLaren’s Short and Suite (1959), for example – were unprecedented at the NFB. With each of these films, he worked with a range of light-hearted jazz, song and dance styles, and ventured into bebop and cool-jazz idioms. Relying on the strong capacity for signification that jazz had acquired during the first half of the twentieth century, Eldon generally employed the idiom to suggest urbanity, youth, drinking clubs, eroticism, and even criminality and the underworld. As John Corner has observed, jazz became the “preferred music for mapping the documentary subject with an essentially cosmopolitan, noir-ish view of urbanism and its new restlessness.”⁹ But Rathburn also paired jazz with some of the mundane subject matter dealt with in government-sponsored documentaries and promotional films. This produced some amusing juxtapositions, such as fisheries workers gutting fish to a sizzling mambo in Fish Spoilage Control.

The Romance of Transportation in Canada was taken in a novel direction by NFB animators Wolf Koenig and Robert Verrall, who gave it considerably more nuance and creative pizzazz than might be expected of a perfunctory mid-century educational film for school-aged children on the history of transportation in Canada. Iconic Canadian radio broadcaster Max Ferguson had been cast in the role of narrator, but when Ferguson had difficulty finding the appropriate narrative tone for Guy Glover’s script, he was replaced by Glover.¹⁰ The film’s jazz score, combined with Glover’s wryly delivered satirical commentary and Koenig and Verrall’s artful approach to animation create the impression of a lighthearted cartoon. However the film’s underlying message was intended – by the film’s government sponsors at least – as a serious one, as it points to the hubris of technological progress and its colonialist implications in Canada.¹¹ It makes an unsubtle political statement, and although The Romance of Transportation in Canada was enthusiastically approved by Film Commissioner Arthur Irwin, it worried federal bureaucrats due to its ironic and irreverent treatment of its subject matter.¹² Canadian film historian Gary Evans describes both the trials and the triumphs of Unit B’s extraordinary early animated film:

Figure 3.1 • Colin Low, holding the Certificate of Merit presented to the NFB’s Unit B at the Seventh International Edinburgh Film Festival, for The Romance of Transportation in Canada (NFB, 1952). From left to right: Eldon Rathburn, Tom Daly, Wolf Koenig, Colin Low, and Robert Verrall.

The Romance of Transportation in Canada was a satirical caprice about how Canadians dealt with the historic/geographic challenge of transportation, the concept of a national image, and Canadians’ own alleged love of suffering … [It] still evokes chuckles from first-time viewers … For the first time, here was a frontier myth that was not American, not “political,” and not serious. To be able to laugh at oneself may be the first step toward maturity, but when Minister [Robert] Winters saw it, he was not amused. “Who authorized that?” he barked. “I did,” answered the cool Irwin, “and I predict that it will win international awards.” Winters ceased his carping and was gratified when it won ten awards, including an Oscar nomination, the Palme d’Or for animation at Cannes, and honours at Edinburgh.13

Rathburn’s challenging score required the recruitment of nine jazz players of the very highest calibre. Fortunately, the NFB was able to hire some of Toronto’s finest musicians for the session, including Bert Niosi (clarinet), Les Allen (tenor saxophone), Ellis McClintock (trumpet), Ted Roderman (trombone), Al Harris (guitar), Lloyd Edwards (piano), Jimmy Namaro (vibraphone), Joe Niosi (bass), and an unknown drummer. Edwards, Namaro, and the Niosi brothers were all members of “The Happy Gang,” the popular CBC lunchtime radio variety show that attracted as many as two million listeners daily during the war and early postwar years, Canada’s “Golden Age of Radio.”¹⁴ The members of the Happy Gang troupe knew Rathburn well, as his wartime song “Mr. Churchill, Our Hats Are Off to You” was frequently featured on their radio broadcasts, and included in their published collection of 1941, The Happy Gang Book of War Songs.¹⁵

According to Robert Verrall, The Romance of Transportation was edited and otherwise completed when the production team called on Eldon to create the score. At the team’s first meeting about the music, Eldon sat down at the piano and spontaneously improvised in sync with the film in real time in his habitual way, dialoguing with Low, Koenig, and Verrall about the mood of the film’s various scenes and sequences. Even Roman Kroitor dropped in to offer input, although he was not working on the film.¹⁶ Verrall recalls his bedazzlement with Eldon’s facility at the piano, and his delight with the unprecedented decision to adopt a jazz idiom. When Maurice Blackburn first heard the score, he assumed that Eldon had used jazz tracks found in the NFB’s stock music library, and was astonished to learn that it was original music.¹⁷ In a 1956 interview, Rathburn discussed his work on The Romance of Transportation in Canada with film critic Gerald Pratley, founding director of the Ontario Film Institute:

After much discussion as to the style and approach we would take with this picture, we decided that a score in the light jazz idiom would be most suitable, even though the story was a historical subject going back to pioneer days. The film finally emerged as a kind of triple counterpoint, made up of humorously stylized animation, sly commentary read in an over-earnest manner, and music in a modern style giving a sardonic feeling to the whole.18

Rathburn’s score for The Romance of Transportation consists of thirteen score cues, each of which is essentially a separate piece written in a distinctive jazz or blues style. Establishing this approach was a watershed moment for Rathburn. He found that by using longer, more internally cohesive segments, the music retained an independent voice while simultaneously accentuating and enhancing the narrative. Reflecting on this score, he offered the following piece of advice to young film composers; “make the music sound as natural as you can, as if the film had been shot to the music.”¹⁹ If film music sometimes goes unnoticed, not so here.

The film deals with the development of transportation in Canada from the arrival of the first Europeans to the mid-twentieth century. In a variety of musically novel ways, Rathburn differentiates each era, environment, and mode of transport. For scenes set in vast, sparsely populated areas, he tends to thin out the instrumentation and write simpler, more diatonic melodies, while urban scenes are up-tempo, with more chromatic and densely textured scoring. Rathburn’s music also reflects the increasing speed and efficiency of successive modes of transportation. The film’s opening scene follows a whimsical character flying a single-seater airplane. When the plane abruptly runs out of fuel, the hapless pilot ejects himself from the cockpit, opens his parachute, and lands on a congested urban street corner, where his arrival causes a chaotic traffic jam and commotion. Rathburn’s accompanying bebop-style score engages the full nonet in the most virtuosic music heard in the film. Taken at a breakneck tempo, and with the horns often taking the head motive in complex unison passagework, the sequence pushes the capabilities of the players to the limit. His catchy and rollicking bebop parody perfectly sets the tone for the film’s slapstick animation. “I think fast bop was a breakthrough in popular music,” he wrote years later about the style he was trying to emulate.²⁰ At the same time he was fully aware that, in being composed note for note – i.e., written out, as all of his jazz-influenced scores were (including the solos) – the score is contrary to the authentic and freely improvised bebop tradition.

In scene two, Indigenous canoers navigate rapids and escort newly arrived Europeans through the wilderness to a peppy, mid-tempo swing tune taken first by the solo clarinet. While it may have been understood that animation affords greater leeway for experimentation, the depiction of an early canoe expedition accompanied by a jazz score must have raised eyebrows among early viewers. Thematic material from this cue returns throughout the score, with increasingly thickened instrumentation as newer modes of transportation are introduced. Next, a fast and frantic boogie-woogie piano accompanies gleeful passengers as they ride past the Canadian landscape in the first steam-powered train. The scene ends with crashing piano clusters as the train stops abruptly, thick smoke pours from the engine’s chimney, and the camera pans to the blackened faces of the astonished passengers. The most lyrical music in the film is a jazz ballad accompanying the historic construction of the railway through the mountains. Rather than writing something grand and richly orchestrated here, Rathburn strips his score down to trombone, clarinet, and sparse accompaniment from the rhythm section, giving the noble principal melody to the trombone in a way that effectively conveys the vastness and grandeur of the Canadian Rockies.

Aspects of the narrative are tied together in the film’s finale, when the previously introduced cast of characters all find themselves stuck in the traffic jam caused by the single-seater pilot from the opening scene. The chaos and confusion of the traffic jam is accentuated by a boisterous drum solo. A relaxed mid-tempo swing ensues when the traffic clears, and a brief recap of Rathburn’s lively opening title music accompanies the closing credits.

According to executive producer Tom Daly, Eldon saved the day for The Romance of Transportation during a final mixing session. Daly gives a charming account that perhaps captures the very essence of Rathburn’s rapport with his Unit B colleagues. He was admired not only for his skill and versatility as a composer, but also for his good-humoured and easygoing temperament:

Unit B had lots of people around, all of whom wanted to tell Clark [Daprato, sound and mixing engineer] exactly how to mix it … They didn’t agree with each other, so Clark was getting very uptight … I almost had the feeling that it was going to fall apart, that he would just leave and go home. But before he left the room, Eldon Rathburn came in wearing a big fur hat and massive fur gloves, sat down at the piano, and began to play. I don’t know how he did it but he managed to make the center of gravity of the tune come through in those smashes of sound, and somehow the whole mood changed, everybody got back in the mood, and he saved The Romance of Transportation.21

The consensus among critics is that Rathburn’s innovative music was ideally suited for propelling the quirky narrative forward in The Romance of Transportation. “[The film] is brightened by a lively score from the great Eldon Rathburn,” writes film critic Matthew Dicker. “[It] almost single-handedly keeps the film from dragging.”²² Gerald Pratley concurred: “Eldon Rathburn was the ideal composer to score this picture,” he wrote in 1956. “His lovely melodies and jolly sense of humour are an essential part of the film.”²³

