A History of Film Music

Although from the earliest days film music in Europe benefited from the close involvement of established composers of concert music, who often brought to their commissions a level of imagination and originality scarcely to be expected in the highly pressurized conveyor-belt production of film scores in Hollywood, this should not be taken to suggest that the European situation was particularly wholesome. In the UK, for example, the stigma attached to commercial composition blighted critical perceptions of a number of composers who worked regularly in film; those who simultaneously attempted to forge careers for themselves as symphonists, such as William Alwyn, Malcolm Arnold and Benjamin Frankel, inevitably suffered from an establishment view that they were somehow prostituting their art when they entered the film studio, or (even worse) that their concert works were merely pretentious film music. Although both Alwyn and Frankel wrote many fine symphonies, their concert music was destined to remain far less familiar than their film scores, and it was only posthumously in the 1990s that their serious compositions were widely recorded.

Before Benjamin Britten (whose early career in documentaries is examined in Chapter 7) quit film work and embarked wholeheartedly on his concert-music career, he wrote to his publisher in December 1937 about the inclusion of his music in a forthcoming radio series devoted to film scores to say ‘I have about ten volumes of film music to my credit (if it be credit!) . . . I think this is worth bothering about because it is quite good publicity, & I’m always being told that I should bother about that kind of thing!’ (Mitchell and Reed 1991, 535–6). In response to a questionnaire about his film work sent to him during his stay in New York in 1940–41, Britten went so far as to say ‘I don’t take film music seriously qua music’ (Kildea 2003, 28). David Kershaw attributes attitudes such as these partly to ‘British snobbery about the perceived lowly status of film composition, an attitude unfortunately shared by some composers who regarded such work as a well-paid chore necessary to buy time for “serious” music’ (Kershaw 1995, 130). The harsh reality was that a career in film music was, and remains, one of the few genuinely lucrative options open to aspiring full-time composers, whether in Britain or elsewhere. Leading British composers, from Arthur Bliss and William Walton to Richard Rodney Bennett, confessed that the handsome fees paid for film work were the major incentive persuading them to embark upon it. Some British composers responded half-heartedly to the challenge of composing for films, but many made significant contributions to the art of film scoring – to the extent that the article on film music in the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Irving et al. 1954) could, somewhat perversely and chauvinistically, ignore the work of all Hollywood composers with the exceptions of Herrmann and Copland, both of whose work conformed to the tenets of autonomous musical structuring that were clear desiderata of the article’s authors.

Before the 1930s, cinemas in Britain were dominated by Hollywood movies, but the numerical balance between domestic productions and imported film entertainment became strictly regulated after the passing of the Cinematograph Film Act by Parliament in 1927; thereafter, domestic production doubled in just one year. Sound-on-film technology was embraced more quickly than anywhere else in the world outside America, with 63 per cent of cinemas in the UK wired for sound by the end of 1930 (Weis and Belton 1985, 27). Helped by the dip in Hollywood’s fortunes during the Depression, the British film industry flourished in the early 1930s and, by 1937, the country was well established as the second-largest film producer in the world – some of its products standing up well internationally to American competition (D. Cook 2004, 291). This success was checked by the onset of the Second World War, by which time many British films – the so-called ‘quota quickies’ – had been produced specifically as B-movies designed both to accompany the screening of more lavish American imports in double bills and to keep the British film industry solvent in the face of the daunting transatlantic competition.

British cinema in the early 1930s achieved a seriousness of purpose through the hard work of Hungarian producer Alexander Korda (né Sándor Kellner), who founded London Films in 1932 and two years later hired Muir Mathieson as his youthfully energetic musical director. Film music in the UK was subsequently nurtured by the strenuous attempts of Mathieson to secure the services of front-rank composers who possessed an innate understanding of the filmic medium; according to film critic C. A. Lejeune, ‘to him, the alliance of image and sound is something of a burning mission’ (quoted in Huntley [1947], 34). Mathieson himself commented:

Music is and always must be a vital part of film art . . . Music can help to humanise the subject and widen its appeal. Music can make a film less intellectual and more emotional. It can influence the reaction of the audience to any given sequence . . . It can develop rhythmic suggestions from words. It can carry ideas through dissolves and fade-outs. It can prepare the eye through the ear. It can merge unnoticeably from realistic sound into pure music. It can shock. It can startle. It can sympathise. It can sweeten. But for the love of mike, never let it be mediocre.

Similar zeal was shown by music directors at rival studios, principally Louis Levy, a former silent-film conductor who worked at Gaumont–British, and Ernest Irving, who moved from pit work in London’s West End to Ealing, where he became musical director in 1931. Producer Michael Balcon had interests both at Gaumont and Ealing, where he became production chief in 1938, and was another important entrepreneur committed to quality film production; later, in the 1940s, this mantle passed squarely to the business interests of J. Arthur Rank. Rank’s famous trademark image of two imposing strokes on a huge dimpled gong (in reality made of cardboard, the strokes overdubbed by percussionist James Blades on a comparatively tiny instrument) was incorporated into main-title music by several composers, most ingeniously by Alwyn; the icon is lampooned in Rank’s production Carry On Up the Khyber (see below) when the Kasi (Kenneth Williams) is interrupted by a servant hitting a dinner gong and irritably declares: ‘I do wish he wouldn’t keep doing that. Rank stupidity!’

The 1930s witnessed notable experiments in documentary film, in which many distinguished composers were involved (see Chapter 7), and an accelerating production of feature films which, if rather stage-bound, were often distinguished by fine acting. At first nondiegetic musical cues in feature films were few and far between, as was the case in Hollywood at this time: Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933; music by Kurt Schroeder), for example, has main- and end-title music but only one substantial nondiegetic cue, poorly recorded and used to create continuity across several disparate shots that culminate in a kiss underlined by a harp glissando. When the Australian composer Arthur Benjamin scored the London Films production of The Scarlet Pimpernel (dir. Harold Young, 1934), his music was almost entirely restricted to the main and end titles and to pastiche period dance music for diegetic use, some of it handled decidedly unrealistically – as when the passage of time depicted by the library clock indicates that the band has apparently been playing the same piece for at least 90 minutes. Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) contained minimal nondiegetic cues; the various composers involved were uncredited, but one was Hubert Bath, who had been responsible for adding synchronized music to the same director’s Blackmail in 1929. Benjamin also scored the original version of Hitchcock’s thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) for Levy at Gaumont; this film featured no nondiegetic music but used Benjamin’s Storm Clouds Cantata prominently for its assassination scene at a concert in the Royal Albert Hall. As might be expected from Hitchcock, the film deployed other types of diegetic musicto dramatic effect, including the incongruous use of an organ to cover the din of what a local policeman terms ‘disorderly behaviour in a sacred edifice’ and the radio broadcast of the climactic concert underscoring a scene featuring the master criminal, who is listening in to learn the outcome of his fiendish scheme. The sound of the fatal gunshot was intended to have been drowned out by a cymbal crash in Benjamin’s cantata: as the crook wryly puts it when briefing his hitman with the aid of a gramophone recording prior to the event, ‘I think the composer would have appreciated that’. (When Hitchcock shot his generally inferior colour remake of the film in 1956, Benjamin’s cantata – now reproduced with six-track stereo technology – was again used at the film’s climax in a sequence affording a glimpse of Herrmann at work on the conductor’s podium, directing the London Symphony Orchestra. As Brown notes, ‘In both versions the villains control the music to such an extent that they even have a recording of it and are even able to miraculously put the tone-arm needle down at exactly the point of the four climactic notes’ (R. S. Brown 1994, 78). For a comparison of the two versions, see Wierzbicki 2003.) Benjamin’s later film work was praised for the clarity of its often chamber-like instrumentation, designed to gain maximum effect from the rather limited recording technology at his disposal: ‘he considers it unnecessary to use an orchestra of more than about twenty players, and he is right: well-orchestrated music needs no mammoth body of players’ (London 1936, 216).

The 1930s also saw debut film scores from Alwyn, Richard Addinsell (whose popular Warsaw Concerto is discussed in Chapter 11 in the context of British cinema’s singular love-affair with the romantic piano concerto in the 1940s), Jack Beaver, Bliss, Britten and John Greenwood. Britten’s work was mainly concentrated in documentary production, but in 1936 he scored his only feature film. Love from a Stranger (dir. Rowland V. Lee), an Agatha Christie mystery, afforded Britten few opportunities for imaginative cues, since most of his music was to be concentrated in the first half of the film in which little of interest occurs: this is a good illustration of a tendency, still prevalent in the industry, for music to be relied upon to bolster weaker scenes. Britten’s most inventive cue, though very brief, occurs when scales played by a child on the piano are surrealistically distorted to portray her teacher’s mounting shock when learning of a lottery win. Britten’s score was conducted by Boyd Neel, who divided his time between film and concert work with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and was a significant champion of the young composer’s work; other British conductors, including Hubert Clifford, would later juggle film careers with work in broadcasting.

An early high point in film scoring was reached with Bliss’s score to H. G. Wells’s science-fiction tale, Things to Come (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1935), recorded by members of the LSO conducted by the 24-year-old Mathieson in a marathon of fourteen studio sessions (Morrison 2004, 177). At Wells’s insistence, music was recorded before shooting began and Bliss’s score was therefore ‘not intended to be tacked on; it is a part of the design’ (Huntley [1947], 39). The opening medley on Christmas carols is disarmingly conventional, though anempathetic in the context of the scenes of war-scaremongering it accompanies. As tangible preparations are made for war, Bliss supplies an acerbic and modernistic march which reaches a terrifying climax as panic invades the streets, the music cutting off at its loudest point when anti-aircraft guns explode into life. Bleak scoring accompanies the ensuing passage-of-time montage, this and later cues largely athematic and based on ostinati. The futuristic scenes set in the 1960s in the aftermath of an apocalyptic global war, like the stop-time animation in King Kong, demanded strongly characterized music if the special effects were not to be felt risible, and Bliss’s music may be considered largely responsible for the overall success of the film’s impact. After extracts from Things to Come were performed at the 1935 Promenade Concerts, Bliss’s music became popular both in the concert hall and through sales of a recording by the LSO, setting a trend for concert versions of British film scores from which Walton, Vaughan Williams and others later benefited. Interest in film music outside its original context was further stimulated by a series of six special radio broadcasts mounted by Mathieson in 1938, and in the meantime the players of the LSO and other leading orchestras had enjoyed a rise in session work, their involvement in film soundtracks having a palpable impact on performance standards.

Unscrupulous producers knew the value of a prestigious name such as the LSO’s and used it without authorization even when only a handful of players in an ad hoc studio band hailed from the orchestra, a practice which resulted in sustained action from the LSO’s management in 1935–7 (Morrison 2004, 177). The quality of British film music at this time did not go unremarked in the American press. The film critic of the New York Herald Tribune declared of Anthony Collins’s score to Victoria the Great (dir. Herbert Wilcox, 1937), recorded by Mathieson and the LSO: ‘the British take their film music seriously and despite the fact that American screen music has been improving at a rapid pace, no permanent symphonic ensemble in the US has yet the record in the screen world that the English group has’ (quoted in Huntley [1947], 43). The LSO’s film work again came to international prominence decades later when they recorded the music for Star Wars in 1977, their involvement a direct result of the personal connection between their then music director (Andre Previn) and the film’s composer John Williams (see Chapter 12).

