(O 3º ANO A SEGUIR AO) ANO DO TIGRE (CII)

Walk On The Wild Side - real. Edward Dmytryk, 1962 (genérico de Saul Bass, música de Elmer Bernstein)

LAURA

(realização de Otto Preminger; música de David Raksin, 1944)

"The tremendous success of the song "Laura" as an entity apart from the film was something of a phenomenon in 1944 Hollywood and, aside from the contribution of his own lyric gift, Raksin is aware of various intangibles that went into the success of the score to Laura. David Raksin feels that "The story of 'Laura' is like that of everything else which is a prototype of some kind. It's as though a lot of elements that are floating around in the air and ready to be grabbed of by somebody, suddenly coalesced in one gesture, and that gesture at that time happened to be 'Laura.' To say that is a lot more puffed up than even an egocentric guy like myself can live with, but I'm trying to be 'historic' and objective about it. It suddenly happened, and everybody went wild. If I had written 'Laura' last year (1973), in the present pop music climate, it would have been a failure".

The overwhelming success of "Laura" as a song exerted a tremendous influence on film scoring immediately thereafter with varying results, for Raksin as well as for other film composers. Raksin recalls: "In the noble Hollywood tradition, in which imitation is more than the sincerest form of flattery - it's a way of life - those who weren't trying to write 'another Laura’ were demanding that others write it for their pictures. In the middle of all of the excitement and acclaim, on a grander scale than anything that happened to film composers in those dear, innocent days, there was something absurd about it all. It isn't that I wasn't enjoying the long-awaited instant fame (just add blood, and stir), but along with the appreciation from one's peers - which is the best kind - there was a kind of philistine adulation that bothered me a lot. It was fine to be admired, but not so good to be admired for the wrong reasons. People made such a fuss about the 'originality' of that melody! I was thrilled about what was happening, thrilled to have composed a song that had 'reached' so many people, and I too felt that there was something different, or special about the song. But to a musician it did not seem proper when uninformed people talked about a piece that started on a supertonic seventh and made its way partly through a cycle of fifths as though its composer had invented that harmonic procedure".

(...)

The music for the film Laura is basically monothematic, that is, the material for the entire score is drawn, essentially, from one melody. There are small subsidiary themes that Raksin uses throughout the film, but the great majority of the music is derived from the main theme. It should be pointed out that monothematic film scores can be dull and repetitive - for obvious reasons. It is difficult for a composer to draw anywhere from forty to sixty minutes of music from one melody and still keep the score musically viable and interesting.

There are several reasons for the aesthetic success of the monothematic score to Laura. First is the haunting quality of the melody. (...) A second, and perhaps more important, reason is the dramatic purpose for which the theme is used, namely to evoke the quality of the (presumably) murdered girl that drew others to her. In the course of the first five reels, where she is seen only in flashbacks, it is this quality that makes the hard-boiled detective fall in love with her. The theme is not used in the traditional "Love Theme" manner, in scenes between Laura and the detective. Film composer Elmer Bernstein's comment on the evocative aspect of "Laura" is worth repeating here because it expresses very succinctly the effective thematic use of Raksin's score: "The single theme can identify a character, as in David Raksin's eternal 'Laura'. A technique that can be - and nowadays usually is - a boring cliché had its classic expression in Laura. The film portrayed a man falling in love with a ghost: the mystique was supplied by the insistence of the haunting melody. He could not escape it. It was everywhere. It was there when he was in Laura's apartment. It was there when he turned on the record player. It was never absent from his thoughts. We may not remember what Laura was like, but we never forgot that she was the music and in that music she has of course come into our lives to stay. In that instance, the music and its insistence was the most compelling feature of the film".

(...)

When asked how the original tune for Laura carne about, Raksin recalled: "I am not going to recount the entire story, which would bring a blush to readers of 'True Confessions', but what happened was roughly the following: Otto Preminger wanted to use as the theme a beautiful Duke Ellington song called "Sophisticated Lady" (not "Summertime," as is occasionally said). I saw my chance to compose a score of my own in my first major assignment at 20th-Fox vanishing, and I genuinely believed that the tune was wrong for the picture. Preminger defended his choice, saying, 'This is a very sophisticated girl.' When I pretended not to understand how he meant that, he said, 'My dear boy, this girl is a whore!' I replied, 'By whose standards, Mr. Preminger - by whose standards?' He turned to Al Newman and asked, with asperity, 'Where did you get this fellow?' Newman, who was much amused, said, 'Maybe you ought to listen to him, Otto.' Preminger, who - despite his fearsome reputation, was always wonderfully generous to me (after he understood that I was really a composer), said in his brusque way, 'Well, today is Friday; you come in with something on Monday or we use 'Sophisticated Lady!' Well, Monday I arrived with 'Laura'".

(Roy Prendergast in Film Music/A Neglected Art)

(2007)

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM

(realização de Otto Preminger; música de Elmer Bernstein, 1959)

In 1955 composer Elmer Bernstein utilized a jazz idiom for the Otto Preminger film, The Man With The Golden Arm whose Main Title music was to become a popular success away from the film-much like Tiomkin's Main Title song for High Noon. "The score for The Man With The Golden Arm is not a jazz score. It is a score in which jazz elements were incorporated toward the end of creating an atmosphere, I should say a highly specialized atmosphere, specific to this particular film." So wrote composer Elmer Bernstein in his repeated attempts to discourage the idea that the score to The Man With The Golden Ann is a jazz score. One of the primary reasons it is not a jazz score is that the music is not improvised; improvisation is the lifeblood of jazz. What little improvisation does take place in the score is done by the drummer, Shelly Manne. The art of improvisation does not mix too well with the split-second timing requirements of a film score.

Up to this time the jazz idiom had been used most sparingly in films and the question of why Bernstein chose the idiom of jazz for this film is a logical one to pursue. Bernstein, in an article in "Film Music Notes", relates the ideas involved in his decision: "I told Otto Preminger, the producer, my intention after one quick reading of the shooting script. The script bad a Chicago slum street, heroin, hysteria, longing, frustration, despair and finally death. Whatever love one could feel in the script was the little weak emotion left in a soul racked with heroin and guilt, a soul consuming its strength in the struggle for the good life and losing pitifully. There is something very American and contemporary about all the characters and their problems. I wanted an element that could speak readily of hysteria and despair, an element that would localize these emotions to our country, to a large city if possible. Ergo, jazz"

Upon his decision to use elements of jazz in his score, Bernstein proceeded to gather in the talents of two brilliant jazz musicians, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne. Rogers arranged all of the band numbers, and Shelly Manne created his own drum solos where Bernstein had indicated them in the score. Since he had only twenty days in which to write the score he enlisted the talents of the orchestrator Fred Steiner.

Bernstein has made some general comments concerning the content of his score that are worth quoting here. About The Man With The Golden Arm, he says, "This is not a score in which each character has a theme. It is not a score which creates a musical mirror for dialogue. Nor is it a score which psychoanalyzes the characters and serves up inner brain on the half shell. It is basically a simple score which deals with a man and his environment. There are only three themes which are exploited in a compositional manner in the development of the score”.

(o genérico inicial de Saul Bass)

Bernstein's score for this film adds a tremendous amount of atmosphere and drama and there can be little doubt that Bernstein's choice of the jazz idiom was the right one to make the story more absorbing and the rather heavy-handed social commentary a little less obvious. But Bernstein could not have foreseen what would happen as a result of his choice of jazz for this particular film. The instrumental Main Title became a popular hit and Hollywood, true to form, began immediate production of a host of imitative scores using jazz elements.

(Roy Prendergast in Film Music/A Neglected Art)

(2007)