The Romance of Transportation was both a landmark achievement for the NFB and Unit B’s first major success. It was the first NFB film to win a Palme d’Or at Cannes and a Certificate of Merit from the Edinburgh Film Festival. It was also the first NBF film created with cel-animation, a cost-effective technique patented by pioneering American animator Earl Hurd in the early twentieth century, whereby characters are hand-drawn on celluloid sheets and laid over a static background drawing. The film broke the previous record for the longest-running film in the American Trans-Lux chain of theatres, where it ran for over twenty-five weeks.²⁴ Rathburn considered his jazz-inspired score for The Romance of Transportation to be one of his most polished and professional works.²⁵

Corral (1954)

Corral (1954) is widely considered one of director Colin Low’s early film masterpieces. The film follows cowhand Wally Jensen as he corrals and breaks in wild mustangs in the southern foothills of the Canadian Rockies, not far from the ranch where Colin Low grew up in Cardston, Alberta. With film images and sequences so powerful that no commentary or diegetic sound was deemed necessary, Corral is the first NFB documentary to employ neither location sound nor a voice-over track. This was not Low’s original intent, since the prevailing view among documentary filmmakers was that viewers expected and needed to be told what to think about the images onscreen. Although Low had hired Unit B’s go-to scriptwriter and narrator Stanley Jackson to provide voice-over commentary for Corral, when the team gathered to screen an updated version of the film with Jackson’s commentary inserted, no voice-over narration was heard, only Rathburn’s music. Jackson had come to the conclusion that a script would only detract from the grandeur of the film’s arresting images and music: “What would commentary do for that?” he asked his perplexed colleagues. In Jackson’s view, the film was finished. The team ultimately agreed.26

Low had asked Rathburn to write and record a score for solo guitar, and specifically suggested that he work with renowned Cuban-American classical guitarist (José) Rey de la Torre.²⁷ After Eldon made some preliminary sketches, the NFB sent him to New York to meet with the great virtuoso, and to pave the way for a recording to be made in the near future. He had also hoped that Rey de la Torre might be able to help him polish the score by providing advice on idiomatic writing for the classical guitar. His initial score was relatively complex (he simplified it in the final version), and having had little experience writing for guitar, he wanted assurance that it was playable. To his astonishment, Torre struggled to read the score at all, even at well under the indicated tempo. When it quickly became apparent that he was a poor reader, Rathburn was perplexed about how to proceed. He visited his Ukrainian-American friend Jack Shaindlin, the New York conductor and film composer who conducted the Carnegie Hall Pops Orchestra through the 1940s and scored a number of early American cartoon, sitcom, and film classics (including Rocky and Bullwinkle and Deputy Dawg, Father Knows Best, and The Cisco Kid).²⁸ Shaindlin laughed when Eldon told him about his predicament, commenting that classical guitarists were often poor readers with limited repertoires. He quipped that it could have been worse – Eldon might have tried to work with Andrés Segovia! For Rathburn, this was an important learning experience: Torre may have been a master guitarist but he was wrong for this job. After returning from New York, he reworked the score for two guitars, and Toronto guitarists Al Harris and Stan Wilson were hired for the recording.²⁹ In the end, in an extremely rare reversal of the norm, roughly 80 per cent of the film’s entire budget ($4,582) was spent on the music ($3,670).³⁰

Compared with his initial more complex sketches, Eldon describes the final score as “folky rather than progressive.”³¹ In general, one guitar is given the melody, while the other provides strumming accompaniment or more complex arpeggiated and improvisatory-sounding rhythmic patterns, the mood, rhythm, tempo and gesture of which reflect the feeling inspired by the movement and emotion of the horses. At other moments the music seems to draw inspiration from the rugged nobility and emotional experience of the cowhand. At no point does Rathburn bring melodic and motivic ideas fully to the foreground in his guitar score, and in some ways it is not particularly memorable as a result. Yet perhaps this is why it is so effective.32 The music neither goes unnoticed nor detracts from the poetry of the visual narrative, with which its dramatic ebb and flow, and its wide dynamic and expressive range, seem intimately wed. Large sections of the score are based on melodies from two traditional cowboy folk songs, “The Strawberry Roan” and “I’ve Got No Use for Women,” both of which undergo substantial transformation but are easily recognizable in the score. Particularly fitting for quotation in Corral is “The Strawberry Roan,” an adaptation of the frontier poem “The Outlaw Broncho” that became a well-known country and western song in the 1930s.³³ The song recounts the tale of a boastful horse breaker who meets his match in a small but feisty strawberry roan.³⁴ Similarly, Sol Meyer’s song titled “I’ve Got No Use for Women” – made famous by rodeo singing star Gene Autry in the soundtrack of the classic Hollywood western Under Fiesta Stars (1941) – describes how a frontier “femme fatale” leads to the demise of a “young cowpuncher.” Rathburn uses it as the basis for a scene toward the end of the film, where the cowhand tries to lasso a stubborn horse in the corral. As he attempts but fails to wrangle the horse into submission, a minor-key variant of the major melody is accompanied by jarring and dissonant low-register chords, which accelerate and crescendo with each futile swing of the lasso. The passage resolves abruptly and major-triad clarion harmonics ring on open strings when the lasso finally lands around the horse’s neck. The music continues in the minor mode as the cowhand attempts to subdue and rein in his horse, calmly assuring the defeated animal that all will be well. Another short statement of the minor melody resolves to major when the animal ultimately surrenders.

This scene is a fine example of the ways in which a subtle but masterful film score is able to manipulate viewers’ emotional states and perspectives, a skill that few film composers have understood as well as Rathburn. In the final scene of this romantic portrait of a cowboy and his horses, Jensen’s warm caress and petting of the mustang – as if to make amends and say “no harm intended” – paired with the subtle shift from minor to major mode, suggests that the struggle for dominance between horse and cowboy has been resolved harmoniously, and that the horse is ultimately content to submit to the cowhand’s ostensibly benevolent domination. Rathburn notes that music effectively assumes the role of commentator in the absence of voice-over narration in Corral. With characteristic humour he recalled issuing a solemn warning to Colin Low about the need to exercise extreme caution when giving a film composer “this much power!”35

One can readily understand why Stanley Jackson and other members of the Unit B team quickly concluded that Low’s film, masterfully shot by Koenig and sensitively scored by Rathburn, needed no voice-over commentary. Like Humphrey Jennings’s classic wartime propaganda film Listening to Britain (1942), in the absence of narration, Corral fully engages its musical accompaniment as an internal and transcendent commentary of another kind. In an extended discussion of Listening to Britain, John Corner notes that “the codes for watching silent depictions are relatively undeveloped in Western culture.”³⁶ He poses the following question: “What does this emphasis on the hearing of music and sounds but not words mean for the way in which we watch the film, for our experience as viewers?” His tentative answer is as relevant to Colin Low’s Corral as it is to Jennings’s Listening to Britain:

I think the answer is that [the absence of voice-over commentary] greatly intensifies our engagement with the images. It helps provide the resources for a viewing disposition allowing us to respond fully to the charge of meanings in each composition, and actively to read the screen not only in the detail of the shot but in its relationship within an associative sequence. Music saturates the images, informing them by fusing its meanings with their own, and at the same times it bonds the shots together through its own aesthetic continuity. It frees them from the literalism of commentary and underwrites the possibility of delivering surprise and juxtaposition as well as of expected connections. Through listening to Britain, we are enabled properly to look at it. For this to work, what we are offered visually must have sufficient resonance and depth to hold active attention without accompanying speech.³⁷

Short and Suite (1959)

Short and Suite (1959) is the third in a series of jazz-inspired animated shorts by Norman McLaren. Somewhat similar in style to McLaren’s Boogie Doodle (1941, in collaboration with jazz pianist Albert Ammons) and Begone Dull Care (1949, in collaboration with Oscar Peterson),38 Short and Suite was inspired by Rathburn’s jazz quartet score for a little-known animated film sponsored by the Ministry of Labour, The Structure of Unions (1955), by Morten Parker, Wolf Koenig, and Robert Verrall. The Structure of Unions was made at a moment in Canadian postwar history when labour restlessness was on the rise, and the general theme of labour relations was a recurrent one among the NFB’s government-sponsored films.³⁹ Having come across the film’s master recording in the NFB library, McLaren cut and rearranged it in accordance with his more abstract goals for Short and Suite. Although he appears not to have consulted extensively with Rathburn during the production process, McLaren adopted the working title “Eldon’s Music” for the film, and later wrote that Short and Suite was “made to accompany music by Eldon Rathburn which I found in the NFB Library.”⁴⁰ Although no original music was written for Short and Suite, it may nonetheless be considered Rathburn’s first collaboration with McLaren. The score for The Structure of Unions (and subsequently for Short and Suite) was recorded in Ottawa’s Château Laurier studio by the renowned clarinetist Buff Estes, bassist Marcel Lafortune, and drummer Niels Lund, with Rathburn himself at the piano.⁴¹

McLaren patched together five musical excerpts from The Structure of Unions in his creation of the soundtrack for Short and Suite, creating his own unique formal structure from Rathburn’s raw musical materials. The main theme consists of the opening title music from the original film (a brief eight-bar bluesy ballad featuring solo clarinet), and the remainder of the work consists of a rondo-like alternation of this section with four extended contrasting interludes. The first interlude is a bass solo over a standard blues accompaniment in piano. Clarinet is featured in the following interlude, a minor key ballad over an ostinato bass line. The piano is featured in the third and most unique interlude, a quasiatonal, erratic, percussive, and highly syncopated Rathburn pastiche in the style of Thelonious Monk, replete with angular motivic contours and percussive tone clusters (in The Structure of Unions, Rathburn engages this music to underscore a scene describing challenges and tensions in the workplace, and the union’s role in settling grievances with management). The final and closing interlude consists of a “trading-twos” statement-and-answer dialogue between piano and clarinet. Up to this point, McLaren’s animation has been abstract and geometric; however in the closing section the musical statement and answer are visualized as a sort of animated “tennis game,” with the screen divided by a thick wavy black line (“the net”) and semblances of human figures appearing in alternation on one side after the other, including an image that appears to be McLaren’s caricature of Rathburn himself (figures 3.2a and 3.2b). When the piano/clarinet dialogue ceases, the full jazz quartet chimes in together, the screen’s dividing line fragments and dissolves, and three fully formed human figures are flashed briefly to end the film. We might propose a new interpretation of the abstract images in Short and Suite, one that seems to have alluded previous commentators: it seems clear that McLaren’s drawings represent gametes, spermatazoa, the vitelline (ovum) membrane, fertilization, chromosomes, zygotic cells, cellular mitosis, and the development of an embryo. The film culminates with the birth of a diminutive child-like figure, shown holding hands with its parents in the final scene.