As in Hollywood, early British film music was boosted by contributions from foreign visitors and expatriates. Examples included the Viennese composer Hans May; the Russians Nicholas Brodszky and Mischa Spoliansky, the latter renowned for his mickey-mousing; the Hungarians Matyás Seiber, who specialized in animation (see Chapter 7), and Miklós Rózsa; the German Walter Goehr, whose best-known score was for Great Expectations (dir. David Lean, 1946); and the Frenchman Georges Auric. The most influential of these internationally was Rózsa, who moved to the USA with Korda during the war and, after settling there in 1941, became one of the most important composers in Hollywood (see Chapter 3).

Rózsa’s compositional technique was formidable, having been honed through studies at the Leipzig Conservatory in the 1920s, and he was already making a reputation for himself as a concert composer when he became interested in film music – and the income that came with it – as a result of a chance conversation with Honegger in Paris and hearing the French composer’s score to Les Misérables the next day. Rózsa wrote his first film score for London Films’ Knight Without Armour (dir. Jacques Feyder, 1937). Impressed by this debut, Korda gave his compatriot a formal contract with the production company and Rózsa quickly provided a new score, for The Four Feathers (1939; directed by Korda’s younger brother, Zoltan), which featured a memorable cue depicting the onset of sunstroke in the desert with dissonances set against a hammered-out mid-texture pedal point, and which in places looked ahead to the darkly sweeping lyricism of the composer’s film noir scores.

In That Hamilton Woman – one of Alexander Korda’s trademark period dramas, released in 1941and known in Britain at the time by the more genteel title Lady Hamilton – Rózsa showed himself to be a competent exponent of stock film-music techniques such as thematic allusion, including the almost obligatory ‘Rule, Britannia’ to accompany exterior shots of Nelson’s warships, and two other stalwart quotations from the silent era: a triumphant variation on the Dies irae for the tolling victory bells and a suitably threatening version of the Marseillaise played by snarling muted brass as the French ships appear at Trafalgar. Rózsa also produced rousingly patriotic music, drawing on the idiom of Elgar and Walton, for the propagandist sections of the film, as when Hamilton makes his pro-commonwealth and anti-dictator speech (clearly suggesting parallels between Napoleon and Hitler), and when the Royal Navy famously runs up the flags spelling out the injunction ‘England expects every man to do his duty’. But Rózsa also demonstrated rare ingenuity of a kind that would distinguish his later Hollywood work. His manner of underscoring dialogue was both economical and unobtrusive, as at the beginning of the film when the downfallen Emma Hamilton is incarcerated in a French jail: her accompaniment is a simple tremolo pedal note from the strings, against which is set a pair of dissonant repeating dyads. (Such dialogue scoring became distilled in Rózsa’s film noir work in the 1940s, when he was often called upon to write atmospheric music beneath the voice-overs that are such an essential part of the genre: see Chapter 3.) His melodic style, with its characteristic sweeping triplet figurations followed by plunging leaps downwards, was also readily recognizable at this stage of his career, as was his prominent use of a solo violin for intimate expressiveness.

The most elaborate of Rózsa’s early scores was that to The Thief of Bagdad (dir. Michael Powell et al., 1940), for which he received an Academy Award nomination; according to Christopher Palmer, it ‘has a wonderful freshness and agelessness, a childlike spirit of enchantment and wonder . . . It glimmers in our consciousness like a fairy castle in the distance’ (Palmer 1990, 190–1). As part of his lavish orchestral palette for this project, Rózsa had intended to include an early electric instrument, the ondes martenot; unfortunately its French inventor, Maurice Martenot, was caught up in the hostilities on the Continent and Rózsa recalled that he ‘wrote back, from the Maginot Line, that he was very sorry he couldn’t come but he was defending his country’ (quoted in Prendergast 1992, 69). It was the necessity to complete the production of The Thief of Bagdad in Hollywood after the outbreak of the European war that compelled Rózsa’s relocation to the USA, where he continued to work for the Kordas and reprised his exotic fantasy style in Zoltan’s The Jungle Book (1942); Rózsa again received an Academy Award nomination, for a score that became popular in recorded and concert form (Rózsa 1982, 112). He found it difficult to adjust to the American practice – enforced by union regulations – of employing professional orchestrators, as in England only Richard Addinsell (whom he described as a ‘dilettante’) enjoyed that particular luxury; as a special concession, Rózsa was allowed to complete the orchestration of The Thief of Bagdad himself, but was forced to use an orchestrator for That Hamilton Woman: ‘It was terrible. I had to redo the whole thing’ (interviewed in R. S. Brown 1994, 278–9). Thereafter, all his Hollywood scores were orchestrated by others according to his short-score directions, following standard industry practice.

Although unfairly criticized by chauvinistic commentators for not being British by either birth or temperament, Auric nonetheless made a vital contribution to the growth of film music in the UK. His film apprenticeship had been served as a member of the Parisian avant-garde, during which time he composed several scores for cutting-edge directors such as Clair and Cocteau (see Chapters 2 and 8). His first British score was for the compendium chiller Dead of Night (dir. Cavalcanti et al., 1945), for which the music had to be relayed to London from Paris as it was composed. He then scored Gabriel Pascal’s lavish version of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), which proved to be by far the most expensive British production of its time. In keeping with his megalomaniac ambitions, Pascal had longed to secure the services of a major composer to write the music for his epic, at first toying with the idea of inviting Prokofiev. Next he tried Walton, Bliss and Britten, all of whom declined. Britten had by this time decided not to return to film work for artistic reasons (he rejected all later overtures from producers, including one from Disney in 1956), his publisher noting that Britten disliked Shaw’s script, but that his principal concern was that ‘in doing it he would accomplish absolutely nothing towards the solution of his own problem[s] as a composer . . . He said that the money did not interest him’ (quoted in Mitchell and Reed 1991, 1122). Britten wrote to his publisher in New York in December 1945: ‘I expect you’ll find Hollywood jubilant over the resounding flop of Caesar & Cleopatra! Something tells me I was wise to steer clear of that little picture. Anyhow that world is not for me’ (Mitchell and Reed 1991, 1287). Britten had been partly responsible for bringing Auric to the attention of British musicians, and may have had a hand in securing him the Pascal commission. In any case, Pascal had previously employed Honegger to compose for his earlier Shaw project, Pygmalion (1938), and there were other Gallic connections in the British film industry at the time – Francis Chagrin had composed many film scores in Paris in 1934–7 before moving to Britain, Cavalcanti had collaborated in France with composers such as Jaubert, and so on – so the choice of Auric was natural enough. For Caesar and Cleopatra, Auric showed himself adept at three basic idioms (the sombrely epic, lushly exotic and downright romantic), and demonstrated considerable refinement in his beautiful diegetic harp music for the women’s intimate scene in the royal palace. The style here was reminiscent of Satie who, as we saw in Chapter 1, composed experimental film music in the 1920s, but the air of modernistic detachment was not to all British tastes. Of the contrastingly grandiose moment when Caesar’s galley departs, Shaw himself declared: ‘Auric’s music touches greatness. It is almost Handelian’ (Huntley [1947], 81).

Auric’s best-known British film scores are those he provided for the popular series of Ealing comedies, which were launched with Hue and Cry (dir. Charles Crichton, 1946). The witty bustle of the music for the graffiti-inspired title sequence was typical of a composer who was a member of Les Six, and proved to be ideal for the action sequences of the Ealing assignments. (For an opposing view, see Swynnoe 2002, xv, 170–2; a more balanced critical assessment of music in various Ealing comedies is offered in Daubney 2006.) An excellent example of Auric’s ability to create contrasting musical characters with a minimum of fuss comes when we see two boys on the ground looking up at an apartment at the top of a high building: when sharing the point of view of the boys, the music is easy-going and elegant, but when the point of view shifts to the reverse shot (clearly representing the mysterious occupant of the apartment gazing down on the tiny figures below) the music darkens suggestively without drawing undue attention to itself. Such qualities are seen in Auric’s other Ealing scores, including Passport to Pimlico (dir. Henry Cornelius, 1949) – the subject-matter of which cried out for a mixture of French and British elements – and The Titfield Thunderbolt (dir. Crichton, 1952). The latter, the first Ealing comedy to be shot in colour, is spotted with notable economy, and the music depicting the village folk pushing a railway carriage along by hand captures the effort involved with a minimum of notes. Other Ealing comedies were scored by Frankel, Tristram Cary and Irving himself. Irving adapted Scottish folksongs for use in Whisky Galore (US title Tight Little Island; dir. Mackendrick, 1948), and made a dark adaptation of a Mozartean idiom for Kind Hearts and Coronets (dir. Robert Hamer, 1949), after some resistance from the film’s producers who felt the idea to be overly provocative (Huntley 2002). Cary’s nondiegetic score for The Ladykillers (dir. Mackendrick, 1955) made ingenious use of the famous melody from a string quintet by Boccherini, played on a gramophone record diegetically to provide an alibi for a gang of crooks supposedly rehearsing the piece in their lodgings.

In the same year as he scored The Titfield Thunderbolt, Auric provided music for John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, a project much more serious in tone, but still eliciting from the composer his characteristic balance between Satielike naïvety and warm romanticism. Two notable cues were the harmonically elusive treatment of a pizzicato ostinato for the opening intertitles (an inventive response to the challenge of providing neutral background music), and the extended section in which Toulouse Lautrec attempts to gas himself, the music building from giddily revolving ostinato patterns to a triumphant climax as his inspiration suddenly returns and he emerges from his self-imposed isolation. Among Auric’s later credits was a score to a suitably creepy film version of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, directed by Jack Clayton under the title The Innocents (1961).

Vaughan Williams, the doyen of English musical nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, made a significant contribution to the art of film scoring. Like many of his younger contemporaries, this impulse was nurtured by a desire to contribute to British film propaganda during the Second World War, considered at the time as ‘new developments in the cinema world, now geared to wartime needs of entertainment and factual reporting of the battle fronts’ (Huntley [1947], 227). Propagandist films, known in the euphemism of the day as films ‘of national importance’, were given mandatory screenings at cinemas across the country. At the instigation of Mathieson, Vaughan Williams launched his film career with a score for 49th Parallel (US title The Invaders; dir. Powell, 1941), a pseudo-documentary yarn about German submariners stranded in Canada which won an Academy Award for its original story by Emeric Pressburger. Vaughan Williams’s score, which Mathieson recorded with the LSO, suggested a deep affinity with the medium. His music was at its expansive best in capturing the grandeur of the opening aerial shots of snow-capped mountains; most of the important cues were reserved for exterior shots in rural or maritime locations, in which the music could come to the fore with-out compromising other parameters of the production. The stark use of the Lutheran chorale melody Ein’ feste Burg (‘A Stronghold Sure’) for the U-boat when it first surfaces, and subsequent developments of the chorale’s simple head-motif, were the only parts of the score that made obvious deference to conventional leitmotivic techniques.

Vaughan Williams’s second score, for the rousing documentary Coastal Command (dir. J. B. Holmes, 1942), made a strong impression on the staff of the Crown Film Unit who recorded it: ‘we knew that here was something great, something, indeed finer and more alive than any music we had ever had before . . . On the rare occasions when the music was slightly too long or too short to match the existing picture, then it was the visual material which suffered the mutilation’ (Ken Cameron, quoted in Huntley [1947], 111). Other wartime documentaries with scores by Vaughan Williams included The People’s Land and The Story of a Flemish Farm (dir. Jeffrey Dell; both 1943) and Stricken Peninsula (dir. Paul Fletcher, 1945). While writing the music for Flemish Farm, some of which was performed at the 1945 Promenade Concerts, Vaughan Williams’s attention to detail led him to interpolate frequent bars of just one quaver’s duration in order to compensate for the timings in fractions of seconds with which he was presented by the cue sheet. As Mathieson commented, ‘It had the effect of “God Save Our (1/8) G-Gracious Queen”’ (quoted in Kennedy 1980, 259). Two unused themes from this score later found their way into the composer’s Sixth Symphony, completed in 1947. In the same year, he scored the film The Loves of Joanna Godden (dir. Charles Frend), for which he faced the challenge of composing music to accompany an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and the consequent burning of sheep.

