Music in Film

My thanks to Viv Apple for this nostalgic and evocative piece:

Whenever I hear mention of the film ‘Dr Zhivago’, or even see the title in print, my brain immediately replays Lara’s Theme through my mind as if an automatic switch has been thrown. Such is the power of the film music written by Maurice Jarre, who died on 29th March. Jarre composed for more than 150 films, won three Oscars, two Baftas, four Golden Globes and a Grammy. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in February this year received a lifetime achievement award at the Berlin Film Festival.

Jarre won his first Oscar for his score in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. After that success he was much in demand from directors including Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, Luchino Visconti and John Huston. He always maintained that music should be a central part of any film and not just used to underline a piece of action or a love scene, and thus he, along with other composers in the field, succeeded in making great films glorious.

I was a small child when my friend Judy and I leaned out of her bedroom window one afternoon and sang at the tops of our voices, Somewhere Over the Rainbow - à la Judy Garland. It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything better to do - although, actually, we didn’t. The real reason why we let rip over the rooftops of Streatham was that we’d discovered the joy and the power of film music. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was, and still is, a film full of extraordinary ideas and wonderful images, but would its magic have been powerful enough to capture both adults and children in its spell without the music of Harold Arlen and lyrics of E.Y. Harburg?

That’s the kind of rhetorical question which lasts throughout a lifetime of movie-going. Musicals, by definition built around their music scores, have come a long way since Busby Berkeley’s girls on winding staircases first bored the pants off small boys waiting for their cowboy features in the 1940s. ‘The Glenn Miller Story’(1953), was among the first musicals to bring realism to the genre, separating story from musical numbers whilst still using music in the development of the scenario. The film was about Glenn Miller whose life story was about his music, just as the brilliant 2005 film ‘Walk the Line’ was about Johnny Cash, whose life was about his music.

It might appear more difficult to use music in a ‘straight’ film, but the evidence is to the contrary. A good composer can conjure up excitement, sadness, fear, elation and passion in his music; a great composer can match these emotions with what is happening on the screen so exactly that we cannot see the join. Even ‘serious’ classical composers have been attracted to the art. Shostakovich composed 34 film scores, including ‘Hamlet’ (1964) and ‘King Lear’ (1970).

Vaughan Williams wrote music for about ten films, including ‘49th Parallel’ (1941), ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ (1948) and the 1941 war documentary ‘Coastal Command’ - a ‘stiff-upper-lip’ collection which might seem to belie the love of folk music for which he was better known. Eric Coates was another quintessentially English composer, and his fondness for marches came in handy when he was asked in 1955 to write the score for ‘The Dam Busters’, the story of Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb. His work proved to be uplifting - an inspiration to accompany 617 Squadron on their flight over the Rhur valley.

By contrast, I defy anyone to listen to Rachmaninov’s Second piano concerto without recalling that most famous 1946 screen love story, ‘Brief Encounter’. Its pent-up passion is woven into the music, which truly tugs at the heart and gives permission for the tears to flow. And in 1995, Nigel Westlake broke new ground by arranging Saint-Saens’ Third Symphony to bring tears of joy to kids and animal-loving adults in ‘Babe’ - based on Dick King-Smith’s book, “The Sheep-Pig”, the story of a small pig’s triumph over the limitations of being a pig.

But could all this be a form of manipulation, a distortion of the truth? This is dangerous ground, but I don’t believe there is anything sinister in the enhancement of a story by way of music, which in itself cannot tell a different story. The score for the 1981 film ‘Chariots of Fire’ won an Academy Award for its composer, Vangelis. Later, there were murmurs that the movie was carried to its triumphal success primarily because of its inspirational music, without which the simple story of rivalry between runners Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddle in 1920 would not have aroused much interest. But to argue this would not only be a disservice to the film, but would also be a denial of something more fundamental, to do with connections in the human brain. When that connection is made, our understanding is enhanced.