Figure 3.2a and 3.2b • Two of McLaren’s sketches from Short and Suite (NFB, 1959), ostensibly caricatures of Eldon Rathburn (McLaren’s working title for Short and Suite was “Eldon’s Music”).

Figure 3.2c • Photo of Rathburn, 1957, taken by a London street photographer.

In characteristic McLaren style, the images in Short and Suite reflect the rhythm and texture of the music throughout. According to the NFB’s summary description of the film, “the various moods in music written for a jazz ensemble by Eldon Rathburn are translated into moving patterns of colour and light.”42 Rathburn’s swaggering jazz score for The Structure of Unions might have been forgotten entirely had it not been rediscovered and repurposed by McLaren.⁴³ One year after its release in 1959, Short and Suite received a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best Animated Film (1960).

Fish Spoilage Control (1956)

Rathburn considered his jazz-inspired score for Fish Spoilage Control, a relatively obscure NFB animated short sponsored by the Canadian Department of Fisheries, to be one of his best. He loved to recount the story of a memorable moment that occurred at the 1956 annual meeting of the Canadian League of Composers in Toronto, with a long list of distinguished Canadian composers in attendance, including Murray Adaskin, István Anhalt, John Beckwith, Jean Papineau-Couture, Harry Freedman, Harry Somers, Barbara Pentland, Clermont Pépin, and John Weinzweig, among others. The meeting opened with a call for an update from each member attending on their current compositional activities. One after the other, the composers around the table spoke of their works in progress, ranging from operas, ballets, and symphonies to concertos, string quartets, and the like. When it was Rathburn’s turn to update the group on his current work, after pausing momentarily for dramatic effect and with the delivery of a seasoned deadpan comic, he announced that he was hard at work on a piece titled Fish Spoilage Control. Following a moment of pregnant silence, the room dissolved into laughter, and well-intentioned gentle condolences were offered.44 Humour surrounding the Fish Spoilage Control project followed Rathburn for years. Speaking on the occasion of his retirement from the NFB twenty years later, sound editor Don Wellington quipped, “Of course the great work of all time in the sponsored field was 1956’s Fish Spoilage Control … Many of us thought that [Eldon’s] bacteria fugue had true germs of greatness!”⁴⁵

Fish Spoilage Control is essentially an instructional film for fisheries industry workers on the fish-handling policies and procedures required to avoid bacterial contamination. Despite its pedestrian objectives (or perhaps of necessity because of them), the film is handled with quirky virtuosity and clever irreverence by the Unit B team – by animator Gerald Potterton and Rathburn in particular – as if the material were equally suitable as light entertainment for popular audiences. The fact that the film is focused so tightly on its topic, and is intended for consumption by a limited audience, only heightens its tongue-in-cheek irony. It is an NFB comic classic that deserves to be seen by a wider audience.

Fish Spoilage Control features music and narration throughout, and Rathburn’s approach is similar to the one he had adopted so successfully in The Romance of Transportation, namely the concatenation of a series of short pieces in a variety of jazz and popular dance styles. Many of the musicians who had recorded The Romance of Transportation were brought back for this session, including Ellis McClintock (trumpet), Ben Lewis (baritone saxophone), Lou Snider (piano), and the Niosi brothers (Bert on clarinet, Joe on bass, and Johnny on drums). Following a frantic opening drum solo that accompanies the acknowledgment of the film’s sponsor, clarinet, alto sax, and trumpet intone a unison bopstyle chromatic title motif that is synchronized with the syllabic stress and rhythm of the title’s three words – “Fish Spoilage Control” – as they boldly appear one-by-one on the screen (see figure 3.3). Years later Rathburn recalled that “the title motif on the words ‘Fish Spoilage Control’ was lost on everyone!”⁴⁶ His opening bit of musical fun seemed to be something that he alone on the Unit B team found amusing. The motif’s unison brassy attack and its tritone frame seem to suggest that foreboding territory lies ahead, as if we might expect a thriller, spy, or action film to follow, rather than a somewhat utilitarian and authoritarian film devoted to rather banal subject matter, namely quality control in the Canadian fish processing industry.

Figure 3.3 • Rathburn’s opening title motif for Fish Spoilage Control (NFB, 1956).

Following the erratic bebop motifs of the opening sequence, Rathburn transitions to a mid-tempo swing tune as the film gets underway, and we see a nattily dressed epicurean being escorted into an upscale urban bistro (“Club Café”) by the maître d’hotel. At this moment the music becomes quasi-diegetic, given that it is ostensibly played by a caricaturized jazz combo in the corner of the bistro as the host shows his dining guest to his table. The customer orders a seafood plate, and when his fish arrives we are suddenly transported to a new scene – accompanied by a languid bluesy leitmotif on baritone sax – showing an unwary school of fish, happily swimming in their natural habitat. A hook appears and a hapless fish is caught, pulled to the surface, and tossed into a pile with the rest of the day’s catch. The lens zooms in, and the narrator and animation point to a singular dreaded bacterium, shown as a small red spot in the belly of the fish. At this point, Potterton’s sinister army of bacteria suddenly appear, devilishly red, with horns and pitchforks, and Rathburn uses a militaristic solo trumpet to signal the declaration of war. As the threatening legions of bacteria multiply and begin to move into formation, side by side and rank by rank, Rathburn’s music underscores the danger ahead with a rhythmically driven and drum-heavy minor-mode jazz march that emphasizes a bluesy flat fifth. Returning to the restaurant, we now hear the first of two tangos, ostensibly played by the live combo, as our discerning diner tastes and rejects a spoiled seafood entrée. The bacteria leitmotif returns as the narrator describes conditions that foster the growth of bacteria, and the tone lightens as we learn about steps that must be taken by fisheries, refrigeration, packaging, and restaurant workers in order to prevent contamination. Rathburn writes a cheerful mambo as fish are gutted properly and placed on ice. As the workers are shown observing proper hygienic practices and procedures, the mambo transitions into a swing tune in the same tempo. An even more exuberant mood accompanies the transport of clean and fresh fish to the city. Through the entire “best practices” sequence, Rathburn’s upbeat and accessible melodies seem to point to an overriding message, namely that informed workers are happy workers who follow instructions, foster a pleasant and efficient working environment, and value the goal of serving contented customers. Back at the bistro, Rathburn accompanies the denouement, where a fresh and delicious serving of fish is presented to the diner, with a ballad reminiscent of Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.” “Fresh fish, delish!” exclaims the customer to the delighted maître d’hotel. After a short cadenza on trumpet, the film ends with the combo resolving together on a sustained tonic chord signalling a happy conclusion.

City of Gold (1957)

City of Gold is one of the most important and influential films created at the NFB during its first two decades of existence. Narrated by Pierre Berton, the iconic Canadian journalist, prolific author, and media personality, it recounts the boom-to-bust saga of Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush. “Dawson City … on a wedge of swamp not far from the arctic circle,” Berton’s narration reads. “For one demented summer, it was Mecca.” Telling its story largely through the use of still photographs, the film combines narration, music, and camera panning and zooming to bring the images to life, techniques that have become known as the “Ken Burns effect” (notwithstanding Ken Burns’s frequent reference to the NFB’s City of Gold as the ultimate fons et origo for his own approach).47

City of Gold is one of Rathburn’s most successful film scores. It represents the culmination and convergence of a variety of ideas and influences that he had been exploring during the 1950s, especially in the areas of instrumentation, colour, texture, and breadth of genre palette. His evocative layering of diverse musical styles, and his effective interweaving of melodies, folk songs, hymns, and anthems from the Gold Rush era lend the film an atmosphere of historical authenticity. City of Gold is also the first of many film and concert music scores in which Rathburn incorporates the banjo, guitar, and Jew’s harp, instruments he engages not only for their unique timbral properties, but also for their potent signifying potential and nostalgic significance, since they readily conjure up rurality, the folk, and the broad North American frontiers of the nineteenth century. We will return to this topic in chapter 7.