Scott of the Antarctic (dir. Frend, 1948) proved to be Vaughan Williams’s most famous film score, partly because it also became popular in a concert version – in this case the Sinfonia Antartica, first performed five years after the film’s release. Irving, responsible for the final music editing, found the composer’s responses to the imagery so consistent that he could relocate cues with ease: ‘For instance, the music composed for the main titles . . . exactly fitted the climbing of the Glacier and stopped with a shuddering roll on the bass drum as the party reached the very edge of the fathomless crevasse – one more crotchet would have swallowed up the whole expedition!’ (Irving 1959, 176). Similar wit is encountered in Irving’s versified injunction that Vaughan Williams should not compose wordless vocal music to compete with dialogue:

If Irving’s attitude towards Vaughan Williams’s music at times seems somewhat cavalier, it is important to note that the composer had a deep respect for his experience in the cinema, and pointedly dedicated the score of Sinfonia Antartica to him. As Vaughan Williams had advised would-be film composers in 1945:

you must not be horrified if you find that a passage which you intended to portray the villain’s mad revenge has been used by the musical director to illustrate the cats being driven out of the dairy. The truth is that within limits any music can be made to fit any situation. An ingenious and sympathetic musical director can skilfully manoeuvre a musical phrase so that it exactly synchronizes with a situation which was never in the composer’s mind.

Irving and Vaughan Williams had nonetheless been careful, before setting to work on Scott of the Antarctic, to draw up a legal agreement to cover the use of the music in the film. Irving had suggested to the composer that the contract ‘should include a stipulation that alterations must receive your consent or mine, and that no third person should be brought in to amplify or replace your work’, later adding (via his solicitor) that he would respect Vaughan Williams’s wishes ‘down to the last tail on the last quaver and that this time I shall not arrange any carols for the penguins, but leave it to him’ (quoted in Kennedy 1980, 297).

Vaughan Williams was one of the few major concert composers who felt that film music had an aesthetically significant future ahead of it, and this positive attitude must in part have been a response to the unusually high level of respect and deference shown towards him by those in the film industry with whom he worked, which permitted him (like Korngold) such luxuries as reading scripts well in advance of shooting. His optimistic thinking was expressed in an article entitled ‘Composing for the Films’ (containing the extract quoted above), in which he famously remarked that ‘the film contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of’ (Vaughan Williams 1987, 162). He identified two principal approaches to film scoring: the first was mickey-mousing, which ‘requires great skill and orchestral knowledge and a vivid specialized imagination, but often leads to a mere scrappy succession of sounds of no musical value in itself’; the second ‘is to ignore the details and to intensify the spirit of the whole situation by a continuous stream of music’ (Vaughan Williams 1987, 161). The second approach was, on the composer’s own admission, his preferred manner of working, although it could lay the composer open to the criticism levelled by Hans Keller against the score for Scott, which he felt ‘tends to interpret monotony by monotony’ (Irving et al. 1954, 99).

Several other British films with high-profile music tracks were released in 1948. David Lean’s interpretation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist featured a score by (as his screen credit put it) ‘Sir Arnold Bax, D.Mus., Master of the King’s Music’. Having previously only scored a single documentary, Malta G.C. (dir. Eugeniusz Cekalski and Derrick De Marney, 1942), Bax had scant film experience, and initially found himself disliking Dickens’s subject-matter intensely, calling the Lean commission ‘a very thankless task as there is no music in the subject. I cannot imagine any subject more unsuited to me’ (quoted in Parlett 1999, 257). Lean was highly prescriptive about the music he required, and must take the credit for the dubious decision to portray Oliver’s isolation by use of a solo piano (Swynnoe 2002, 65–7). Predictably competent, and often well characterized, Bax’s score is solid enough but generally unimaginative in its deployment of stock devices such as stingers, mickey-mousing and over-stretched leitmotifs; the overly sensuous music heard as Oliver lies quietly in Mr Brownlow’s bedroom tells us far more about Bax’s stylistic preoccupations than anything of direct relevance to the dramatic situation.

Also from 1948 dates Brian Easdale’s extraordinary score to The Red Shoes, directed by Powell and Pressburger. One of the most important British directors of his generation, Powell had formerly taken a traditional view of music’s supporting role in filmed drama, occasionally playing recorded music during filming to inspire his actors in the silent-film tradition, but wherever possible involving his composers at an early stage in production so that they had ample time to absorb the needs of a particular project. Some strain was placed on his creative relationship with Pressburger (who, like the Kordas, was Hungarian) when Powell declined to employ Rózsa to score Contraband in 1940 in the belief that insufficient English composers were entering film scoring, and opted to commission a score from Addinsell instead (Powell 1986, 341). (He seemed less concerned about this in 1956, when he and Pressburger commissioned a folk-tinged score from Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis for the wartime adventure Ill Met by Moonlight, though for that project a local Cretan flavour was of paramount importance; in 1964, Theodorakis went on to pen the archetypical Cretan film score, for Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek.) For a time Powell’s favoured composer was Allan Gray, who scored the unusual black-comedy wartime romance The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) with a wide range of stock idioms and up-to-date swing, and to whose work on A Canterbury Tale (1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) the director paid warm tribute – even taking the unusual step of including brief music examples from Gray’s score to the latter in his autobiography (Powell 1986, 533). But Gray’s preliminary work on The Red Shoes was rejected by Powell as inadequate, and Easdale was called in to provide a replacement score at short notice, having already scored Powell’s highly acclaimed Black Narcissus (1947) because in that film the director had felt Gray’s abilities were not up to Powell’s confessed aim of creating an ‘operatic’ effect in which music and image would be indissolubly fused.

Seeking a highly skilled composer who also happened to be versed in Indian music, Powell was encouraged to contact Easdale on the recommendation of fellow director Carol Reed. Powell recalled his thinking at the time:

Allan Gray . . . had a keen ear for a tune and wrote all his own orchestrations. His main gift was a dramatic one. He had the capacity to enter into the idea of a scene or a situation, but it was still film music in the traditional way, applied on, as it were, mixed into the sound-track and the dialogue of the actors, like the rich glazing on a ham. I wanted someone with a more creative approach. I wanted someone who was my superior in musical thought, a collaborator who would lead me out of my depth and whom I could tempt even further out of his. I wanted collaborators who were the best in Europe and I wanted a continuous argument with them. Nothing else seemed to me to justify the kind of work that went into making a film . . .In Black Narcissus, I started out almost as a documentary director and ended up as a producer of opera, even though the excerpt from the opera [a short sequence which Powell referred to as ‘my first composed film’] was only about twelve minutes long. Never mind! It was opera in the sense that music, emotion, image and voices all blended together into a new and splendid whole . . .

I insisted on rehearsing and shooting to a piano track and consulting Brian with a musical score in my hand over each set-up. But it worked! It worked! I have never enjoyed myself so much in my life. For the first time I felt I had control of the film with the authority of the music. It was astonishing to everyone, but particularly, of course, to the camera crew that we were able to compress or speed up the movement of the action just by saying: ‘No, that wasn’t fast enough. We’ve only got seven seconds [of music] for that bit of action.’

Powell’s desire to make an entire film in which music and fantasy were perfectly fused became a reality in his co-production (again with Pressburger) of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman (1951), widely regarded as one of the most aesthetically successful of all opera films (see Chapter 4).

In the meantime, there had been the international success of The Red Shoes, a ballet fantasy shot in sumptuous colour and requiring original diegetic music for its elaborate danced routines. Easdale’s replacement score was a rich concoction of impressionistic harmony and sensual orchestral textures, the obvious influences of Debussy, Ravel, Satie and Stravinsky appropriate to the film’s action, which takes place in a ballet company modelled on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. (One of the real Ballets Russes’ members, Leighton Lucas, later went on to be a film composer who amongst other projects scored The Dam Busters (dir. Michael Anderson, 1954), famous for its rousing march by Eric Coates.) Easdale’s music was recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under both Easdale and Sir Thomas Beecham, the latter conducting the seventeen-minute self-contained ballet based on ‘The Red Shoes’ fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen; the suggestion to approach Beecham had come from Easdale, who was anxious that the ballet sequence should be directed by a mature and experienced interpreter of classical music (Powell 1986, 638–9). Among the felicitous moments in the underscore is the sudden surge as the ballet’s fictional composer, Julian Craster, first hears the sounds of his new score in his head (an example of what might be termed a ‘metadiegetic’ cue: see Gorbman 1987, 22–3).

Bliss once commented, of film music in general, that ‘in the last resort film music should be judged solely as music – that is to say, by the ear alone, and the question of its value depends on whether it can stand up to this test’ (quoted in Huntley [1947], 40). While this view is no longer fashionable, it is nevertheless true that Easdale’s ballet sequence in The Red Shoes is that rare phenomenon in film music: a self-contained composition sophisticated enough to stand analytical comparison with music by established classical composers. This is especially important in the context of the film, since all too often films dealing with fictional composers are supplied with music supposedly written by them but of an execrable standard: Easdale’s music by ‘Julian Craster’ is of such consistently imaginative quality that the character, who is portrayed as a wayward genius, is entirely plausible. Tellingly, once the musical argument of the film is complete the end credits play in a sombre silence unusual for its time. Easdale’s music for The Red Shoes deservedly won the Academy Award for best score, and was the first British film score to be so honoured. (Another British first in 1948 was the bestowing of the Academy Award for best film to Olivier’s Hamlet, with music by Walton: see Chapter 4.) Easdale’s later scores included dissonant and partly octatonic music for Peeping Tom (dir. Powell, 1960), a controversial drama about voyeurism featuring idiomatic and versatile writing for solo piano, at times sounding like a modern accompaniment to a silent film – an appropriate identification given that home movies are the medium in which the voyeur preserves his lonely fantasies.

Alwyn’s film scores also came to prominence in the momentous year 1948 ,which saw the release of three feature films with his music. His position was typical of several of the country’s most prolific film composers: a solid craftsman with a wide range of dramatically useful stylistic idioms at his disposal, he honed his compositional technique in film scores at a time when he would far preferred to have been acknowledged as a composer of ambitious symphonies – of which he wrote five between 1948 and 1973. Looking back on his career in films, which began when he accompanied silent films as a professional flautist, he commented:

I had many offers from Hollywood, but remembering those, once famous, composers who had responded to its lures only to have their talents dimmed and even obliterated by the demands of the film world, I resisted the temptation. In spite of my interest in film making, I was first and foremost a serious composer and each film score I had written was an opportunity for experiment and an exceptional chance, given the splendid orchestras who played my scores, to improve and polish my technique and widen my dramatic range.

Ironically, it was the challenge of film work that caused Alwyn to destroy many of his early concert works, which he felt were blighted by a ‘woeful inadequacy’ of technique. And it was certainly true that the standard of orchestral playing in British film studios was rarely less than superb: many of Alwyn’s film scores were recorded by orchestras of the calibre of the RPO, Philharmonia and LSO, mostly under the capable and often inspiring direction of Mathieson. (The latter made an amusing cameo appearance as Sir Arthur Sullivan in TheMagic Box (dir. John Boulting, 1951), conducting pastiche Sullivan composed by Alwyn.) Like Walton, Alwyn saw film work as a convenient source of income to subsidize concert projects, commenting that the commission to score Safari (dir. Terence Young, 1956) was necessary to fund the completion of his Third Symphony (I. Johnson 2005, 266).

