Listening to Stanley Kubrick
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Example 1.16. The Faithful Hussar (tune only).
Traditionally, there are many verses to the song, but the character sings only the following three (and then repeats the first two):41
Es war einmal ein treuer Husar,
Der liebt’ sein Mädchen ein ganzes Jahr,
Ein ganzes Jahr und noch viel mehr,
Die Liebe nahm kein Ende mehr.
There once was a faithful Hussar
He loved his girl for a whole year,
For a whole year and much more,
His love had no end.
Und als man ihm die botschaft bracht
Dass sein herzliebchen am sterben lag
Da liess er all sein hab und gut
Und eilte seinem herzliebchen zu
And when he heard the message
That his heart’s love was dying,
He left all of his belongings
And hurried to his darling.
Ach bitte Mutter bring’ ein Licht,
Mein Liebchen stirbt, ich seh’ es nicht,
Das war fürwahr ein treuer Husar,
Der liebt’ sein Mädchen ein ganzes Jahr.
Oh please, Mother, bring a light
My love dies, I see it not
This was indeed a faithful Hussar
Who loved his girl for a whole year.
The young woman sings (she is billed as Susanne Christian, but she was Christiane Harlan, who was to become Kubrick’s third wife), and at first the men are shouting and catcalling and it is difficult to hear her. As she continues, however, the men become quiet and begin to listen. They do not know the words to the song, but they seem to know the tune, and soon they are singing along with her. Tears fall down the faces of some of the men who are watching, matching the tears of the woman.
Outside the café, Dax listens to them, his face softening for the first time in the film. It is as if music, particularly melody, is the humanity that the men have forgotten out on the battlefield. As they share the music, singing the melody in unison, they momentarily cease to be soldiers, and the line between French and German is blurred. Kubrick and Fried have made these final moments of the narrative especially powerful because they have withheld melody for the majority of the film. Besides La Marseillaise at the opening credits and the diegetic waltz of General Broulard’s party, the only musical elements we have heard are drum rolls and the percussive cues of the night patrol scene. We the viewers—and these characters—have been starved for melody and starved for humanity. Kubrick gives us both in this final moment, and it is all the more sweet because we have been deprived of them. An orchestrated version of “The Faithful Hussar” accompanies the credits. In his book about the music of Kubrick’s films, Gerrit Bodde says this about the music in Paths of Glory:
We can assume that Kubrick wanted to create this interpretation of the film: France’s power and glory (as shown in the main title theme) has a high price, which is paid by the soldiers. This is shown through the cinematic action, in the disconsolate mood of the soldiers’ celebration, and through the end titles).42
The choice of a mostly percussion score was made by both Kubrick and Fried, who said: “Now Stanley had a kind of harsh, bleak vision of life, and taking the tonality out of the music, having an all-percussion score would be just a natural.” After viewing the film in recent years, Fried almost seemed to regret the decision from a humanitarian point of view: “By taking away the tonality of the music, it was as if I had abandoned them, and I took away their humanity. I stranded them out there with no underscoring except bleak percussion. And I felt terrible.”43
After this, Kubrick didn’t jump directly into using preexistent music; he still had Spartacus and Lolita ahead of him, but perhaps he was beginning to see the possibilities in using other sources for his scores. Kubrick and Fried would never work together again, but remained friends. It’s unlikely that Fried would have worked with Kubrick again, even if he had been asked. In recent years, Fried described the difficulty of his collaboration with the director:
He liked the first score, it was very effective and it did the job. Second score he began to get more ideas about music and then he became more demanding about certain things, and by the third score, we were already arguing. The fourth and fifth score, there were knockdown battles. But by that time, he had developed a taste and a style and he was a hard guy to argue with. . . . At the beginning, it was easy, I went my own way, but by . . . Paths of Glory, I had to justify every note.44
Furthermore, Kubrick and Fried were philosophically opposed on the issue of preexistent music in film. Fried believed that classical music took the viewer out of the film experience, especially if the music was well known. In addition to that, he has said: “[Preexistent music] doesn’t support the picture because it wasn’t written for the picture.”45 Kubrick, on the other hand, believed that preexistent music was a viable source for scores, especially because he saw the quality of that music overshadowing that of newly written scores:
However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart, or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? . . . With a little more care and thought these temporary tracks can become the final score.46
Gerald Fried went on to a very successful career writing scores for both television and films. His philosophy of scoring, and his ability to work quickly, made him ideally suited for the job. Fried describes the highlights of his career as the score for the iconic television mini-series Roots (Quincy Jones began the score, writing a portion of it before Fried was brought in to complete the work), his work on the Kubrick films, and his work for the original Star Trek television show. One of his cues for that particular program, fight music for a battle in which Kirk and Spock must fight to the death (in an episode called “Amok Time”),47 has entered popular culture as definitive dramatic (perhaps melodramatic) fight music.48 In 2012, Fried was still composing, working on a musical (for which he wrote the script, music, and book), and living in New Mexico.