In an interview broadcast in 1960 on the CBC radio program Music for the Films, Rathburn commented extensively on his score for City of Gold.⁴⁸ The production team agreed with Rathburn’s plan to engage period-style folk instruments – honky-tonk piano, banjo, guitar, harmonica, and Jew’s harp – in addition to flute, clarinet, harp, horn, trombone, tuba, a string section, and percussion. Pierre Berton describes the team’s discussions with Eldon in an interview with film scholar John Tibbetts: “There was a great deal of discussion about the kind of music we should use and a decision was made at the time to use odd instruments like Jew’s harps which seemed to fit so well into the period. Eldon Rathburn … did the score, which I am sure you will agree is one of the best ever heard in a documentary.”⁴⁹

Eldon was brought in by Low and Koenig at the very final stage of production, after the narration had been recorded. Roman Kroitor described Rathburn’s ingenious score as the key ingredient that led to the ultimate success of the film:

[Among Eldon’s film scores] my favorite is City of Gold. I remember it being run with just voice and pictures. Pierre [Berton] looked at the film and thought it was passable, but not great. Then we put music to it and suddenly the film had mystery, excitement, adventure, humor, and reflection, and has become a classic. I think the score is at least eighty-five percent of that. Eldon’s genius has been getting inside a film and expressing its essence in a way that the filmmaker didn’t quite realize was there.⁵⁰

Due to a musicians’ union strike in Canada, the decision was made to record the score in London. Rathburn later recalled that the film was scored and recorded under ideal conditions, with sufficient time to complete the composition and orchestration stages, and British session musicians of the very highest quality. He was deeply impressed with English conductor Muir Mathieson and percussionist James Blades in particular, with whom he maintained friendly contact and correspondence during the next two decades.51

City of Gold opens with low brass and rolling timpani sustaining dominant harmony while the orchestra climbs through motivic material in a dizzying ascent to the tonic and the arrival of the honky-tonk piano that will come to represent one of the film’s most characteristic sonic markers. A bowed ostinato string bass line beneath the piano initially provides it with a solid harmonic underpinning but soon asserts its independence, wandering in and out of concordance. With these opening gestures, Rathburn symbolizes two of the film’s central themes: the piano is employed as a device to signal the period, place, excitement, and glitter of late nineteenth-century Dawson City, while the foreboding bass describes the underlying struggle, earnestness, and hubris of the Gold Rush. When the piano fades, the bass line takes prominence and is joined by strings and winds in an idyllic, peaceful, and optimistic main theme. As the camera moves in on present-day Dawson City, Berton begins his narrative: “This was my home town, and my father’s town before me … History will never see its like again.” When we see a gathering of octogenarians on a hotel porch, chatting and commiserating about days gone by, the honky-tonk piano returns to reference earlier times, while the strings engage in a nebulous harmonic reverie. “Exotic musical chords stroke the scene,” writes John Tibbetts, “like a magician’s transforming wand.”⁵² When the camera pans to children playing in the street, Rathburn accompanies the scene with a whimsical passage in woodwinds, harp, and glockenspiel. The honky-tonk piano and orchestral reverie return when the camera cuts to shots of the city’s turn-of-the-century railroad and buildings, and Pierre Berton recalls memories of his childhood in Dawson City. Rathburn acknowledged that these juxtapositions were inspired both by the ways in which he sought to interpret the film and its themes musically, and by the polystylism of Charles Ives. “I think the influence of Ives is heard in my use of simultaneous ideas,” he wrote. “However the film dictated the use of these ideas, and my score evolved from a striving to blend with the film, rather than trying to emulate Ives.”⁵³

When the film cuts to shots of snowy mountain peaks, Rathburn signals the dangerous trek to the goldfields that lies ahead with four dark and ominous-sounding orchestral sonorities. When the camera moves to historical photographs of hikers on the Chilkoot Trail, he presents a minor-mode banjo vamp while a muted horn plays fragments from “The Dirty Miner,” a well-known folk song from the period.⁵⁴ Rathburn’s banjo effectively underlines the miners’ slow, steady, and dangerous climb through the ice and snow. When the hikers arrive at the other side, and the camera pans down the mountainside to the Klondike River valley where a fleet of ships awaits their arrival, Rathburn conveys a sense of triumph and relief with a shift to the major mode, quickened tempo, and prominent unmuted horns. To accompany the voyage of the optimistic miners down the river to their destination, he breaks into a series of cheerful fiddle reels accompanied by banjo and Jew’s harp, including the British Army song “Brighton Camp.”⁵⁵ The song’s final verse aptly captures the mood of the hopeful travellers:

Figure 3.4 • Photograph featured in Colin Low’s City of Gold (NFB, 1957): “Climbing Chilkoot Pass,” by American-Canadian photojournalist Edwin Tappan Adney (originally published in “News from the Klondike,” Harper’s Weekly, 25 December 1897). The image was accompanied by Pierre Berton’s narration: “The winter of 1897, beyond mountains two thousand miles north from civilization, the cry was ‘Gold!’”

The hope of final victory within my bosom burning

Is mingling with sweet thoughts of thee and of my fond returning.

But should I ne’er return again, still with thy love I’ll bind me.

Dishonour’s breath shall never stain the name I leave behind me.

When the expectant gold seekers finally reach the gold fields, only to discover that they have arrived too late – since almost everything has been claimed – Rathburn intones a solemn dirge.

As the film draws to a close, Berton’s narration reviews and summarizes the saga. Here, for scenes capturing the frenzy of the Gold Rush, the bustling Main Street, and the diverse characters inhabiting Dawson City (including the prostitutes of “Paradise Alley”), Rathburn writes raucous vaudevillian pieces, one-steps, turkey trots, and period waltzes. To describe the authoritarian presence of the Mounties and the puritanical laws they enforced, he shifts to the hymn “Shall We Gather at the River,” scored solemnly for brass and gospel-style piano, in striking contrast to the music with which he captures the high-spirited revelry of the townsfolk. When Berton describes how the strong American presence in this Canadian city gave rise to periodic clashes of culture, Rathburn accompanies the sequence with a medley that interweaves “God Save the Queen” with “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The camera finally pans across the exhausted and despondent faces of the men who had come to Dawson City in 1897 with such high hopes. “For this I wrote a hymn-like piece, played in concert band style,” Rathburn notes.56 As the film concludes in present-day Dawson City, a solo celeste bridges the gap between past and present. Rathburn’s end-title music largely recapitulates the opening title music on honky-tonk piano and ostinato bass. The piano climbs to its upper register to close the film score in quasi-improvisatory style.

In awarding the film first prize in the “general interest” category at the 1957 Cork (Ireland) Film Festival, renowned British filmmaker and critic Basil Wright commended City of Gold for its “charm and poetic tenderness” and for the “faultless music of Eldon Rathburn.”⁵⁷ Film scholar John Tibbetts similarly praises Rathburn’s “evocative” score, calling it “a classic of its kind.”⁵⁸ City of Gold was nominated for an Academy Award in the “Best Film, Short Subject” category, and it won first prize at the Bilbao International Festival of Documentary Film, a Gold Medal at the International Film Festival on Social Documentary in Florence, Italy, and a coveted Palme d’Or at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. In June of 1958 it was named “Film of the Year” at the tenth annual Canadian Film Awards.⁵⁹

Figure 3.5 • Measures 1–16 from Rathburn’s main theme for It’s a Crime (NFB, 1958). In his 1997 piano solo arrangement of excerpts from the film score, Rathburn titled this theme “Happy in Vienna.”

It’s a Crime (1957)

In 1957, Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroitor, and Gerald Potterton invited Rathburn to compose music for It’s a Crime, an animated film they had been asked to produce by the Department of Labour. By assigning many of the Unit B personnel who had worked on The Romance of Transportation to It’s a Crime, Tom Daly had hoped the team might repeat the success of the earlier film. By this point in Eldon’s career, “the committee” consistently sought him out to score their films, and he was accustomed to working with them.60 Since it had been decided that the film would be a tongue-in-cheek comedy thriller, Rathburn decided to score it for solo zither, inspired by Anton Karas’s evocative zither score for The Third Man (1949), Carol Reed’s Oscar-winning noir crime thriller set in Vienna, starring Orson Welles in the lead role of Harry Lime.⁶¹ Figure 3.5 shows the score’s opening sixteen-bar phrase, a theme Eldon later titled “Happy in Vienna,” in a 1997 piano solo arrangement of excerpts from the film score (discussed in chapter 8). Throughout the film, Rathburn’s score unabashedly imitates Karas’s style, and the “Happy in Vienna” theme is representative in this respect. It is simultaneously a Viennese waltz parody and a free variation on Karas’s “Harry Lime Theme,” a tune that topped the US Billboard pop music charts for eleven weeks in 1950 (success that led to the subsequent Hollywood trend of releasing film themes as singles). In his journal notes, Rathburn reflects on his score for It’s a Crime and provides some insights into his changing perspective on harmonic language and instrumentation at the time:

I like this score [It’s a Crime] because in it I rediscovered the purity of diatonic music. Writing a lot of troubled, chromatic music is fine, but it gets to you after a while. I also gained more respect for fretted instruments. Their thin wiry sound is a welcome relief from the luxuriant oboe, creamy strings, blazing brass and noisy percussion. Somehow the zither evokes the feeling of Europe in the spring, walking around Rome, the cafés of Paris, Soho’s many wonders, etc.62

Rathburn recorded the score in London in the spring of 1957, shortly after recording City of Gold there in collaboration with conductor Muir Mathieson. He had been hoping to contact Anton Karas in London, and since Mathieson had an acquaintance who knew Karas well, he made some inquiries on Eldon’s behalf. His recent experience with New York guitarist Ray de la Torre still fresh in his mind, Eldon was curious to know whether Karas, who earned his living playing the zither in an Austrian Heuriger, could read music. Eldon eventually tracked down John Cox, the sound engineer for The Third Man. Cox did not know Karas’s whereabouts, but he had found Karas extremely difficult to work with, and he warned Eldon against hiring him. Eldon heeded his advice and hired Ernst Naser, a professional zitherist living in London, to record the score.⁶³

It’s a Crime was commissioned by the Department of Labour with the goal of addressing Canada’s seasonal unemployment problem. The film was targeted at a general audience, with the aim of urging Canadian employers to maintain peak employment during the winter months, rather than reducing productivity.⁶⁴ Potterton and Koenig decided to imbue It’s a Crime with the kind of wry, animated humour that had been so successful in The Romance of Transportation and Fish Spoilage Control. The film’s main character is a thief whose entrepreneurial project is to set up a counterfeiting machine when other sources of work had dried up during the winter months. As unorthodox as this approach must have seemed given the film’s intended message, both the production team and Ministry officials were delighted with its premiere screening on the opening night of the Stratford Film Festival (July 1957), and a highly favourable review that appeared in Time magazine.65

Police (1958)