The marriage of music and film must be one of passion, the partners locked into an emotional bond from which there is no escape. As cinema-goers we feel this to be true, but it may have been proved in practical terms recently, when Bernard Herman’s score for the 1960 Hitchcock film, ‘Psycho’ was put up for sale at the auction house Bonham’s. It was expected to go for about £40,000 - but there were no takers!

Hitchcock was unsure about the movie and wanted to cut it drastically, but Herman knew that with the application of music he could turn it into something special. And he was proved right. Hitch told Herman he wanted NO music for the shower scene, only the sound of water - and he then went away on a short break. When he returned, Herman had sneakily written the music which became perhaps the most famous horror scene theme in film history. But on its own, divorced from that horrific murder, was it just a string of notes? In this particular case, it seems so. And yet other factors, such as the present economic climate or simply the natural fluctuations of the market, may be just as much to blame here.

Would I pay £40,000 for the original score of ‘Dr Zhivago’? No. But then why should I, when I already have it in my head for ever?

by Viv Apple



in memoriam Maurice Jarre, 13th September 1924 – 29 March 2009

The Damned

On the night of 30th June 1934, Nazi troops moved against Ernst Rohm’s paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung) in a putsch that lasted three days and saw over 85 deaths. Hitler’s antagonism against the SA owed to their continued independence; the putsch was also an excuse for striking at his critics, demonstrating the force and deadly efficiency of his own SS troups, and consolidating his power base.

The carefully orchestrated coup was called Operation Hummingbird, but has gone down in history as the Night of the Long Knives.

This nefarious moment in German history provides the 20-minute centrepiece to Luchino Visconti’s ‘The Damned’. Subtitled ‘Götterdämmerung’ (trans. “twilight of the gods”), the Wagnerian reference is apposite. Visconti’s film is operatic to the point of being overwrought, particularly in its increasingly melodramatic last half hour.

The stage upon which this opera of Nazi-ism, power struggles, sexual ambiguities and compromised morality plays out is the Essenbeck Steelworks, owned by a powerful industrial family whose political allegiance is important to Machiavellian SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem). ‘The Damned’ opens with a birthday party for the ageing Baron von Essenbeck who announces his retirement, leading to instantly fractured interrelationships inside and outside of the family as the appointment of the new director of the company hangs in the balance.

The rank outsider* in all of this is Frederick Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde); however, he has two aces up his sleeve: his relationship with the Baron’s widowed daughter, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), and the backing of Aschenbach.

Through Aschenbach’s machinations and Sophie’s borderline erotic manipulation of her sexually confused son Martin (Helmut Berger) – whose predilections range from cross-dressing to paedophilia to mother-fixation – Bruckmann is appointed director of the steelworks. But it’s not long before his obsession with complete control over both firm and family – not to mention his reluctance to take the political hard line that his deal with the devil (or rather his suave earthly representative Aschenbach) requires – leads to his downfall.

Bogarde excels as Bruckmann: a vivid, complex study of ambition, fear, moral cowardice, desperation and, finally, abject defeat. Ingrid Thulin goes a wee bit ‘Lady Macbeth’ towards the end, but by this point Visconti’s shovelling on the theatrics like there’s tomorrow. Helmut Berger, Visconti’s homo-erotic camera clearly favouring him over the rest of the cast, gives a memorable performance if sometimes for the wrong reasons; but there’s no doubt that he gets across Martin’s vicious amorality.

Further down the cast list, Umberto Orsini and Charlotte Rampling deliver compelling turns.

But it’s Helmut Griem who eclipses even Bogarde. “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” to quote ‘Hamlet’. Aschenbach smiles, and smiles, and soothes, and coerces and chills. Martin’s demonic ascension and engineering of Bruckmann and Sophie’s fate is nothing but the movement of Aschenbach pulling the strings. Griem plays him with infinite charm and assured understatement. Amidst the emotional excesses of Visconti’s lurid epic, he’s the calm centre of stillness, composure and complete ruthlessness.



