thedrifter
12-23-04, 07:05 AM
Keeping Score at the Movies
December 23, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Burt Prelutsky
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some time ago, in my eternal quest to set the record straight, I suggested that the true hero of the motion picture industry wasn’t Thomas Edison or D.W. Griffith, not Chaplin or Keaton, not Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer, but the anonymous fellow who first came up with the notion of putting salt on popcorn, thus turning packing material into a concession stand bonanza that costs more per-pound than lox and caviar put together.
But there are others who, more often than not, get overlooked while far too much praise is lavished on actors and directors. I refer to the men who compose musical scores for dramatic films. Although there have been great scores composed for mediocre movies, there has very rarely ever been a great movie that didn’t have a great score. An example of the difference a fine score can make was “Brian’s Song,” a TV movie that would have drowned in its own bathos and banalities if Michel Legrand’s music hadn’t saved it from itself.
Understand, I’m not referring to movie musicals filled to the brim with catchy tunes, and I’m not even referring to non-musicals whose scores pretty much consist of minor variations on a nice song written for the movie. Those would include the likes of “Picnic,” “High Noon,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” “Laura,” and of course “Casablanca.” Neither would they include movies that simply utilize a pre-existing classical or semi- classical piece, such as “Brief Encounter,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Story of Three Loves” or “The Horse’s Mouth,” which owed far more to people such as Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, than to those hired to adapt their music for the screen.
Unlike some people, I don’t subscribe to the belief that to be successful, a dramatic score should be so unobtrusive as to be virtually unnoticeable. To me, that makes about as much sense as suggesting that the cinematography or the dialogue or the costumes and scenery, should go unnoticed. It is the music, after all, that heightens the emotions, helps dictate the pace of the movie and, as much as any other single factor, cues our responses. If you ever had to sit through a movie that gave short shrift to its music or was saddled with an inappropriate score, I can guarantee you will have found it very hard sledding, even if you weren’t fully conscious of what the problem was. So, at this time, I’d like to pay tribute to the talented men who have done so much to make the great movies even greater and the not-so-great movies bearable. Narrowing my list down to my 25 favorite scores means some of the finest of the breed are not represented. They include John Williams, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin, William Walton, Alfred Newman, Miklos Rozsa, Victor Young, and Alex North.
In alphabetical order, then, they are: “A Place in the Sun,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “Citizen Kane,” “East of Eden,” “Force of Evil,” “Forever Amber,” “Jezebel,” “Of Mice and Men,” “On the Waterfront,” “Our Town,” “Raintree County,” “Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “The Big Country,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Man With the Golden Arm,” “The Natural,” “The Third Man,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Untouchables,” “Things to Come,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” and “Witness.” If I added two more for good measure, they would probably be Allan Gray’s haunting “Stairway to Heaven” and Richard Addinsell’s “Suicide Squadron,” which gave the world “The Warsaw Concerto.”
Sixteen composers turned out those 25 scores. Franz Waxman, Leonard Rosenman, Jerome Moross, Bernard Herrmann, John Green, Hugo Friedhofer, Randy Newman, Maurice Jarre, Arthur Bliss and Anton Karas, and Leonard Bernstein, all scored one. Aaron Copland, Ennio Morricone, and Max Steiner each scored two. David Raksin scored three, and, remarkably, Elmer Bernstein scored five! When it is really first rate, a dramatic score can evoke a specific moment in a movie in much the same way that a certain scent can evoke a time, a place or a person. So, the next time you go to the movies, and quickly discover that Ebert, Roeper, and their damn thumbs, have conned you once again, you might try shutting your eyes and listening to the music. You just might discover what you’ve been missing.
Burt Prelutsky
Ellie
December 23, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Burt Prelutsky
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some time ago, in my eternal quest to set the record straight, I suggested that the true hero of the motion picture industry wasn’t Thomas Edison or D.W. Griffith, not Chaplin or Keaton, not Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer, but the anonymous fellow who first came up with the notion of putting salt on popcorn, thus turning packing material into a concession stand bonanza that costs more per-pound than lox and caviar put together.
But there are others who, more often than not, get overlooked while far too much praise is lavished on actors and directors. I refer to the men who compose musical scores for dramatic films. Although there have been great scores composed for mediocre movies, there has very rarely ever been a great movie that didn’t have a great score. An example of the difference a fine score can make was “Brian’s Song,” a TV movie that would have drowned in its own bathos and banalities if Michel Legrand’s music hadn’t saved it from itself.
Understand, I’m not referring to movie musicals filled to the brim with catchy tunes, and I’m not even referring to non-musicals whose scores pretty much consist of minor variations on a nice song written for the movie. Those would include the likes of “Picnic,” “High Noon,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” “Laura,” and of course “Casablanca.” Neither would they include movies that simply utilize a pre-existing classical or semi- classical piece, such as “Brief Encounter,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Story of Three Loves” or “The Horse’s Mouth,” which owed far more to people such as Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, than to those hired to adapt their music for the screen.
Unlike some people, I don’t subscribe to the belief that to be successful, a dramatic score should be so unobtrusive as to be virtually unnoticeable. To me, that makes about as much sense as suggesting that the cinematography or the dialogue or the costumes and scenery, should go unnoticed. It is the music, after all, that heightens the emotions, helps dictate the pace of the movie and, as much as any other single factor, cues our responses. If you ever had to sit through a movie that gave short shrift to its music or was saddled with an inappropriate score, I can guarantee you will have found it very hard sledding, even if you weren’t fully conscious of what the problem was. So, at this time, I’d like to pay tribute to the talented men who have done so much to make the great movies even greater and the not-so-great movies bearable. Narrowing my list down to my 25 favorite scores means some of the finest of the breed are not represented. They include John Williams, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin, William Walton, Alfred Newman, Miklos Rozsa, Victor Young, and Alex North.
In alphabetical order, then, they are: “A Place in the Sun,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “Citizen Kane,” “East of Eden,” “Force of Evil,” “Forever Amber,” “Jezebel,” “Of Mice and Men,” “On the Waterfront,” “Our Town,” “Raintree County,” “Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “The Big Country,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Man With the Golden Arm,” “The Natural,” “The Third Man,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Untouchables,” “Things to Come,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” and “Witness.” If I added two more for good measure, they would probably be Allan Gray’s haunting “Stairway to Heaven” and Richard Addinsell’s “Suicide Squadron,” which gave the world “The Warsaw Concerto.”
Sixteen composers turned out those 25 scores. Franz Waxman, Leonard Rosenman, Jerome Moross, Bernard Herrmann, John Green, Hugo Friedhofer, Randy Newman, Maurice Jarre, Arthur Bliss and Anton Karas, and Leonard Bernstein, all scored one. Aaron Copland, Ennio Morricone, and Max Steiner each scored two. David Raksin scored three, and, remarkably, Elmer Bernstein scored five! When it is really first rate, a dramatic score can evoke a specific moment in a movie in much the same way that a certain scent can evoke a time, a place or a person. So, the next time you go to the movies, and quickly discover that Ebert, Roeper, and their damn thumbs, have conned you once again, you might try shutting your eyes and listening to the music. You just might discover what you’ve been missing.
Burt Prelutsky
Ellie