In 1958 Rathburn worked on another jazz-infused score for Unit B. Police (1958) takes a behind-the-scenes look at the Toronto Police Department and chronicles the daily activities of some of its officers. Together with Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig, director Terence McCartney-Filgate was a pioneering figure in the evolution of the NFB’s Candid Eye film series and its “direct cinema” approach to documentary filmmaking. In tandem with French ethnologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch and the closely related cinéma-vérité moment, NFB filmmakers played a leading role in the early exploration and definition of direct cinema. In direct cinema the documentarian’s goal is to present natural dialogue and authentic action with minimal intervention. By employing handheld cameras and omitting narration and hired actors, they sought to minimize their own perspectival framing and engagement with the subject at hand, in the hope that viewers might form their own subjective insights into the events and issues unfolding on the screen.⁶⁶ Terence McCartney-Filgate’s The Back-Breaking Leaf (1959, also scored by Rathburn), a direct-cinema documentary about workers in southern Ontario’s tobacco fields, was the Candid Eye series’ crowning achievement, winning international accolades including a Eurovision Grand Prize for Documentary Film at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.⁶⁷

Given that Police seeks to capture unscripted action and dialogue, Rathburn felt that only a highly improvisatory score would be suitable as musical accompaniment. In a memorandum of 11 December 1958 to Grant McLean (assistant film commissioner and director of production), Unit B’s executive producer Tom Daly describes how Eldon generated his score freely and organically, from a germinal thematic kernel. Daly is effusive in his praise of Rathburn’s work on the film:

I want to put on record what we consider to be a triumph of musical taste and ingenuity, namely Eldon Rathburn’s performance on the music for the film Police. On Wednesday afternoon he sat down with the [Unit B] boys to see the film and discuss the music. The music had to be recorded on Thursday evening, the following day. In that very short time, Eldon had composed the theme representing the police element, and a 10-section score of ten variations on this theme, ready for recording by a group of musicians who could improvise. Eldon had worked each part of the score in seconds, marking everything that had to be accented breaking it down into so many bars at such and such a tempo, and marking the chord harmony for each part. The combo – vibraphone, piano, trombone, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, tympani, double bass and electric guitar – simply had to improvise from this structure under Eldon’s direction. The result was excellent in every way. It fitted beautifully, was very apt for the picture it went with, and is one of the noticeable positive contributions to the film. Besides which, the players had a wonderful time. All in all, I think Eldon and the Music Department in general should be voted a double portion of recognition for their capacity to come through marvelously in a pinch.⁶⁸

Figure 3.6 • Rathburn’s ternary “cool jazz” theme for Police (NFB, 1958).

The jazzy tune shown in figure 3.6 serves as the thematic basis for the score, with its characteristically “Tin Pan Alley” ternary (ABA) form and sentence-like presentation phrase structure (i.e., with a “basic idea” and its repetition in bars 1–8).⁶⁹ As this theme and its ensuing ten improvised variations unfold, Rathburn’s score reveals itself as an example of 1950s “crime jazz,” a sub-genre that is perfectly wed to McCartney-Filgate’s direct-cinema style, and ideally suited to this film about the Toronto Police Department in particular.70 Pairing jazz with crime would become ubiquitous during the late 1950s when, as Alan Kurtz has noted, jazz came to serve “as a cinematic signal for sex and violence.”⁷¹ Rathburn’s score for Police could also be characterized as “cool jazz,” with its lighter tone, prominent melodic material, relaxed tempo, and techniques borrowed from the Western classical tradition, including contrapuntal melodic lines, larger ensembles and classically influenced formal designs.

At precisely the time Rathburn was preparing his score for Police, Miles Davis released his landmark album Birth of the Cool (1957).⁷² Although Eldon does not mention its impact, his adoption of the “cool jazz” style for this film, his nonet instrumentation (clarinet, saxophone, trombone, piano, guitar, bass, drums, vibraphone, and percussion), and some of his scoring techniques – the frequent assignment of the melody to two instruments playing in unison, while inner voices supply contrapuntal counter-melodies, for example – all point to Davis’s influence. Similarly, in the closing section of his score, Rathburn transforms the film’s main theme (figure 3.6) into a mid-tempo mambo during the scrolling of the credits, a nod to the Afro-Cuban jazz craze that took hold in the 1940s and ’50s with tunes such as “A Night in Tunisia” and “Manteca” by Dizzy Gillespie (with Chano Pozo) and “Mangó Mangüé” by Charlie Parker (with Frank Grillo “Macheto”). Both Rathburn’s notebooks – where he meticulously recorded his weekly LP listening regimen⁷³ – and his score for MacCartney-Filgate’s Police reveal that Eldon was highly conversant with the most recent trends in contemporary jazz.

An ambitious Rathburn-inspired jazz recording project was undertaken just prior to the publication of this monograph. The core musical materials for the project were drawn from three of the films discussed above: The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952), Fish Spoilage Control (1956), and Police (1958). Working with themes from Rathburn’s scores, producer/arrangers Adrian Matte and Allyson Rogers created a series of jazz charts that were designed as a springboard for the improvisatory skills and imagination of the five leading Canadian jazz artists who accepted the challenge and participated in the project.⁷⁴ The Romance of Improvisation in Canada: The Genius of Eldon Rathburn was recorded in February 2018 at the NFB’s historic Chester Beachell Studio in Ville St-Laurent (north Montreal)⁷⁵ – the very studio where Rathburn had worked and collaborated so frequently during his career – and the album was released by Montreal’s Justin Time Records in November 2018.76 The album’s versatile all-star combo takes the listener on a voyage though lively bebop to free jazz, tango, and mambo, and brings the recording to a touching conclusion with a sentimental rendition of a jazz ballad (“The Rockies”) from Rathburn’s score for The Romance of Transporation in Canada. Released ten years after his death in 2008, The Romance of Improvisation in Canada is a fitting tribute to Rathburn. In its look back at these extraordinary NFB film scores from the 1950s, this ground-breaking Canadian creative project combines tender nostalgia and the best of forward-looking twenty-first-century jazz.

Sojourn to Europe

When “Professor” William Comerford Bowden died on 21 March 1959 at the age of eighty-six, apparently from a suicidal leap into Saint John’s Reversing Falls,⁷⁷ Eldon was deeply saddened to have so suddenly and tragically lost his first mentor, his most faithful correspondent, and a steadfast and lifelong source of encouragement. For several months he had been planning a sabbatical leave from the NFB – a three-month sojourn to Europe. The timing could not have been better. He wanted to travel, to gain perspective on his life and career, and to withdraw for a few months from the gruelling pace he had maintained during the dozen years that had passed so quickly since his arrival at the Board in 1947. He knew that this leave of absence would be the best possible medicine for his soul and mind. On 21 April 1959, his forty-third birthday, Eldon set sail for Europe on the Empress of France, waved off at the wharf by his now twenty-one-year-old sister Joan. Travelling economically, he shared a cabin with a previously unknown Englishman, “Harold,” who was returning to the UK after discovering that life in Canada was not what he had hoped it might be. The ship docked in Liverpool, and Eldon travelled from there to London by train. He later recalled spending countless hours combing through the bookstores of Charing Cross Road and feeding his passion for railroad history by visiting London’s colossal and historic junctions and stations. After visiting Edinburgh, he soon made his way to the continent, where with the aid of a Eurailpass (then a new pan-European initiative) he travelled from Amsterdam to Paris, Milan, Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Spain, as well as various destinations in between. When he visited Spain, the country was still presided over by Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892–1975), the brutal Fascist dictator. North American tourists rarely visited Spain during this tumultuous period of its history, but Eldon was bravely undeterred. After returning to Montreal in July, he regaled family and friends with tales of his adventures throughout a European cultural, economic, and political landscape that was still recovering and rebuilding after the war. Near the end of his life Eldon told Roberta Morris, his niece, that his decision to take this career pause to visit Europe was one of the best he had ever made.78

However, in stark contrast with the elation he experienced while travelling throughout Europe, Eldon would experience deep sadness when he returned to Canada to find his family in mourning. When he was in Europe, his thirteen-year-old niece Roxana (“Roxie”) Cooper – daughter of his sister Inez and brother-in-law Bill – had suddenly collapsed and died at school, apparently from a previously undiagnosed cardiac condition. Roberta Morris recalled a conversation with her uncle some years later: “The funeral was already over by the time he arrived home; I remember Eldon telling me how difficult that was to come home to.”⁷⁹

The 1960s

Rathburn scored nearly forty films during the 1960s, a period of almost explosive creative productivity for both Eldon and the NFB.⁸⁰ His major film projects during the early 1960s include two important films by Colin Low: Circle of the Sun (1960), the first film to capture the Sun Dance ritual of Alberta’s Kainai Nation (or “Blood tribe”), and Universe (1960), an Oscar-nominated documentary on interstellar science (discussed below). Highlights of the year 1960 also include collaboration with co-composers Joan Edward and Malca Gillson on a series of three historical documentaries by William Weintraub: The Good, Bright Days: 1919–1927 (1960), Sunshine and Eclipse: 1927–1934 (1960), and Twilight of an Era: 1934–1939 (1960). David Bairstow’s Morning on the Lièvre (1961), a lyrical film set to poetry by Archibald Lampman, is accompanied by one of Eldon’s most impressionistic orchestral scores. During this period he also scored a series of films for the celebrated director Donald Brittain, including Everybody’s Prejudiced (1961); Brittain’s thirteen-part series Canada at War (1962), a sprawling documentary project that engaged four of the NFB’s staff composers (Blackburn, Fleming, Rathburn, and the newly hired Ken Campbell);⁸¹ and Fields of Sacrifice (1964), a film that visits the battlefields of Europe where Canadian soldiers lost their lives during the First and Second World Wars (a score Eldon later described as “one of my best”).82 And Rathburn scored two of the NFB’s first feature film productions during this period: Don Haldane’s Drylanders (1963), a fictional story of the trials and tribulations of a prairie family during the Great Depression and the prolonged drought that intensified its impact on the Canadian West, and Don Owens’s Nobody Waved Good-Bye (1964), an experimental and improvisatory coming-of-age film that foregrounds the generation gap between a rebellious teenager and his parents.