Alwyn’s substantial contribution to the fortunes of British cinema in its heyday, based on an output of some 86 feature-film scores, plus music for numerous documentaries, was recognized in 1958 by his election to a Fellowship of the British Film Academy. His common-sense lectures and writings on the art of film music included a spirited defence of stylistic flexibility (‘Contemporary criticism is inclined to question the ability of a composer to be versatile’), a plea for the provision of cues to be governed by the interests of economy (‘I do feel that far too much of my ingenuity is spent nowadays in persuading the filmmaker to keep music out of the film rather than to put it in’) and an awareness that film music should not necessarily be obtrusive or memorable (‘I am always a little worried if somebody says to me, “I liked your score for such and such a picture.” It makes me wonder whether I have stepped outside my brief, which is to provide music which is as indigenous to the film as the camera angles and the film sets’; quotations from a lecture given in 1958, and published as W. Alwyn 1959). Alwyn felt that music could often do the actors’ work for them, drawing attention to

the remarkable faculty of music for portraying something which is happening in the actor’s mind, and not what you see in his face or in his actions. In the old, silent film the actor had to rely on exaggerated gestures, the art of mime, to express his emotions: in the sound film he can behave naturally with the aid of words – the ‘method’ came into its own – but he can also remain silent and poker-faced while music expresses for him the emotion which is to be shared by his audience. (Incidentally I like to cherish the idea that many an actor’s reputation I have made or marred by the surreptitious use of music.)

This final remark recalls actor George Peppard’s tribute to the power of Bronislau Kaper’s music to endow his acting with spurious depth (see Chapter 3).

Alwyn’s film work became well known with his calypso-flavoured score to The Rake’s Progress (US title Notorious Gentleman; dir. Sidney Gilliat, 1945), which was partly set in the Caribbean, and in two scores composed for films by Reed, and it might have become still better known had the composer not been abandoned by Reed when the latter opted to score The Third Man (1949) with what was to become spectacularly popular zither music by Anton Karas (I. Johnson 2005, 195). For Reed’s noir-influenced Odd Man Out (1946), a tale of a fugitive IRA leader, Alwyn’s score studiously avoided traditional Irish music for political reasons, even though in several other films – for example, Captain Boycott (dir. Frank Launder, 1947), which was set less contentiously in rural Eire – he showed a fondness for the Celtic folk idiom. In OddMan Out, as in the racing scene in Boycott (which eschews music until the horse stumbles), Alwyn elects to begin a cue on a specific moment of action for dramatic effect, director Karel Reisz commenting that Johnny’s fall from a speeding car ‘has significance beyond that of the culmination of an isolated exciting sequence: it is the motivating point of the whole film and as such its dramatic significance is conveyed by the sudden artificial entry of the music. Because the music has been used sparingly up to this point, its sudden entry makes a more precise and definite point than would have been possible with a continuous background score’ (Reisz 1953, 267). Although much of Alwyn’s score was written in advance during a period of close consultation with both director and sound editor, and one crucial part of the film was shot to pre-recorded music so that actor James Mason could respond to its funereal tread, economy had not yet become Alwyn’s watch-wordandthe score has been criticized for being rather ‘heavy-handed’ (I. Johnson 2005, 157) in spite of its splendid main theme and exciting chase music. (For a full discussion of the music, see Manvell and Huntley 1957, 139–49.) Alwyn’s score for Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948) also suffered from a superabundance in places but showed a sure grasp of both the heart-on-sleeve romanticism and effervescent comedic underscoring typical of film music at this time. The most imaginative and understated moment in this score is the delicately spiralling cadenza for solo violin as a child’s paper dart, formed from an incriminating telegram, makes a leisurely descent of a staircase before coming to rest in the hands of a police officer. Unusually, a loud cue dubbed at an unnaturally low volume for a tense game of hide-and-seek was admired by the composer for adding ‘a sense of strain to the sound-track – almost like trying to scream in a whisper’ (M. Alwyn 1993, 8).

The comedy whodunit Green for Danger (dir. Gilliat, 1946) provided Alwyn with a rare opportunity to indulge in an elaborate autonomous structure, the flamboyantly bustling counterpoint of its main-title music having been unwittingly suggested by the director himself when, having warned the composer against doing a mickey-mouse score and ‘Feeling that this was a bit negative, I added facetiously, “I mean, write a fugue, Bill.” And that, when I got back [from America], I found was precisely what he had done’ (quoted in I. Johnson 2005, 159). The crime melodrama Take My Life (dir. Ronald Neame, 1947) featured music heavily in its diegesis, both in the shape of a diegetic opera premiéred at Covent Garden – and including an aria for the film’s heroine with the same title as the film itself – and in a school song found as a manuscript sketch in the possession of the murder victim, which helps the killer to be tracked down and is taken up excitedly in the nondiegetic score as the heroine rushes by train to Edinburgh to find him (to a conjunction of music and images strongly reminiscent of the seminal documentary Night Mail). Alwyn’s ability to tackle diverse genres was much in evidence at the end of the decade: he scored an adaptation of a stage play with disciplined and dignified romanticism (The Winslow Boy; dir. Anthony Asquith, 1948); indulged in vivid comedic scoring in The History of Mr Polly (dir. Anthony Pelissier, 1948), which included a Wagnerian climax culminating in a simultaneously diegetic and nondiegetic rendering of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ over a pregnant dominant pedal point when Polly is unexpectedly propelled into the heroic limelight; and a harmonically advanced score, based largely on a simply four-note motif, which contributed immeasurably to the eeriness of The Rocking-Horse Winner (dir. Pelissier, 1949). Here the rocking horse’s frenzied motion and other darker cues demonstrated Alwyn’s ability – like Herrmann’s, by whom he may have been influenced – to create disquieting effects by the simplest of ostinato-dominated means. A notable feature of this score was the manner in which a verbal rhythm inspired by a line of voiced-over speech (‘There must be more money!’) was transformed into a naggingly insistent motif, rather in the manner of Rózsa’s score to The Secret Beyond the Door, released in the previous year (see Chapter 3).

Alwyn’s versatility became even more marked in the 1950s, ranging from the extreme economy of a few sustained notes in the highly theatrical submarine drama Morning Departure (US title Operation Disaster; dir. Roy Baker, 1950) to, at the other extreme, a Korngold-like opulence for the Burt Lancaster swashbuckler The Crimson Pirate (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1952). Formulaic stiff-upper-lip war films were much in vogue at this time. Malta Story (dir. Brian Desmond Hurst, 1953) featured laughable special effects and elicited from Alwyn the prototype of the boldly heroic idiom later popularized by Ron Goodwin (who more than anyone demonstrated that the long-lived British war film appealed as much to a boyish sense of adventure as to propagandist instincts); inspiration was clearly running dry on this project, as shown by the old-fashioned and gratuitous allusion to the US national anthem when we see a glimpse of the American aircraft carrier USS Wasp. (Dimitri Tiomkin repaid the compliment by quoting ‘Rule, Britannia’ for the appearance of the Royal Navy in The Guns of Navarone (dir. J. Lee-Thompson, 1961); the technique had become a thoroughly outdated and stock response even by the early 1950s.) The Black Tent (dir. Hurst, 1956) provided the opportunity to fuse Western and Arabian musical elements in the service of a desert drama about miscegenation, with the help of plenty of stereotypical augmented seconds for generic locational colour, while the by turns bustling and grimly determined action music of the nautical yarn The Silent Enemy (dir. William Fairchild, 1958) climaxed in a substantial dialogue-free cue which lent tension and momentum to a sustained knife battle between British and Italian divers attempting to retrieve secret documents from the underwater wreck of a crashed bomber. In Carve Her Name with Pride (dir. Lewis Gilbert, 1958), Alwyn’s nondiegetic score reworked Chopin’s D flat major Prelude – first played diegetically by a French soldier courting the film’s heroine – for simple pathos, and neatly recomposed a flamboyant Straussian cue accompanying a daytime parachute jump so that it plays more dramatically for a nocturnal drop.

In his final years as a film composer, Alwyn continued to contribute music to a range of genres. The comedic scoring of The Smallest Show on Earth (dir. Basil Dearden, 1957), with its affectionate parodies of old-fashioned film music, and the conservative style of Disney adventures such as In Search of the Castaways (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1961) – in which Alwyn’s sometimes quirky vaudeville-style music for implausible action scenes sat oddly alongside sugary songs showcasing the vocal talents of the film’s star, Maurice Chevalier – were in marked contrast to the gritty modernism in the superior supernatural thriller Night of the Eagle (US title Burn, Witch, Burn!; dir. Sidney Hayers, 1961) and the partly twelve-note thematic material of Life for Ruth (dir. Basil Dearden, 1962). In visual terms, Night of the Eagle was influenced by the latest Hitchcock movies, and not surprisingly Alwyn’s largely athematic score continued to pay veiled homage to Herrmann’s dogged use of ostinato and obsessive rhythmic patterns, while at the same time adhering to stock devices such as an unsubtle use of the Dies irae to signify the devil – this theme at one point transformed into a yet more obvious diabolus in musica when performed by a xylophone in brittle parallel tritones.

Perhaps because of his artistic aspirations in other genres, Alwyn’s functional film music was sometimes unfairly panned, as when Keller dismissed the score for The Cure for Love (dir. Robert Donat, 1950) as ‘reeking Kitsch’ and expressed his amazement that a Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music should be capable of such ‘indifferent’ music (Keller 1950, 145) – though the same critic a few years later praised Alwyn’s score to The Rocking-Horse Winner for its ‘revolutionary musico-dramatic build’ and concluded that the composer was at once the most ‘retrospective’ and ‘expert’ of all film composers in the UK (Irving et al. 1954, 102). For his own part, Alwyn had remained ever-practical but somewhat ambivalent about a kind of composing which he considered as ‘musical journalism’ (I. Johnson 2005, 304), and gave a spirited retort to the impertinence of his critics: ‘One cannot label [film] music as mere “background” music in a derogatory sense merely because film music in the minds of uninformed music critics has always tended to be associated with the lush outpourings of third-rate hacks’ (W. Alwyn 1967, 40). Chief among the reasons for his decision to leave the film industry in 1963 was the constant difficulty he had experienced in attempting to persuade producers to use economic scoring methods that did not involve a full symphony orchestra, which he felt ‘is like the all-star cast, it provides a sort of Hollywood gloss and a pseudo-prestige value to the films . . . important sounding music makes the picture sound important’, and the tendency to use twice as much music in the late 1950s than was customary a decade earlier, which meant that ‘without silence the composer loses his most effective weapon’ (1958 lecture, quoted in Swynnoe 2002, 189, 191).

Alwyn spent his retirement in the company of his second wife, Doreen Mary Carwithen, who was one of the very few female film composers to have made a name for herself in the 1950s. After an apprenticeship as a copyist and creditless ghost-writer aiding more established composers at Denham Studios, Carwithen scored a clutch of films in her own right between 1948 and 1956, including a novel balletic interpretation of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ (On the Twelfth Day, 1956) directed by and starring Wendy Toye, with production design by Ronald Searle. Carwithen later commented that, like Alwyn, sophisticated composer Elisabeth Lutyens had no qualms about adapting her compositional style for films (Swynnoe 2002, 225), Lutyens’s output in this medium including several features and documentaries released between 1946 and 1975. Among them were several mediocre horror films (see below), a genre which has traditionally admitted unusually high levels of dissonance and avant-garde techniques. Lutyens had been the first woman composer to score a feature film in the UK when she undertook Penny and the Pownall Case in that seminal year, 1948. In the following year, Grace Williams (a student friend of Britten’s who served as the latter’s amanuensis when he worked on Love From a Stranger) was commissioned to score director Jill Craigie’s feature Blue Scar, her music for the project partly based on folksong material from Williams’s native Wales. Unfortunately, most of the films on which these women composers worked in a thoroughly male-dominated industry have long since sunk into obscurity.