*Readers of Sheridan Morley’s book on Dirk Bogarde’s early career will, I hope, forgive the pun.

PERSONAL FAVES: Death in Venice

Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ had already been adapted, operatically, by Benjamin Britten before Luchino Visconti came to film it in 1971. Both Britten and Visconti were gay, which perhaps accounts for the common misconception that the film is about an old man’s obsessive lust for a boy barely in his teens.

Wrong. The film, like its literary source, is about many things, not least the nature of art and beauty and the thorny question of where, between the two, the humanity of the artist resides. There is nothing perverse or cynical about the film. For all of its melancholy it is, in fact, one of the most beautiful works of film art in the history of the medium.

Mann’s novella was inspired by the author’s encounter with Gustav Mahler during a train journey. Shocked at Mahler’s physical appearance (the haggard Aschenbach at the end of the story, powdered, a line of mascara running down his face, is Mann’s fictive approximation). And it was for the purposes of fiction that the character became Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer of books, not of music.

A director whose forte was his immaculate attention to detail, particularly in the observation of social rituals (the minutiae of Mann’s descriptions are captured in vivid and poetic images), Visconti’s film is a faithful adaptation but for one crucial alteration.

The director’s most decisive aesthetic decision was to allay the character more closely with the man who inspired him. Thus the Aschenbach of the film is a composer - moreover, by dint of the soundtrack, Aschenbach is Mahler. Evocative use is made of his Third and Fifth Symphonies, particularly the latter’s adagietto. (Even Karajan, a non-Mahlerian, was taken by the film enough to record the Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic.)

Visconti also adds a series of flashbacks which concern, variously, Aschenbach’s attitude to his art, the death of his beloved infant daughter (viewed in this light, the effeminate young boy Tadzio [Bjorn Andresen], of an age Aschenbach’s daughter would have been, becomes almost a replacement for the composer’s fatherly devotion), and his debasement in the boudoir of a hooker - this last being the event that instils in him an obsession with cerebral and artistic purity and dignity.

A key flashback sees him in heated debate with Alfred (Mark Burns), a fellow composer:

Aschenbach: The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.

Alfried: No, Gustav. Beauty belongs to the senses, only to the senses.

Aschenbach: You cannot reach the spirit from the senses. It’s only through complete domination of the senses that you can achieve wisdom, truth and purity.

At the risk of oversimplifying a deep, profound and thought-provoking film, ‘Death in Venice’ is about an artist who, suffering from nervous exhaustion, takes a supposedly recuperative sojourn only to be confronted with a vision of purity and beauty, but one that, by definition of his reaction to it, completely invalidates the principles by which he has tried to live.

The last half hour is shattering. Scenes dealing with Aschenbach’s increasing bad health, played out against a plague-ridden Venice stained with disinfectant and ravaged by fires, bookend the final flashback sequence, which demonstrates Aschenbach’s failure as an artist and public vilification.

Throughout, Dirk Bogarde’s performance as Aschenbach has been perfectly nuanced and intricately mannered, suggesting through the minimum of dialogue (he is onscreen the whole time, but entire stretches of the film pass without him uttering a word) the brittleness and emotional void of a man who has kept his humanity tightly under wraps. The last quarter of the film, however, is acting on another level. Bogarde progressively tears away layer after layer of his character, culminating in a moment of heart-breaking acceptance as Aschenbach finally attempts to reach out to someone only for it to be too late. He slumps back into his deckchair; the man and the artist are dead. It is arguably one of the most moving death scenes that any actor has played.

For Bogarde, Aschenbach was more than just a role:

The five months of work on ‘Death in Venice’ had been the hardest I had ever known for stress and mental strain; daily I had struggled with a personality … who had overwhelmed me to such an extent that every single function I performed in my daily life was as he would have done. I was never without his influence at any time, even in sleep. - Dirk Bogarde, ‘An Orderly Man’, chapter 1.