During the early 1960s Rathburn also scored three films for the renowned British-Canadian director and animator Gerald Potterton. In the comedies My Financial Career (1962), The Ride (1963), and The Railrodder (1965), Eldon’s jolly musical sensibilities are perfectly matched with Potterton’s lively sense of humour and creative personality. In My Financial Career, an animated short film based on a well-known satirical short story by Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock, Potterton drew on Rathburn’s considerable talent for improvisation. “I didn’t even have time to pour myself a cup of coffee!” he recounted years later about being accosted by Potterton one morning as he arrived at the office. “He grabbed me and I improvised the score on the spot!”⁸³ For his short slapstick comedy The Ride, Potterton wanted Eldon to write a series of pieces for jazz piano solo in the hope that the legendary New York jazz pianist Errol Garner might agree to record the score.⁸⁴ When he learned that Garner was unable to read music, Eldon decided to adopt a silent film approach, scoring the film for a small vaudevillian combo of winds, low brass, banjo, percussion, piano, and harpsichord, with himself in the most prominent role at the keyboard. Potterton’s scenario involves a drowsy chauffeur accidentally drifting off to sleep in his Rolls-Royce as he awaits the arrival of his patron. The chauffeur dreams that his cigar-smoking patron, absorbed in the Financial Times, is blithely unaware of his surroundings. The insouciant patron soon finds himself in a variety of slapstick scenarios, including hurtling downhill on a toboggan at top speed, all due to his hapless chauffeur’s inattention. All the while, the earnest chauffeur is in hot pursuit, attempting to come to the rescue. Given Rathburn’s nostalgia for vaudevillian slapstick and silent film, and his fond childhood memories of hours spent at the Nickelodeon in Saint John, Potterton’s film was ideally suited to his skills and sensibilities.

Two of Rathburn’s most important NFB film projects from the early 1960s were Universe (1960), an ambitious and costly science documentary project that was three years in the making, and The Railrodder (1965), the last film in which the legendary American cinema idol Buster Keaton would play a leading role.

Universe (1960)

Universe, an educational documentary that examines the then-current understanding of planetary science, asks the viewer to imagine a six-billion-kilometre journey through the stars and space, from our solar system to the most distant galaxies.85 It has been called a prototypical masterpiece of the science documentary genre for its awe-inspiring special effects and realistic animation of cosmic phenomena as they might appear to a futuristic voyager travelling to the farthest regions of the solar system. The idea for the film dated from a 1949 meeting that took place in Paris between Colin Low and Berthold Bartosch, the pioneering Czech animator. At the time, Bartosch was formulating plans for “a new film on the cosmos.” Low explains how their conversation inspired his own ambitious vision for Universe:

His equipment was very simple but very ingenious, and he showed me how he planned to execute it with three-dimensional models. I was struck by his audacity and ingenuity. Afterwards I thought about him frequently as our equipment at the NFB developed. When Roman Kroitor told me about his idea for a film about an astronomer, he said, “Why not experiment?” So we started in an old garage behind the Ottawa NFB studio … When we moved to Montreal, we had a good studio close to the Animation Department. Sydney Goldsmith could experiment with effects, and Gerry Graham and Des Dew found a British special effects expert from England, Wally Gentleman … On and off we experimented, and our cutting copy looked better and better. When the first Sputnik went into outer space [4 October 1957], management at the Film Board suddenly got interested. What was to be a little classroom lesson became a production! Kroitor and Gillson had shot a great live-action sequence of the astronomer and the Richmond Hill David Dunlap Observatory. I had pushed for lighting that would match the spectacular effects. Eldon Rathburn wrote the score and recorded it in England, and the narrator, Douglas Rain, a Stratford Shakespearian actor, read the narration that was written by Roman Kroitor and Stanley Jackson. Tom Daly was the watchful producer from the beginning. It was exciting to see it come together. I watched the film not long ago, and I think that Berthold Bartosch would have been proud.⁸⁶

Figure 3.7 • Rathburn’s draft manuscript (piano reduction) for Universe (NFB, 1960), mm. 1–20. The enclosed numbers above the staff indicate film length footage on the Moviola.

Rathburn’s otherworldly orchestral score for Universe is a tour de force of tonal exploration and orchestration. Figure 3.7 shows the composer’s piano reduction of the opening twenty measures. An ostinato pedal-tone C in timpani, cello, and double bass sets an eerie stage for the extraterrestrial voyage ahead. To heighten the dramatic impact of this foreboding opening gesture, Rathburn sets his tempo at 60 bpm, a relentless and robotic clock pulse he employs to “create the feeling of time standing still.”⁸⁷ The multi-metre in figure 3.7 provides a fine example of an aspect of film composition that Eldon had described a decade earlier in a brief published article he wrote in 1950 titled “Writing for Movies.”⁸⁸ “There is the all-encompassing time-element, often complicated by abrupt visual changes on the screen,” he wrote. “This may necessitate a rapid alteration of metre, such as 3/4, 2/4 or 3/8.”⁸⁹ Figure 3.7 also shows how compositional features on the score are cued and synchronized with important events on the screen – “space wander,” “M.T.” (“main title”), “F.O.M.T.” (“fade out main title), “sun,” “skyscrapers,” “people” – the timing of which is given above the staves according to the film footage shown on the NFB’s “Moviola” equipment, which facilitated film and music editing. A particularly dramatic audiovisual moment occurs when the film reaches the sixty-foot point, for example, with the sudden and dramatic appearance of the sun as a fiery ball on the horizon. At the very moment it appears, Rathburn resolves a complex dissonant brass sonority through a powerful crescendo that culminates with an austere-sounding intervallic fifth, marked sforzando. He had used a very similar gesture at the forty-foot point to introduce the sudden on-screen appearance of the film’s main title, “Universe.” Between these prominent forty- and sixty-foot score cues, an otherworldly celeste introduces a starkly robotic motive in the upper register, while an equally austere trio of vibes, alto flute, and harp traverse a scalar ascent that reaches its apex with the dramatic appearance of the sun. When the film snaps to a shot of terrestrial skyscapers, Rathburn marks the moment with a sparkling and rapid upper-register flourish in celeste and glockenspiel that arrives on a dissonant D_♭ above the treble clef, a gesture made to sound even more alien by violin harmonics. The effect is magical and arresting.

Figure 3.8 • Piano reduction of Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War” (from The Planets, 1916, mm. 6–16). Score reduction transcribed from the composer’s original two-piano arrangement (J. Curwen & Sons, London, 1915).

Rathburn’s foreboding pedal tone is strongly reminiscent of the opening measures of “Mars, the Bringer of War,” the first movement of Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets, Op. 32 (1916), a piano reduction of which is shown in figure 3.8.⁹⁰ Rathburn also references Holst’s early twentieth-century masterwork in the pungent brass sonorities he employs in his opening passage, and he directly quotes Holst’s prominent rising-fifth-descending-semitone “Mars motive” (see figure 3.8, mm. 8–11: G–D–D_♭–A_♭–G etc.) in the most recurrent and unifying motive heard throughout Universe.

When the Unit B production team heard the initial brass-heavy scoring of Rathburn’s “Mars” section for Universe,⁹¹ they rejected it and asked for something more “distant” sounding. Acknowledging the team’s concerns, Eldon demonstrated something he felt might be a viable alternative: a free improvisation on his brass theme, but played in the murky and forbidding-sounding lower register on the piano, heavily pedalled. The team was impressed and sold.⁹² Fourteen years later Rathburn returned to this musical space-evocation approach when working on Sidney Goldsmith’s animated film Satellites of the Sun (1974), a score based largely on themes by Bach played in the low register of the piano, two octaves lower than written by the baroque master.⁹³

Later in the score, in a film sequence he labelled “galaxy music,”94 Rathburn employs “crowded elements such as a string canon very closely separated,”⁹⁵ a textural technique that would later become associated with the Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti.⁹⁶ Ligeti coined the term “micropolyphony” to describe this technique:

Technically speaking I have always approached musical texture through part-writing. Both Atmosphères [1961] and Lontano [1967] have a dense canonic structure. But you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very densely woven cobweb. I have retained melodic lines in the process of composition, they are governed by rules as strict as Palestrina’s or those of the Flemish school, but the rules of this polyphony are worked out by me. The polyphonic structure does not come through, you cannot hear it; it remains hidden in a microscopic, underwater world, to us inaudible. I call it micropolyphony (such a beautiful word!).⁹⁷

Figure 3.9 shows the initial measures of Rathburn’s extended canonic “micropolyphony,” a passage that begins in the upper strings at “Cue 9” of his score for Universe (1960). Curiously, although we do not know what might have instigated Rathburn’s exploration of micropolyphonic technique, it is clear that its use in this score occurs fully one year prior to Ligeti’s Atmosphères (1961) the orchestral score usually cited as the first example of micropolyphony in the repertoire. Rathburn’s micropolyphonic “galaxy music” is therefore an example of the technique in use avant la lettre, and it may have been an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s employment of Ligeti’s Atmosphères in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to which we will return below.