A notably robust and distinctive harmonic idiom is the principal characteristic of film scores by Alan Rawsthorne. Irving commented of Rawsthorne’s music to The Captive Heart (dir. Basil Dearden, 1946) that the piquant harmony made ‘“sloppy” love scenes . . . bearable’ (Irving et al. 1954, 102), elsewhere praising his lack of superficiality and refusal to pander to lowbrow tastes, citing a dramatically appropriate use of counterpoint to depict the weary march of debilitated prisoners at Dunkirk (Huntley [1947], 83). The leaden Ava Gardner vehicle Pandora and the Flying Dutchman( dir. Albert Lewin, 1950), an Anglo-American co-production, was enhanced by Rawsthorne’s evocative and tonally elusive harmony: his score is freely evolving, without recurring motifs, and dislocated bass lines lend a sense of dynamic progression. In The Cruel Sea (dir. Frend, 1953) the composer avoided both sentimentality and the banal heroic style of many British maritime features through similarly elusive and sometimes acerbic advanced tonality. In Rawsthorne’s robust idiom, unpredictable but logical harmonies are often a by-product of imaginative contrapuntal voice-leading – a central characteristic of his style in the concert hall (Dunwell 1960, 186).

Along with Alwyn, Benjamin Frankel was one of the most successful, highly paid and prolific British film composers of the 1940s and 1950s. His versatility was such that he began his career as a dance-band violinist and arranger, and director of West End musicals, and ended it as a composer of respected concert music (including eight symphonies), much of which embodied tonally rooted serial techniques. His first major film success was the score to The Seventh Veil (dir. Compton Bennett, 1946), one of many British films of the era exploiting classical repertoire (see Chapter 11) and hailed as ‘an outstanding success in bringing music to a wider audience in an artistically satisfying, technically pleasing (even box office gratifying) manner’ (Huntley [1947], 78). This stylish melodrama about a concert pianist’s psychological and romantic problems fared unexpectedly well in America. The composer’s theatrical experience made him an obvious choice to score film transfers from stage comedies such as the period pieces Trottie True (US title The Gay Lady; dir. Hurst, 1949) and The Importance of Being Earnest (dir. Asquith, 1952), both of which feature music-hall galops and gently parodic takes on parlour music. In 1951, Frankel scored one of the finest Ealing comedies, The Man in the White Suit (dir. Mackendrick). His music for Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), a London-setfilmnoir, was for contractual reasons not used in the USA where an alternative score was provided by Franz Waxman; it seems likely that Frankel’s economical music for the British Territories release was considered too dispassionate in effect for American tastes by the film’s producers, and Waxman’s replacement score (used in all other parts of the world, and later completely eclipsing the Frankel version when the film was released for broadcast on television) was certainly more firmly anchored in the well-established noir vein in its clear-cut expressionism (Husted 2003).

Frankel’s film work fluctuated between a popular melodicism hailing from his light-music background and far more sophisticated compositional preoccupations. So Long at the Fair (dir. Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough, 1950) and Footsteps in the Fog (dir. Arthur Lubin, 1955) spawned the hits ‘Carriage and Pair’ and ‘Lily Watkin’s Theme’ respectively (the latter popular with the British dance bands of the day), yet in the same year as he scored Footsteps Frankel experimented with serial technique in his music to Peter Grenville’s The Prisoner, alongside lush non-functional triadic progressions for strings suggestive of Debussy at his most luminous. As other film composers discovered at around this time, the convoluted technical processes of dodecaphonic serialism proved most apposite in dramas concerned with Angst and terror, and Frankel’s fullest serial essay in a film score came with his contribution to the Hammer production The Curse of the Werewolf (dir. Fisher, 1961) – though in spite of the self-imposed technical challenge he also found room for a bucolic cue imbued with Mahlerian diatonicism and the sounds of nature, and his serial conceptions were always characterized by melodic accessibility and affective lyricism, sometimes underpinned at climaxes by statuesque Stravinskyan ostinati in the bass. The Night of the Iguana (dir. John Huston, 1964) has tender modal writing for chamber textures, well suited to a tragi-comic stage transfer; that the music works well away from the film is due to a thematic unity that can bind short cues satisfyingly together (Kennaway 2002, 25).

Frankel’s final film score, to Ken Annakin’s all-star war epic Battle of the Bulge (1965), proved to be his magnum opus. A finely executed new recording of the full music track (see Kennaway 2000) revealed this to be one of the most inventive, substantial and vivid scores ever conceived for a genre that mostly elicited bombastic triumphalism and clichéd battle music from even the best composers who served it. Frankel’s reworking of familiar militaristic and patriotic rhetoric is distinguished by appealing eccentricities helping to capture aspects of the participants’ characters, for example an angular and jazzy hoe-down tune for a maverick US tank commander that perfectly complements (and can serve as a bustling counterpoint to) Adolf Hoffmann’s banal Panzerlied anthem beloved of the German tank crews, this authentic song heard both diegetically and in the nondiegetic score. Although the music is structured according to traditional leitmotivic principles, Frankel’s ever-resourceful harmonies, rhythmic propulsion and textural imagination constantly maintain freshness. Prominent stylistic fingerprints include polytonality, melodic chains of thirds and harmonies sustained from successive melodic notes (both suggesting the influence of Britten), expansive but restrained string lines layered with nervously fragmented brass and percussion, use of ostinati driving in layers over simply pounding bass lines, deftly balletic moments (e.g. to accompany an aerial pursuit), and contrasting sections of delicate lyricism. By way of contrast, John Addison’s meagre score to the comparable all-star Second World War epic A Bridge Too Far (dir. Richard Attenborough, 1977), although in places achieving a delicate and restrained lyricism, for the most part utilized four-square and optimistically patriotic marches to punctuate the drama, their cheerfulness sitting oddly alongside the often graphic depictions of the devastating carnage of one of the worst defeats in British military history. So inappropriate did Addison’s naïvely optimistic style seem, even to the film-makers, that only after a prolonged silence could the jolly main-title march be faded back in to accompany the latter stages of the end credits.

By the time he composed his score to Hamlet, Walton had long enjoyed a reputation as a leading film composer, and freely confessed to having embarked on film work largely for the ‘filthy lucre’. Walton’s most celebrated film scores are those he composed for Olivier’s trilogy of Shakespeare films, which are discussed in Chapter 4. He also provided music for eleven other films, including four early projects directed by Paul Czinner: Escape Me Never (1935), As You Like It (1936), Dreaming Lips (1937) and Stolen Life (1939). The commission for Escape Me Never, which was the first British feature for which an established composer with an international reputation had been engaged, ‘helped to pay the mortgage during the composition of the First Symphony’ (Kennedy 1989, 76; Walton 1988, 87). That money was the initial impetus for Walton’s decision to move into film scoring is shown by a revealing letter to his publisher, written in March 1936 following a rumour that Clair wanted to hire him for his next film, when the composer wished to acquire a hard-hitting agent: ‘I am coming more &more to the view that it is absolutely necessary to have someone who really lives in, & understands the film world inside out. Only they can get the highest prices and know how to haggle & bully this gang of would-be tricksters’; commenting on the then current negotiations of his contract for As You Like It, he confessed he felt like a babe in the wood ‘wandering in a strange & predatory land’ (Hayes 2002, 107–8). In May 1938 Walton was weighing the financial pros and cons of accepting either an American commission for a Violin Concerto for Jascha Heifetz or lucrative film projects, telling his publisher ‘it all boils down to this, whether I’m to become a film composer or a real composer . . . In fact I think I can safely wipe out films, which have served their purpose in enabling me to get my house etc.’ (Hayes 2002, 115).

In 1941 Walton scored a film version of Shaw’s Major Barbara (dir. Pascal et al.), during work on which the playwright deigned to offer the composer detailed advice on how to reflect his words with suitable music, declaring ‘If I were a musician I should not presume to suggest an alteration; but an amateur’s comments should always be listened to’ (quoted in Kennedy 1989, 110). Walton was exempted from military service in the Second World War on condition that he provide music for propaganda films. In addition to scoring three such projects for Ealing Studios in 1941–2, he composed a score for Leslie Howard’s Ministry of Information production, The First of the Few (1942). A superior fictionalized account of the life of legendary Spitfire designer Reginald Mitchell, the film was provided with suitably rousing music, and Walton confessed that for this project it ‘will have to be good & one can’t rely on a quick film extemporisation technique for it, so it will need more time trouble & care’ (Hayes 2002, 138). Extracts from the score quickly became popular in the concert hall under the title Spitfire Prelude and Fugue. The patriotic tone of the Prelude inhabits the same post-Elgarian soundworld as Walton’s coronation marches, while the boisterous Fugue originally accompanied shots of the assembly line working intensely to produce the prototype aircraft. Elsewhere Walton employed the standard device of musical quotation at appropriate moments, including a leitmotif from Wagner’s Ring for the Nazi domination of Europe and the US national anthem for the music accompanying that country’s victory of the Schneider floatplane racing trophy. In a letter written in the spring of 1942, shortly before he embarked on the score, Walton commented that he felt film music to be

entirely occasional, & is of no use other than what it is meant for & one won’t be able to get a suite out of it.

Which is just as it should be, otherwise it would probably not fulfil it’s [sic] purpose. That is why I’m against my film music being played by Mr [Stanford] Robinson [a conductor of light music at the BBC] or anyone else. Film music is not good film music if it can be used for any other purpose . . . So I don’t care where [the score of] Major Barbara is or any other of my films. The music should never be heard without the film.

At the time, Walton could hardly have been expected to predict how successful some of his film-music suites were to become in the concert hall, and the popularity of the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue was soon matched by that of various extracts from Henry V. Money remained a prime objective, and to his publisher he expressed concern that Vaughan Williams (who shared the same publisher) might in these war years under-sell himself to film producers: ‘it is not a help for the rest of the composers if someone of his calibre & reputation is asking half what most of us get’ (Hayes 2002, 128). By the early 1960s, Walton’s need to earn had become less pressing, and he commented of his decision not to score David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in 1962: ‘2 1/2 hours [of music] for £5000 – not on my life’. He was still earning handsomely from royalties payable on his earlier film scores: in 1963, for example, he received £479 for Olivier’s Hamlet, now fifteen years old, so the Lean offer must have seemed a poor deal indeed (Hayes 2002, 327, 330).

6.1 Malcolm Arnold conducting music for the British war film Battle of Britain (1969), with actress Susannah York (as Section Officer Maggie Harvey) on screen. All but a short segment of William Walton’s score was rejected by the film’s producers.