In later “galaxy music” passages for Universe, Rathburn’s textures and scoring are exceedingly sparse. Years later he noted that he had learned from the Universe project to explore the virtue of “leaving more space” in his music whenever possible.⁹⁸

Throughout the film, Roman Kroitor’s live-action footage of star-gazing astronomer Donald MacRae – manipulating his mammoth telescope and other equipment in the Richmond Hill David Dunlap Observatory – is viewed in silence. The only exception to this rule occurs at the end of the film, when the star-gazing astronomer’s work day ends, and he leaves the observatory. Here, as the end titles begin to scroll, Rathburn writes an original idyllic and folktune-like melody in the major mode, a striking change in tonal character signifying that the cosmic voyage is over for now. “The effect of the simple end music is quite startling,” Rathburn writes. “Until then the music has been ‘astral’ in character, and the change to simple diatonic music had a down to earth feeling that worked well.”⁹⁹

Figure 3.9 • “Cue 9” (comets) of Rathburn’s score for Universe (NFB, 1960), initiates an extended passage of canonic micropolyphony that begins in the upper strings. A diagonal line and enlarged note-heads highlight Rathburn’s “microcanon at the sixteenth note” in this passage.

After its release in 1960, Universe caught the eye of American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who promptly ordered fine-grain copies of Universe from the NFB during the planning stages of his own ambitious project, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a landmark feature film on life, futuristic travel, and existential angst in the space age.100 According to Kubrick’s biographer Vincent Lobrutto:

To find special effects techniques that met Kubrick’s criteria, the director issued a decree to see and read everything available on space … The staff uncovered Universe, a short film produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1960. As the film unspooled, Kubrick watched the screen with rapt attention while a panorama of the galaxies swirled by, achieving the standard of dynamic visionary realism that he was looking for. These images were not flawed by the shoddy matte work, obvious animation and poor miniatures typically found in science fiction films. Universe proved that the camera could be a telescope to the heavens. As the credits rolled, Kubrick studied the names of the magicians who created the images: Colin Low, Sidney Goldsmith, and Wally Gentleman. Staff members set about locating this [NFB] visual effects crew and researching how they achieved their miracles … After watching Universe, Kubrick was convinced that he had found his special effects team. He was unable to secure the entire Universe team, but he did hire Wally Gentleman.101

Universe is a classic example of a powerful cinematic achievement that represents the collaborative effort of a team of artists who are at the peak of their respective careers and who rally behind a unified creative vision. By the time Kubrick’s request arrived at the NFB, Low and Goldsmith were forced to decline, as they were preoccupied with the ambitious Expo 67 Labyrinth project (discussed in chapter 4). However, Wally Gentleman joined Kubrick’s team as director of special effects, a role in which he would design some of the film’s most breathtaking futuristic scenes.¹⁰² Stratford Festival actor Douglas Rain, who narrated Universe, was hired by Kubrick to provide the voice of HAL 9000, the Discovery One spacecraft’s coolly dispassionate computer antagonist in 2001. Sidney Goldsmith would produce a long series of NFB animated films about space exploration that sprang from the success of Universe, including Fields of Space (1969, scored by Rathburn), To the Edge of the Universe (1969), Space Connection (1973), Satellites of the Sun (1974, scored by Rathburn), Starlife (1983), and Comet (1985).

Although Low, Gentleman, Koenig, and Rain had all received calls from Kubrick to collaborate on 2001, Rathburn did not. As it turned out, this may have been a piece of good fortune. Kubrick initially hired composer Alex North to score his film, but did not use it when North delivered the music, preferring instead to use only recorded classical music. Although original orchestral scores had gradually become the norm for feature films of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, Kubrick would ultimately eschew them altogether. Beginning with 2001, he would never again use original music in his films. Some commentators have suggested that Kubrick’s approach set the stage for a general devaluation of the craft of original film music composition among the next generation of American filmmakers, many of whom turned to stock music rather than original composition.103 As an exception to this trend, Martin Scorsese hired composer Bernard Herrmann to score Taxi Driver (1976) but has subsequently avoided the use of original film scores. Herrmann famously dismissed Kubrick’s use of recorded music in 2001: “It shows vulgarity when a director uses music previously composed. I think 2001: A Space Odyssey is the height of vulgarity in our time. To have outer space accompanied by The Blue Danube, and the piece is not even recorded anew!”¹⁰⁴ It could be argued that the film composer was not fully restored to a place of pride in the American film industry for a decade, until John Williams wrote his leitmotif-rich score for another space film, Star Wars (1977), in collaboration with director George Lucas.

Hailed as “a triumph of film art,” Universe was nominated for an Oscar, received the Jury prize for “Best Animated Short” at the Cannes Film Festival, and won more than twenty other major international film awards.¹⁰⁵ When Eldon retired from the NFB in 1976, New Brunswick painter Norman F. Jackson sent him a card of congratulations and enclosed a copy of his sketch of the late President John F. Kennedy looking down on Neil Armstrong on 21 July 1969, as he took his first step on the moon.¹⁰⁶ In reference to Rathburn’s evocative film score written a decade before the lunar landing, Jackson wrote: “To Eldon Rathburn, who gave sound to the Universe.”¹⁰⁷

Sky (1963)

During the early 1960s Eldon frequently worked with the New Zealand–born filmmaker John Feeney. Feeney worked at the NFB from 1954 to 1963, a decade during which he became known for his award-winning documentaries on the Inuit peoples of Artic Canada. Rathburn scored three films for Feeney, all of which were released during Feeney’s last year at the Board: A Christmas Fantasy (1963), Sky (1963), and the widely acclaimed Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak (1963), an Oscar-nominated film in which Rathburn made sparse and experimental use of percussion throughout the score. Like Corral a decade earlier, music plays a foreground role as both A Christmas Fantasy and Sky are films without commentary.

Sky (1963) is a nature film in which director Feeney employs time-lapse photography and an assortment of lenses and filters to capture the movement of clouds as they sweep across the Alberta Rockies and foothills, and to record the shifting moods of a day in the life of the clouds, from sunrise to sunset. Time-lapse photography appeared in film long before Feeney’s moody film,108 but rarely had it been used so dramatically and artfully. Rathburn’s modernistic score is similarly adventuresome, providing expressive commentary in the absence of narration. “It is a dangerous game to give a composer a film with no commentary at all,” he wrote some years later. “In this case, the composer calls the shots, which may not be what the producer had in mind – Sky was a case in point.”¹⁰⁹ Rathburn’s music for Sky gave rise to what is apparently the only instance in his career where his work caused considerable controversy. His austere, brooding, and densely chromatic orchestral score for the film was a radical departure from NFB norms for nature films. When he had played his initial sketches for the production team on piano, Feeney was unconcerned about its dissonance. However when the team later heard the final orchestral mix, the tritone-rich motivic material and sustained dissonances in the strings seemed considerably harsher than they had sounded in the original piano reduction. Rathburn was well aware that his orchestration had intensified the score’s pungent atonality, but he was satisfied that it served the film and its images well. When critics commented on the acerbic character of the music after initial screenings, Tom Daly asked him to withdraw and rewrite the score.¹¹⁰ But Eldon was resolute. “Tom, if I did it again,” he replied, “I would do the same thing, only more!”¹¹¹ In the end the original music was retained, and both Rathburn and Feeney were ultimately delighted with the results. David Burmester, a now-retired English teacher in Davis, California, concurred. Burmester used short films to motivate the writing of poetry in his high school classroom, and he recommended Sky as his “favorite film for this purpose (or for practically any other purpose),” noting that Rathburn’s music is particularly well suited for providing inspiration and focusing discussion among students: “The eerie music of Eldon Rathburn helps establish the tone of the film so that when we see a storm sweeping over the mountains, it seems as if we’re seeing the darkness pouring out of Mordor. I’ve used Sky in many ways. One is to substitute a different score (my favorite is The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’) and then discuss the importance of the soundtrack.”112

The initial inspiration for the character of Rathburn’s score was Feeney’s opening visual gesture, the powerful image of a sunrise shown as a distant small orange circle rising out of the darkness of the fully blackened screen. For Daly and others on the production team, Feeney’s opening sunrise had evoked only a sense of calm, serene natural beauty. However Eldon recalled that he “had a totally different idea.”¹¹³ Taking the opposite approach, he “treated the sun like a huge dangerous ball of fire!”¹¹⁴ Feeney quickly agreed that this was fully in keeping with the quality and character of his own visual poetry on the screen. Rathburn’s atonal score emphasizes the feeling of otherworldliness that the film evokes, with its oddly coloured landscapes devoid of human or animal presence, and the passage of time sped up or slowed down by techniques of time-lapse photography techniques. IMDB reviewer James MacDuff gives a stirring account of the results:

[John Feeney’s Sky is] simply astonishing! Nothing in Feeney’s previous films could prepare you for the breathtaking splendor of the images in this film, nor for its technical virtuosity. Even more amazing is the stark beauty of the images, and the melding of the minimalist music track with the images. One gets an entirely otherworldly feeling from the movie; that is, the music is designed to try and put us into a frame of mind that emphasizes that what we are seeing is not something one can ever see in the real world, but rather only out of a distillation and transformation of the real world, a transformation only achievable by the technical means of cinema.¹¹⁵

The Railrodder (1965)

A farcical silent film hearkening back to the popular travelogue films produced during the early years of the twentieth century,¹¹⁶ The Railrodder (1965) is the most important of Rathburn’s three collaborations with Gerald Potterton. Against all odds, Potterton was able to hire the legendary Buster Keaton, then age seventy, to take the film’s lead role.¹¹⁷ As NFB commissioner Guy Roberge proudly explained in a letter to member of parliament John Smith, Keaton had apparently accepted the invitation due to the NFB’s growing reputation:

In his distinguished sixty-five year career as an entertainer, famous Hollywood star Buster Keaton had never made a documentary motion picture […] When asked why he accepted the Board’s invitation Mr. Keaton replied: “The main reason, I think, was because I’d heard that this National Film Board of yours has an outstanding record for making first-class documentary films. I figured if I was going to make one – the first one in my career – I might as well make it with the best outfit, so here I am.”118