Walton’s distinguished film career came to an ignominious end in 1969 when he was engaged to provide the music for another patriotic war film, Battle of Britain (dir. Guy Hamilton). By this stage Walton’s compositional powers were declining, and he felt compelled to employ Malcolm Arnold as a creative assistant; Walton’s lack of understanding of the technicalities of film-making was strikingly revealed when he naïvely commented to Arnold that some passages of the music would need to be ‘fairly loud (I’ve put in no expression marks) as I imagine there [are] a lot of background airplane noises to overcome’ (Hayes 2002, 385). The film’s American producers disliked the music track when they heard it and, using the pretext that there was insufficient material to fill a soundtrack album, rejected it. John Barry was invited to supply a new score, but declined, and the commission was instead taken over by Ron Goodwin, who had written rousing action scores for war movies such as 633 Squadron (dir. Walter Grauman, 1964) and Where Eagles Dare (dir. Brian G. Hutton, 1969), the former celebrated for its thrillingly memorable and much-imitated main-title theme. Only when Olivier (who played Sir Hugh Dowding) threatened to have his name removed from the credits of Battle of Britain did the producers agree to retain one small segment of Walton’s original music. This ‘Battle in the Air’ sequence occurs towards the end of the film, and was clearly patched together with linking passages supplied by Arnold. In an attempt to make amends for this transatlantic insult to a nationally revered figure, the British Prime Minister Edward Heath successfully retrieved Walton’s manuscript from United Artists in 1972 and presented it to the composer at his 70th birthday party,held at 10 Downing Street. With the release of Battle of Britain on DVD in 2004, Walton’s slender score (the original recording of which was unearthed from the sound mixer’s garage in 1990) was made available as an alternative music track; but its coronation-style march theme and flippant variation on Siegfried’s heroic horn motif from Wagner’s Ring, duly trotted out for appearances of the Luftwaffe (and, in one ineptly spotted cue on the DVD, when an RAF Spitfire attempts to land with its wheels up), are likely to come as a severe disappointment for those expecting to encounter a long-lost masterpiece of film scoring.

Arnold was in his own right one of the leading British film composers of the 1950s and 1960s. Like Britten and many others, he served an apprenticeship in documentary film, beginning in 1947 and scoring over ten films per year from 1948 until 1951, when he began to undertake more commissions for feature films. By the time he abandoned film work in 1969, he had contributed music to well over 100 projects, including collaborations with directors Huston, Mankiewicz and Reed. Among Arnold’s strengths were a belief that composers should accept only those film commissions for which they entertained a genuine empathy, a compositional integrity which (like Herrmann’s) drew no stylistic distinction between film and concert work, and a keen sense of economy and restraint. The latter was strikingly demonstrated when he refused to write anything except main-title music for Henry Koster’s No Highway (1951), on the grounds that in this case background scoring would ‘ruin a good script and a good film’ (quoted in Burton-Page 1994, 53). Certain films involved research to find appropriate exotic raw material, as in his appropriation of Caribbean music for Island in the Sun (dir. Robert Rossen, 1957) and Indian music for Nine Hours to Rama (dir. Mark Robson, 1962), while in British-based features he occasionally resorted to regional folksongs to create a local flavour. The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (dir. Robson, 1958), which included stereotyped musical orientalism, somewhat overworked its main theme but cunningly combined it at the conclusion with the evacuee children’s diegetic nursery song ‘This Old Man’. In Whistle Down the Wind (dir. Bryan Forbes, 1961) Arnold again captured the innocence of a group of children, who on this occasion discover a murderer hiding in a barn and take him to be Jesus, with delicate scoring that includes an inventive arrangement of the Christmas carol ‘We Three Kings’. With his witty scoring for the four films in the popular ‘St Trinian’s’ series (1954–66), set amongst the badly behaved pupils in a notorious fictional girls’ public school and inspired by the drawings of Ronald Searle, Arnold joined the ranks of composers not ashamed to have their names associated with the amiable crudities of British comedy.

Arnold’s film music is perhaps best represented by the three very different scores he composed in the 1950s for critically acclaimed features directed by Lean. The Sound Barrier (1952), concerned with aviation pioneers of the early jet age, was in some respects a topical sequel to The First of the Few, and not surprisingly Arnold’s music was imbued in places with a distinctly patriotic flavour strongly redolent of Walton. As in Arnold’s concert music, multiple piccolos are used imaginatively, here suggesting both ethereal skyscapes and the mysterious allure of the unknown. A glittering waltz accompanies some of the aerial sequences, but tension in action sequences is more commonly generated not by music but by carefully sequenced sound effects, with the concluding sonic boom constituting the real climax of the soundtrack. In places Arnold’s music appears to emerge from the sound effects, as when the roar of a Comet’s jet engines spooling up merges imperceptibly into a gradual crescendo on a sustained orchestral chord. Music is absent from the sequence in which a biplane crashes and kills its novice pilot: only as the smoke spirals upwards from the wreckage does Arnold’s cue begin, piccolo spiralling isomorphically upwards and initiating a solemn orchestral dirge which is prolonged well into the next scene in order to cast a shadow over the dead pilot’s father as he studies the model of his elegant new jet aircraft design.

The second Arnold–Lean collaboration, Hobson’s Choice (1953), received a fine comedic score in which Arnold avoided the pitfalls of mickey-mousing by ensuring that almost all directly illustrative gestures in the music occur in the context of a consistent rhythmic accompaniment with its own ongoing momentum, often based on repetitive dance-like patterns. Elements of music-hall burlesque, a sometimes disconcerting feature of Arnold’s concert music, here find full-blooded expression, and although the instrumental stereotyping (e.g. lurching tuba and bassoons for drunkenness, and trombone glissandi for vulgarity) verges on caricature, such designedly banal musical material is refreshed by subtle twists. In the opening scene the camera pans across the ranks of different footwear in the cobbler’s shop to the accompaniment of a sequence of balletic musical ideas (analysed in detail in Manvell and Huntley 1957, 138–42), and shy Willie Mossop’s unduly protracted undressing on his wedding night is celebrated with a miniature nondiegetic violin concerto. Hyperbole is rife, with deliciously exaggerated love and triumph themes punctuating the score at crucial moments, and a brilliant touch of bathos occurs when an expansive climax on the love theme is brutally truncated as Willie is slapped on the face by the mother of the ex-girlfriend his new love has just forced him to jilt.

Lean declared of Arnold’s Oscar-winning score to The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) that it possessed size, sensitivity and guts, and showed that the composer was blessed with the instincts of a fine story-teller (Burton-Page 1994, 55). The widespread popularity of the score was in no small measure due to Arnold’s ingenious treatment of the jaunty First World War march Colonel Bogey (composed by Kenneth Alford in 1916), which proved to be a hit when released in a film spin-off recording by Mitch Miller and his band in 1958. In the film, Alford’s theme first appears when whistled diegetically by the marching British soldiers, with Arnold’s buoyant nondiegetic countermelody creeping in inexorably beneath it and elsewhere appearing independently. In the prisoner-of-war genre the impact of these cheerful marching melodies was considerable, strong echoes in later films including The Great Escape (dir. John Sturges, 1963; music by Elmer Bernstein), in turn parodied in the British animated comedy Chicken Run (dir. Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000; music by John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams). Lean was impressed by those moments in The Bridge on the River Kwai when the composer allowed his music to ‘spill over’ and dominate the action, but the score is mostly restrained and, as in The Sound Barrier, sound effects and ambient sound often create the necessary tension. The starkest example of this occurs in the tense final segment of the film, when no music is heard for over twenty minutes of running time as the bridge is covertly wired with explosives by commandos and then destroyed.

Founded in 1947, Hammer Productions ventured into science-fiction in the 1950s and launched the film-music career of house composer James Bernard with The Quatermass Xperiment (US title The Creeping Unknown; dir. Val Guest, 1955), Quatermass II (US title Enemy from Space; dir. Guest, 1956) – both direct spin-offs from a successful BBC television series – and X the Unknown (dir. Leslie Norman, 1956), all three of which made the most of a low-budget ensemble of strings and percussion. Hammer’s lucrative move into horror came with reworkings of Universal’s favourite subjects from the 1930s: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (US title Horror of Dracula, 1958), both directed by Terence Fisher and scored by Bernard; the first set a new standard of goriness influential on the genre as a whole, while the second aspired to intelligent production values that were sometimes sorely lacking in later Hammer films.Trademarks of Bernard’s idiom already present in these soundtracks were obsessive three-note motifs derived from the syllables of both title characters’ names, and ‘a slow and dominant, often descending progression of notes over a rapid flurry of orchestral dissonance, growing and building in volume and register, advancing a relentless terror in coordination with the horrors on-screen, climaxing in a dynamic frenzy of wild orchestration’ (Larson 1996, 21). These characteristics persisted in scores for sequels such as Dracula, Prince of Darkness (dir. Fisher, 1966), Scars of Dracula (dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1970) and Frankenstein and the Mon-ster from Hell (dir. Fisher, 1973), which exploited direct clashes between leitmotifs representing either abstract good and evil or characters polarized in other binary oppositions.

Bernard had begun his career by acting as copyist on the manuscript full score of Britten’s opera Billy Budd (1951). Britten, having long since abandoned film work himself, wrote to his former protégé about his film music in 1958: ‘I think you have done splendidly – a real example to other composers who are often too grand (or too incompetent) to accept commissions of the sort that you have always done’ (quoted in Bridcut 2006, 255). Bernard’s Hammer music can be heard at its most typical in The Devil Rides Out (dir. Fisher, 1968), where the most effective rhetorical gestures are the simplest: an ascending rolled timpani glissando against tense string trills for the appearance of the goat-devil and a luminous oscillation of two chords for a hypnosis induced by reflections in a mirror, for example. Elsewhere the music relies heavily on prolonged sequential crescendos for its intensity, as in a scene of self-strangulation, and in embryonic form this technique also provides small building blocks of related material for short cues that can easily accommodate sporadic interruption by individual lines of dialogue. Much of the tutti scoring seems overdone for modern tastes, relying heavily on stingers and stereotypical instrumentation (e.g. snarling muted brass and string tremolos), and the pagan orgy scene is choreographed to primitive ritualistic music hardly representing a significant advance over Steiner’s tribal music in King Kong written some 35 years earlier; bizarrely the sound levels are here manipulated to suggest that the music is diegetic by ducking the volume when the orgy is seen from a distance, even though the elaborate scoring (for orchestra with African drums) unwittingly makes a mockery of such attempted realism on the part of the dubbing mixers.

Hammer Productions were anxious to retain high-quality orchestral music to compensate for sometimes dubious production values, and to maintain a consistency of musical style to promote a coherent house identity. The studio’s music directors, first classical conductor John Hollingsworth then Philip Martell from 1964 onwards, were perceptive talent-spotters fully committed to maintaining consistently high levels of composition and performance; unusually for its time, the music department was run on the old Hollywood model. Notable composers who scored Hammer films were Don Banks, Tristram Cary, Christopher Gunning, Elisabeth Lutyens, John McCabe, Mario Nascimbene (see Chapter 9), Harry Robinson (né Robertson),DavidWhitaker and Malcolm Williamson. In a rare inversion of orthodox compositional priorities, Banks viewed his Hammer scores – which included The Reptile (dir. John Gilling, 1966) – as an opportunity to experimentwith modernist devices he found too avant-garde for his concert work, seizing the opportunity to hone his twelve-note techniques (Larson 1996, 57–8). By contrast, Lutyens was well known as a serial advocate in her concert works but chose to modify her style significantly when working in film; in addition to scores for Hammer such as Paranoiac (dir. Freddie Francis, 1963) she also worked on a number of productions by the studio’s rival in the genre, Amicus Films. Her music for the latter’s The Skull (dir. Francis, 1965), scored for an unorthodox orchestra featuring cimbalom and two bass clarinets but no violins, shows her ability to mould modernistic rhetorical gestures into memorable patterns (Doran 2004). Williamson found his wings clipped when he wanted to score The Horror of Frankenstein (dir. Jimmy Sangster, 1970), a black comedy and the final member of Hammer’s Frankenstein series, with a Herrmann-like ensemble of eight members of the clarinet family plus strings and percussion, only to be told that he had to include flutes and oboes for nature-effects and love-interest respectively (Larson 1996, 79). Fashionable electronics were generally avoided, though Bernard employed a novachord (in unison with a soprano) in his suitably complex score for The Gorgon in 1964 (dir. Fisher), Robinson used a Moog synthesizer to suggest psychological disturbance in Demons of the Mind (dir. Peter Sykes, 1972), and Cary was unusually commissioned to write complete alternative scores, one for electronics and the other for full orchestra, for Quatermass and the Pit (dir. Baker) in 1967. The electronics were true to their typecasting as agents of the irrational, and parts of both scores were used in the final dub (Larson 1996, 31, 93), but the music had an impossible task trying to rescue what was (apart from the film’s hysterical climax) uniformly unatmospheric imagery, and the beautiful dirge accompanying the end titles was perversely not used at any point in the preceding narrative. In the same year Cary founded a pioneering electronic studio at London’s Royal College of Music and went on to write prolifically for television.

In the 1970s, when Hammer music was dominated by the work of Whitaker and Robinson, some tension occurred when the studio bosses tried to plug pop songs for commercial gain, Robinson recalling that one such in Lust for a Vampire (dir. Jimmy Sangster, 1970) ‘drew hoots and jeers from every audience that heard it’ (quoted in Larson 1996, 109). When a contemporary rock score was commissioned from Michael Vickers for Dracula A.D. 1972 (dir. Alan Gibson, 1972) the results were felt so lamentable that an uncredited Banks was brought in to rescore half of the film, which was further modified with additional library cues (Larson 1996, 131). Robinson’s pop background was reflected in his use of AABA song form in main-title themes, including that to Twins of Evil (dir. John Hough, 1971), the score of which has been analysed in detail by David Huckvale (1990). Such updatings in idiom were partly the result of pressure from the American co-producers who, as with other British film ventures at the time, became heavily involved in financing them. One of Hammer’s last films, To the Devil a Daughter (dir. Sykes, 1976), had a score by US composer Paul Glass in which the disjointed colouristic rhetoric showed that the ultra-dissonant horror score had run out of steam just as much as the studio’s earlier neo-romantic Gothic scores. Hammer’s final feature appeared in 1978, and two years later they entered television production with the series Hammer House of Horror.

Even more successful than Hammer in its heyday was the seemingly never-ending series of unsubtle but surprisingly enduring Carry On comedies, featuring a roster of well-know comic actors and deriving much of its inspiration from the unsophisticated humour and innuendo of the old-time music hall. Early titles in this series were scored in 1958–62 by Bruce Montgomery, who pursued a parallel career as an author of intelligent crime fiction under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin and who had previously writtenmusic for the ‘Doctor’ series of comedies in the 1950s (see Whittle 2007). Montgomery’s early score for The Kidnappers (dir. Philip Leacock, 1953) had shown his work to be finely crafted but sometimes indulging in needlessly elaborate orchestral textures and occasionally incoherent mickey-mousing alongside melodramatic stingers, a pastoral Englishness reminiscent of Warlock and Delius, folk-music elements and a willingness to increase the level of dissonance where justified by the drama. The Carry On series found its winning and indestructible formula after Montgomery parted company with it, with unpretentious and tuneful music for the numerous productions from 1963 until its demise in 1978 provided by Eric Rogers to scripts by Talbot Rothwell and spirited direction by Gerald Thomas, all working under the aegis of Rank producer Peter Rogers.

Eric Rogers’ musical responses to the widely variable quality of comedy with which he was confronted were resourceful, embracing a host of cinematicmusical idioms appropriate to the generic parodies at the heart of the Carry On concept. These affectionate stylistic homages were generally more satisfying than the overly literal mickey-mousing effects he often used to underscore physical comedy, most obviously to be seen in Carry on Doctor (1967) in which the graphic musical isomorphism of events (for example, an ascending swoop up to a dissonant stinger as a doctor accidentally trips and injects a patient unceremoniously in the posterior) comes straight out of the cartoon-composer’s stock repertoire. (For a transcribed example of similar catching the action from Carry on Henry (1971), see Kershaw 1995, 135.) Also old-fashioned and predictable is distinctive instrumentation appropriate to character-type (bassoon or bass clarinet for almost anyone above an average bodily weight, for example) and crudely mocking devices (‘laughing’ muted brass, trombones blowing raspberries). Allusions to well-known songs remain a direct holdover from the silent era, as when a boy with his head stuck in a chamber pot arrives at Accident & Emergency to a nondiegetic strain from ‘Boys and Girls Come Out to Play’.

As a foil to the essential bittiness of mickey-moused local details, Rogers often punctuated his scores with amiably lumbering general-purpose ritornello themes. His generic stylizations were otherwise mostly played straight and without undue exaggeration, presumably in order not to detract from the comic immediacy of the acting; in this regard he adumbrated the mock seriousness of 1980s comedy scoring by many years. The technique is heard to good advantage in Carry on Cleo (1964), which paid straightforward tribute to the epic Roman idiom of Rózsa – whose martial trumpets could conveniently collapse into jazz-muted laughter at appropriate moments. (It is to be hoped that Rózsa would have appreciated the funny side of the parody more than did Twentieth Century-Fox,who obtained a court injunction to prevent the film’s Cleopatra-spoofing poster from being displayed.) In Carry on Screaming (1966), a snappy main-title pop song in Elvis Presley style leads to eerie underscoring for an affectionate lampoon on the Hammer horror films; mickey-mousing is limited, and the thematic allusions are insular, the signature tune from the 1960s BBC TV police soap-opera Z Cars making a suitably silly (and, to a non-British audience, meaningless) appearance as inept Victorian coppers arrive at the crime scene. Perhaps the finest film in the series, the sharply scripted Carry On Up the Khyber (1968) allows the essential naïvety of authentic military band music to make itself sound daft without the need for additional help, and the film is full of audio-visual musical jokes strongly reminiscent of Golden Age cartoons: the rotating magazine of a sabotaged Gatling machine-gun plays a mechanical fairground tune, and during the film’s climactic parody of upper-class Englishness, in which the white-tie-clad aristocrats attempt to maintain dignity at a dinner party in spite of the fact that their residency is being shelled by revolting natives, the palm-court piano quartet continues playing unfazed as the bombs burst around them. (‘Terrible noise!’ moans a frightened guest, to which the host replies: ‘Yes, shocking isn’t it? It’s not a first-class orchestra. But mind you, they’re doing their best.’) Even after receiving a direct hit, the ensemble gets shakily to its feet and resumes playing a hesitant version of The Blue Danube to a honky-tonk accompaniment on their bombed-out piano.

As in France, so in the UK film-making styles underwent a sea-change in the early 1960s as social realism, the lower-class way of life, political consciousness, sharp satire, a sometimes raunchy sexuality and the glossy fashions of the Swinging Sixties all variously left their mark on the British equivalent to the nouvelle vague: Free Cinema, born out of low-budget documentary-making in the late 1950s and spearheaded by the outspoken director Lindsay Anderson. Influential on the downbeat realism arising from the emerging social consciousness was the uncompromising dramatic style of a new generation of playwrights including John Osborne, whose seminal Look Back in Anger was filmed by Tony Richardson in 1959, with music by jazz trombonist Chris Barber. For Room at the Top (1958; music by Mario Nascimbene) and The Pumpkin Eater (1965; music by Georges Delerue) director Jack Clayton turned to continental composers to break away from English musical stereotypes. The first British feature film influenced by Free Cinema thinking to find commercial success was Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), with a jazz score by John Dankworth. Set in Nottingham,the film’s anti-authoritarian stance and sexually liberated working-class subject-matter proved attractive at the box office – so much so that producer Harry Saltzman was as a direct result of its success empowered to embark on the internationally successful James Bond series (Cowie 2004, 94). Dankworth also scored Joseph Losey’s The Servant in 1963, the year in which Anderson’s uncompromising This Sporting Life somewhat bizarrely featured highly intellectual and dissonant music by Schoenberg’s former pupil Roberto Gerhard for the story of a rugby-playing coal miner. Anderson’s anarchic and bitterly anti-Establishment public-school fantasy If . . . (1968;music by Marc Wilkinson) later became emblematic of the narrative daring of the British New Wave.

Saturday Night’s co-producer Richardson directed his own northern-set comedy, A Taste of Honey (1961), and the young-offender story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), both with music by his favoured collaborator John Addison. Addison also scored Richardson’s lively interpretation of Henry Fielding’s robustly comic novel Tom Jones (1963), based on a screenplay by Osborne; this multi-Oscar-winning venture imaginatively combined authentic period detail with modern cinematographic techniques, Addison supplying a quirky harpsichord-dominated score drawing on aspects of baroque recitative in the accompaniment of voiced-over narration, parodies of silent-film music and stock comedic devices similar to those in the Carry On series. Another director interested in lower-class scenarios, social realism and sexual liberation at this time was John Schlesinger, whose creative partnership with Richard Rodney Bennett is discussed below; music for Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) came from Dankworth, the scenario’s urban amorality typical of the age. Beginning in 1967 with Poor Cow (with music by Donovan), independent director Ken Loach embarked on a long series of documentary-style dramas that from the 1990s onwards benefited from the sustained involvement of experienced film composer George Fenton (see below).

Perhaps as a result of the steady influx of jazz and pop scoring that affected both British and international cinema in the 1960s, few concert composers embarked on film careers until Michael Nyman collaborated with director Peter Greenaway in the 1980s (see Chapter 12). A notable exception was Peter Maxwell Davies, who provided music for Ken Russell’s productions of The Devils (1970) and The Boy Friend (1971). Music for the former, an outrageously lurid baroque horror film which made some of the musicians participating in the recording feel physically nauseated, was provided by Davies’s celebrated avant-garde ensemble The Fires of London, with diegetic early music by the equally renowned period-instrument specialist David Munrow. Davies’s score balances a lyrical but disturbing expressionism (rotting corpses) with avant-garde twitterings (plague victims) and queasy timpani glissandi (burning at the stake), with snatches of grotesque parody including an impressive conjunction of a diegetic Dies irae procession with extreme nondiegetic modernism–the latter throughout exceptionally well suited to such strong visual imagery. Far more conventional was his tuneful and impressionistic scoring of The Boy Friend, which included spirited pastiches of the Charleston and foxtrot for Polly’s dream sequence.

Until the late 1970s, when his increasing dissatisfaction with the commercial bias of film music influenced his decision to work largely for television, Richard Rodney Bennett was perhaps the ultimate example of a front-rank composer equally comfortable with film and concert work. His youthful studies with Lennox Berkeley (1953–6) and Pierre Boulez (1957–9) left him well versed in both tonal and avant-garde idioms, and with a particular affinity for the English pastoral tradition, French neo-classicism and Schoenbergian serialism. He was also a gifted jazz pianist and cabaret performer, who (like the similarly versatile Schifrin) moonlighted at Paris jazz clubs during his formative years. These experiences left Bennett with an unusually wide range of stylistic possibilities at his creative disposal when he immersed himself in film work, which commenced when he was still only nineteen and found himself encouraged to embark on documentaries and thrillers by Hollingsworth. Bennett’s output of film music thereafter co-existed alongside a steady stream of well-received concert works, the technical sophistication of which inevitably rubbed off at times on the often advanced harmonic language of his film scores.