A touching scene involving Rathburn occurred when Keaton and his wife Eleanor arrived at the NFB’s Montreal offices to discuss the shooting of Railrodder. Potterton had arranged to welcome Keaton with an impromptu screening of The General, his classic 1927 silent film. Live piano accompaniment was provided by Eldon, whose talent for silent film improvisation was well known at the Board.¹¹⁹ By all accounts, Keaton was deeply moved by the gesture, and by Eldon’s live music in particular.¹²⁰ Recalling the warm dialogue that transpired between Rathburn and Keaton in the NFB’s staff cafeteria that day, Stephen Low (Colin Low’s eldest son) – a teenaged part-time employee of the NFB at the time – reports that they had a lively exchange about the steam railway and the “good old days,” a conversation that continued long after the others had left.¹²¹

As the film opens, Keaton is standing alone on London Bridge sporting a three-piece suit, porkpie hat, and string tie. When he opens his newspaper and reads an alluring ad enticing tourists to “See Canada Now,” Keaton pauses for a moment of reverie and has visions of Canada’s many tourist attractions (a rapid sequence of scenic excerpts from NFB films). The comedy begins when Keaton’s character suddenly dives into the Thames, and ostensibly manages to swim to Canada’s maritime coast. There he picks up an abandoned railway “speeder” and sets off on a cross-country journey that showcases the vast and varied urban and rural landscapes of Canada. The voyage takes him from province to province, from coast to coast. Keaton encounters a series of railroad mishaps along the way and savours Canada’s scenic beauty, all the while dodging oncoming trains and engaging in physical shenanigans that were improvised by Keaton during the shooting.¹²² Figure 3.10 shows Gerald Potterton’s comical sketch of the production entourage, caricaturizing Keaton, the film crew, and other personalities involved in this zany and ambitious cross-country film shoot. In figure 3.11, Keaton is shown wearing his signature porkpie hat and relaxing on the CN Railway speeder that carries him across Canada in The Railrodder (NFB, 1965), Gerald Potterton’s slapstick Canadian classic. Eleanor Keaton fondly recalled trekking across Canada with Buster and the NFB film crew:

Figure 3.10 • Potterton’s comical sketch from the production file for The Railrodder (NFB, 1965), caricaturizing Buster Keaton, “Mrs Buster” (Eleanor Keaton), “Gerry” (Gerald Potterton, director), “Bob” (Robert Humble, cinematographer), “Jo” (Jo Kirkpatrick, assistant director), “Julian” (producer Julian Biggs), and “John” (John Spotton, co-director).

We had a particularly wonderful time when we went to Canada to make The Railrodder [when] Gerald Potterton had us come up to make a movie for the National Film Board. We started in Nova Scotia and ended up in British Columbia, just south of Vancouver. Almost 5000 miles we travelled – about five or six weeks – making that movie … We all travelled in the Queen’s train car, courtesy of the CNR, and we had the Queen’s steward, chef, dishes, china and crystal. We stopped at various places, and they always came out to meet Buster. A whole pipe and drum corps met us in Manitoba, I remember, and gave Buster a huge key to the city. Otherwise, on the train it was just Buster and me, Gerry and his assistants, and Johnny Spotton, who was making a documentary of the project [John Spotton, Buster Keaton Rides Again, NFB, 1965]. It was wonderful.123

Figure 3.11 • Buster Keaton during the filming of The Railrodder.

A pastiche of country, jazz, dixieland, folkloric, boogie, bluegrass, and classical styles, Rathburn’s comical score travels across Canada with Keaton. The Railrodder’s musical cast was almost as glamorous as the on-screen talent, and Rathburn recalls how impressed he was with the calibre and professionalism of the musicians on the session.124 The score was recorded on 25 March 1965 at Fine Studios in New York City under the direction of composer-conductor Jack Shaindlin, with whom Eldon had consulted during the preparation of his score for Corral (1954). The players contracted by Shaindlin included the legendary virtuoso banjoist Eric Weissberg, Ralph Froelich on French horn, Eddie Manson on harmonica, Tony Gottuso on guitar, Roger Kellaway on piano, Bob Haggart on bass, and Herb Harris on drums.¹²⁵ In 1972 Weissberg went on to international acclaim for his arrangement and recording of the “duelling banjos” theme from the Oscar-winning Deliverance.¹²⁶ Rathburn showcases his playing with a lively Scruggs-style bluegrass banjo part that figures prominently throughout The Railrodder, particularly when the speeder and its nonchalant passenger are hurtling westward at top speed. Also featured prominently in Rathburn’s score are honky-tonk piano and harmonica parts that, like the banjo, hearken back to his score for City of Gold, written almost a decade earlier. Rathburn’s lively sense of humour and penchant for engaging folk instruments to invoke nostalgic sentiments were ideally suited to Potterton’s silent film and Keaton’s trademark slapstick antics. “None of the NFB’s other staff composers could have written a score anything like it,” Potterton noted more than fifty years later.¹²⁷

With no dialogue to lead the narrative, Potterton called on Rathburn to produce a witty score that would play a prominent and omnipresent role throughout the film. Eldon did not disappoint: he wrote twenty minutes of original music for the twenty-five-minute short film. “An excellent mixture of music and sound effects compensate for the lack of dialogue,” reviewer John Tibbetts wrote.¹²⁸ Following the opening credits (which are accompanied only by a series of train whistles), and moments prior to Keaton’s dive into the Thames, Rathburn introduces his folky main theme, shown in figure 3.12, played by solo harmonica. At various points throughout the film the “Railrodder theme” is handled by each instrument in the ensemble. The bass picks it up next, playing in a relaxed swing style that creates a feeling of both suspense and humour as Keaton emerges on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, looking lost and perplexed. From this point forward, Rathburn’s sense of humour, drama, and timing merge effortlessly with Keaton’s physical comedy, and his versatility is essential to the film’s slapstick style, as his main theme is transformed into dixieland, jazz, polkas, country swing, and boogie-woogie interludes.

Figure 3.12 • Rathburn’s principal theme from The Railrodder.

When Keaton and his speeder sail past the fine dining room of an upscale restaurant on the outskirts of Winnipeg, Rathburn inserts a moment of classical music pastiche into his score as a signifier of social class. To coincide with a shot of the restaurant’s genteel patrons dining on haute cuisine, he briefly inserts a recording of the decorous principal theme from the second movement of Haydn’s String Quartet in F Major, op. 3, no. 5 (“Serenade” – Andante cantabile). In a classic gag reminiscent of the silent film era, the camera shifts back outside to find Keaton assembling his own formal dinner on the speeder. The string quartet recording quickly segues to Rathburn’s unorthodox folk instrument arrangement – for banjo, guitar, and harmonica – of Haydn’s “Serenade.” Similarly, when Keaton stops the speeder to enjoy afternoon tea, Rathburn opts to accompany the scene with a well-known minuet from Luigi Boccherini’s String Quintet in E Major, op. 11, no. 5. As if to accentuate the absurdity of Keaton’s theatrical observance of high tea on a railroad maintenance car in the middle of the Canadian prairies, Rathburn presents the Boccherini on solo harpsichord. When Keaton suddenly notices a large buffalo on the tracks, Rathburn’s theme simultaneously shifts to the double bass, in comic mimicry of the large lumbering animal. As with all humour, timing is key, and Eldon’s notorious skill for precision alignment of his musical ideas and gestures with the on-screen action is particularly well suited to slapstick comedy.

Released on 2 October 1965, two days prior to Keaton’s seventieth birthday, The Railrodder garnered accolades from around the globe, including Belgium’s Prix Femina, an “Outstanding Film of the Year” award at the London International Film Festival, and “Special Mention” at the Berlin Film Festival, where it “had the audience roaring with laughter and received well-earned applause.”129 The Railrodder was both Keaton’s first documentary film and his last leading role in a film. Gerald Potterton recalls with sadness that “Buster had a coughing fit and I knew he was not well. He coughed up blood. We were in the middle of nowhere – Rivers, Manitoba – and only halfway through the shooting.”¹³⁰ On 1 February 1966, four months after the film’s release, Buster Keaton died of lung cancer in his home in California. In a review of the premiere screening of The Railrodders in New York, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote that “it’s too bad Mr. Keaton could not have been there to hear the applause.” “This film comes as close to capturing his classic film The General as anything he has done in thirty five years. It’s good to see him in this witty and charming picture.”¹³¹

The Dismantlement of the NFB’s Unit System

The Railrodder was shot during the autumn of 1964, the year the NFB’s unit system was replaced by an arrangement that liberated filmmakers from the structures and hierarchies that had become fossilized over time within the Board’s organizational chart. Tensions had arisen between the NFB’s units, and staffers from the Board’s other units lobbied for the dismantlement of the “unit system,” frequently citing the perceived privilege of Unit B, which had been given larger budgets, more leeway to experiment, and more autonomy from government-sponsored work. Unit B had also faced harsh criticism from the Board’s political and civil service watchdogs under the populist government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (1957–63), which “did not quite understand why taxpayers should pay for the capricious experiments of a few young intellectuals.”¹³² NFB historian Gary Evans has distilled the heated ideological debate that arose within the Board as follows:

The philosophical division was between those who were thinking of film in terms of content and those who were thinking in terms of art. This debate cut across linguistic lines and was essentially about old and new cinema. Those who believed in the Grierson tradition believed that the functional, informational film was the essential mission of the Film Board. Others said that cinema encompassed a much larger world, reflecting the style, technique and art of an era. It was never put in so many words, but among English and French filmmakers there was developing an ideological split that might be summarized by the question “Art, but for whose sake?”133

In an oft-cited essay, Peter Harcourt remarks on how Unit B’s films are characterized by a distinctly Canadian quality of “suspended judgment, something left open at the end, of something undecided … something rather detached from the immediate pressures of existence, something rather apart.”¹³⁴ The quality of “suspended judgment” and an aesthetic desire to relate the viewer’s experience to something bigger, and to find the universal in the particular, are often ascribed to the films created by Unit B between 1948 and 1964, its mid-century moment in the sun.¹³⁵