Diversity was much in evidence in his early assignments, which included a lush easy-listening backdrop for the star-studded Indiscreet (dir. Stanley Donen, 1958), a cool-jazz score (conducted by Arnold) for Losey’s Blind Date (US title Chance Meeting, 1959), and modernistic and often hyperbolic rhetoric in a number of Hammer thrillers: The Man Who Could Cheat Death (dir. Fisher, 1959), on which the music track featured electronic organ, reverbed percussion and a high level of dissonance; the dark Bette Davis vehicle The Nanny (dir. Seth Holt, 1965), with its prominent harpsichord and psychological insights underlined by music illuminating different points of view and, at the end, delusions; and The Witches (US title The Devil’s Own; dir. Cyril Frankel, 1966), its score again dominated by percussion, including marimba to conjure up an aura of African black magic (Larson 1996, 72–6). Ken Russell’s film of Len Deighton’s thriller Billion Dollar Brain (1967), a more overtly commercial venture financed by the same team responsible for the contemporaneous James Bond series (United Artists and Saltzman), commenced with main-title music for the unorthodox forces of three pianos and orchestra, couched in a Poulenc-like idiom of Gallic suavity which Bennett confessed was directly inspired by Legrand’s score for La Baie des anges (dir. Jacques Demy, 1962); French details in Bennett’s response extended to the melodic use of an ondes martenot throughout the score (Phillips 2002, 25), which also included the then fashionable sonority of the harpsichord and a brilliant set-piece for an assassination on the steps of a Russian church in Finland featuring ritualistic Kremlin-like bell effects filtered through the clear influence of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Some years later it was in favour of a fashionable score by Legrand that Losey parted company with Bennett when the latter’s score to The Go-Between (1971) was rejected by the director because he felt it to be ‘too dramatic and climactic’ (Caute 1994, 263), Legrand in turn incurring Losey’s wrath because his replacement music too closely resembled the French composer’s earlier score to The Thomas Crown Affair. But in the shape of two other musically sensitive directors, Schlesinger and Sidney Lumet, Bennett found lasting creative partnerships that inspired his most substantial and memorable film music.

The collaboration with Schlesinger began with the comedy Billy Liar in 1963, a witty tale of the surreal daydreaming of a restless undertaker’s assistant furnished with economical music both gently parodistic and fashionably jazzy, and peaked with the Thomas Hardy adaptation Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). During work on the Hardy project Bennett’s conviction that attending the filming process was of no benefit to a composer was confirmed by the fact that at the Dorset location shoot he merely ‘sat there and sneezed and had no musical ideas at all’ (quoted in Daniel 2000, 153). The Hardy score is a model of sensitive spotting and the kind of organic structural control at which the best conservatory-trained composers excel, as shown by the extended sequence in which the passage of Bathsheba’s and Troy’s initial courtship is persuasively underscored by gradual musical developments, each appropriate to the changing setting: beginning with their first nocturnal encounter, the music imparts continuity across the passage-of-time montage, shifting up a semitone into the beekeeping scene and introducing an appropriately onomatopoeic buzzing motif (related to the main theme), remaining designedly subservient under dialogue (where the theme is delicately hinted at by celeste); then, as the camera sweeps with Bathsheba into the open countryside, thematic developments become far more expansive yet harmonically unstable, permitting the incorporation of spirited mickey-mousing for Troy’s flamboyant sword-play, and satisfyingly reserving the fully fledged form of what is now a love theme until the sequence’s concluding kiss, this climactic theme having been alluded to all along by motivic patterns similar to both the intervallic shape and rhythm of its distinctive anacrusis. Bennett’s score to Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979) juxtaposed an English pastoralism, including delicate romantic underscoring with sufficient harmonic interest to safeguard against banality, with a tenser style best exemplified by the main-title cue which emerges from a Sousa-style opening to prolong the march rhythm with a dissonant bass line and searching, lyrical string theme (layered much in the manner of Frankel’s distinctive texture in Battle of the Bulge), both helping to promote a sense of expectancy among American troops arriving in the north of England via a truck convoy.

For Lumet, Bennett scored the all-star Agatha Christie whodunit Murder on the Orient Express (1974), in which the motion of the elegant train was characterized by an energetic waltz tapping both popular-song associations and, in the melody’s more atmospheric incarnations, the impressionistic sophistication of Ravel’s La Valse (1928). (According to Elmer Bernstein (Waletzky 1994), the literal-minded Herrmann singularly failed to grasp why Bennett had composed a flippant tune for a ‘train of death’, Bernstein using this as an example of Herrmann’s inability to understand lightheartedness.) Alongside the waltz, Bennett included snatches of the 1930s dance-band style which the director had originally planned to dominate the project, and drew attention to the inherently superficial nature of such glossy movie entertainment with a lushly romantic main-title overture in hyperbolic piano-concerto style. His technical sophistication came to the fore in the partly aleatoric music for the eerie kidnap montage that serves as the film’s prologue, this and the subsequent octatonic stingers for the stark newspaper headlines later receiving a satisfying structural reworking as the same music returns for the flashback of the murder, each stinger recapitulated against the individual knife-stabs of the multiple killers who are wreaking their collective revenge. Bennett’s music for Lumet’s Equus (1977) is discussed in Chapter 11 for its dark allusions to the idiom of Bach’s Passions. As in much of Bennett’s film music, his advanced harmonic style here allows him to bring cues to an end with subtle unresolved dissonances in order to promote a sense of expectancy – a natural development of the somewhat more intrusive interrupted cadences that served this purpose in the Golden Age lingua franca of tonal film scoring.

Bennett became associated with historical costume dramas in the early 1970s through his Russian-tinged music for the stolid epic Nicholas and Alexandra (dir. Franklin Schaffner, 1971), and a lyrical score to Lady Caroline Lamb (dir. Robert Bolt, 1972) drawing heavily on the idioms of Finzi and Walton, especially the harmonic language of the latter’s Viola Concerto (1929). Unlike some film composers, Bennett did not regard his later TV work as a poor cousin to music for the silver screen, and in 1999 he gave up a Royal Opera House commission in order to score the BBC’s big-budget serialization of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels (Daniel 2000, 152), commenting that working on his full-orchestral score for this project – his first to be orchestrated by another’s hand – was ‘like doing a film in the good old days’ (quoted in Phillips 2002, 27). His occasional forays back into cinema had in the meantime included a collaboration with director Mike Newell, for whom he provided a dreamily romantic score for Enchanted April (1991) showcasing solo strings and ondes martenot, and delicately reharmonizing Elgar’s Chanson de matin (first played diegetically by a solo oboe), and a score for the smash hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which at the end of the century remained the most commercially successful British film of all time, having netted £130 million at the global box office (J. Walker 2006, 422). Bennett dismissed this best-known of his film projects as ‘a disaster musically because they changed the whole score’ (quoted in Phillips 2002, 24), referring to the jettisoning of much of his carefully spotted love-affair music in favour of exploitative pop songs aimed at a youth audience.

The other British film composer to emerge with an international reputation in the 1960s, for very different reasons, was John Barry, who won Academy Awards for Born Free (dir. James Hill, 1965; awards for both score and song), The Lion in Winter (dir. Anthony Harvey, 1968), Out of Africa (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1985) and Dances with Wolves (dir. Kevin Costner, 1990). Apart from the historical epic The Lion in Winter, with its fine dramatic score featuring impressive choral writing, Barry’s most memorable film music was inspired by the successful Bond franchise, on which he worked intermittently between 1962 and 1987, and his music for which is discussed in Chapter 10 in the context of the exploitation of pop styles in British film scoring of the time. His Oscars were awarded to tuneful scores well suited to natural or expansive imagery, and Out of Africa in particular established an immediately recognizable soundworld based on lyrical violin melody and slowly moving triadic harmony which the composer later reworked on numerous occasions.

Extremely prolific, Barry rarely recaptured the freshness of the best of his 1960s output and after the mid-1980s repeatedly resorted to formulaic applications of the same clutch of basic root-position triads, often scored in close position for trombones; he rarely adapted his style to generic requirements, with the result that expansive landscapes (Out of Africa), Sioux Indians (Dances with Wolves) and seventeenth-century puritans (The Scarlet Letter; dir. Roland Joffé, 1995) all ended up sounding much the same. Kevin Mulhall mildly expresses the sense of disappointment and missed opportunity often engendered by Barry’s compositional recyclings, with particular reference to Swept from the Sea (dir. Beeban Kidron, 1997): ‘The usual Barryisms are all here, including a headlining main theme, long-line monophonic melodies in song structures, . . . tonal harmonies, accessible chord progressions, the doubling of parts and the repetition of phrases . . . Other than an Eastern European composition (“Yanko’s Dance”), there is no period or ethnic material . . . A solid if somewhat familiar effort from Barry’ (M.Walker 1998, 38). Other commentators have been disappointed by the ‘certain ad hoc quality’ of Barry’s compositional technique (Darby and Du Bois 1990, 391).

More versatile was the work of George Fenton, who entered film scoring in the 1980s with considerable experience of writing music for theatre and television behind him. His simplest film scores were those which discretely punctuated and supported the low-budget social dramas of independent British director Ken Loach (Ladybird Ladybird, 1994; Land of Freedom, 1995; Carla’s Song, 1996; My Name is Joe, 1998; Bread and Roses, 2000; Sweet Sixteen, 2002; Ae Fond Kiss, 2004), for whom he continued to work loyally in spite of numerous freelance commissions from Hollywood which earned him no fewer than five Academy Award nominations in the period 1982–91. This international exposure began with Gandhi (1982), the first of Fenton’s many collaborations with British director Richard Attenborough; the soundtracks of this and their later Cry Freedom (1987) were important for a sensitive use of ethnic musical elements (see Chapter 12). Fenton’s music for Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) demonstrated a sure command of both electronic and acoustic resources, and in period costume dramas he excelled at adapting pre-existing baroque music alongside freshly composed neo-classical cues (Dangerous Liaisons, 1988; The Madness of King George, 1994). The dark side of Victorian London was evoked by his broodingly modal string writing for Mary Reilly (dir. Stephen Frears, 1996) and a more wistful folk-like mood permeated the Hardy adaptation The Woodlanders (dir. Phil Agland, 1997).

For Hollywood, Fenton provided both easy-going pop scores for routine romantic comedies (e.g. The Object of My Affection and You’ve Got Mail, both 1998; Sweet Home Alabama, 2002; Hitch, 2005), and more imaginative – and at times appropriately surreal – music for offbeat projects such as The Fisher King (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1991) and Harold Ramis’s unorthodox comedies Groundhog Day (1993) and Multiplicity (1996). Fenton’s firm grasp of generic formulae was demonstrated by the Rózsa-like expressionism of his score to the neo-noir thriller Final Analysis (dir. Phil Joanou, 1992), the dignified patriotic and heroic music for the endearingly old-fashioned British war film Memphis Belle (dir. Michael Caton-Jones, 1990) and the virtuosity of his music for the animated feature Valiant (see Chapter 7). His most satisfying work was inspired by intelligent adaptations of thought-provoking literary sources such as the C. S. Lewis drama Shadowlands (dir. Attenborough, 1993) and Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (dir. Nicholas Hytner, 1996). In Shadowlands, a specially composed Anglican anthem performed diegetically at the outset by the choir of Lewis’s college in Oxford provides the thematic basis for a tautly organized nondiegetic orchestral score that climaxes in a profoundly moving end-title cue (played with searing intensity by the LSO under Fenton’s direction), its style alluding to Elgar’s nobilmente idiom but the flow of the music subtly affected by unpredictable metrical changes. Even in less challenging genre assignments like Final Analysis, Fenton often clinched his musical arguments in freshly composed end-title music (rarely providing the lazy rehash of earlier cues and song themes typically used as padding for this part of a film): the final music in The Crucible, for example, provides a much-needed note of dignified human resilience as a release from the gloom of the tragic final scene. Admittedly, most spectators quit the cinema as soon as the end-title music begins; but Fenton composes these epilogues as much with his fine orchestral players in mind, giving them the cathartic opportunity to perform something more substantial and satisfying than the fragmentary cues which are their normal filmic fodder.