Notes
1. “Kids at a Ball-Game,” Look, October 16, 1945; “Dixieland Jazz Is ‘Hot’ Again,” Look, June 6, 1950; “Montgomery Clift . . . Glamour Boy in Baggy Pants,” Look, July 19, 1949. A collection of these clippings is housed at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London.
2. Mildred Stagg, “Quiz Kid,” The Camera, December 6, 1949, 152.
3. Raymond Fielding, The March of Time: 1935–1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 63.
4. Kubrick had also done another day-in-the-life piece in Look on boxer Rocky Graziano in its February 14, 1950, issue.
5. United States Coast Guard website, http://www.uscg.mil/history/img/Sailors_All_Poster.jpg.
6. “This Is America: They Fly with the Fleet,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346020/.
7. Quoted in John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997), 37.
8. Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 68.
9. LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 64.
10. LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 67.
11. Email to the author, 5 April 2012.
12. Fleischer was editor in chief of Ring Magazine from 1929 to 1972.
13. Fried himself was a woodwind player (oboe), and much of his film music relies on the woodwinds to carry melody.
14. Kubrick apparently gave Cartier the dog, hoping to add a “human interest” element. LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 61.
15. Kubrick later discussed having to do reshoots because Cartier knocked Bobby James out too quickly.
16. “The Seafarers,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045130/synopsis.
17. From the Associated Press: “A 22-Year-Old Producer Makes Real Films for Fun and Profit,” New York Journal-American, December 27, 1950.
18. Interview with Joseph Gelmis, “The Fil
m Director as Superstar,” The Kubrick Site, http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html.
19. LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 80–81.
20. Review of Fear and Desire, New York Post, March 9, 1953.
21. Frank Quinn, New York Mirror, no date, clipping.
22. Letter from Mark van Doren to Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick Archive, University of the Arts London.
23. John McCarten, Review of Fear and Desire, New Yorker, April 11, 1953, 128, http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1953-04-11#folio=128.
24. The character’s name is later revealed to be MacClellan, perhaps a reference to Civil War general George McClellan, who was a brilliant man but a poor judge of his abilities on the battlefield. He was removed from his command by Lincoln because he twice missed the opportunity to not only end the Civil War but win it.
25. The magician Sydney refers to is Prospero, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this play, Prospero and his daughter Miranda are exiled on a remote island. Prospero uses his magic to create a storm that will bring his brother Antonio, who has usurped the throne from Prospero, to the island, along with Antonio’s allies.
26. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 1, sc. 2.
27. In pieces like Richard Strauss’s tone poem Death and Transfiguration, the gong symbolizes the moment of death. In his Treatise on Instrumentation, Hector Berlioz states, “The gong or tamtam is used only in compositions of a mournful character or in dramatic scenes of the utmost horror.” Hector Berlioz and Richard Strauss, Treatise on Instrumentation, trans. Theodore Front (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 395.
28. Irene Thirer, “Screen View,” New York Post, March 27, 1953, 58.
29. Samuel L. Singer, “24-Year-Old Is ‘Factotum’ of New Film,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday Morning, July 26, 1953, 16.
30. Interview with Joseph Gelmis, “The Film Director as Superstar,” The Kubrick Site, http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html.
31. Bernd Schultheis, “Expanse of Possibilities: Stanley Kubrick’s Soundtracks in Notes,” Stanley Kubrick Catalogue, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 2007), 267.
32. Copyright 1954, King’s Crown Music.
33. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill, “Gerald Fried,” in Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Checkmark Books, 2002), 125.
34. Iris was played by Ruth Sobotka, Kubrick’s wife at the time. She was a professional dancer.
35. Quoted in Phillips and Hill, Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick, 126.
36. Rainer Crone, Stanley Kubrick Drama and Shadows: Photographs 1945–1950 (London: Phaidon, 2005), 132.
37. Schultheis, “Expanse of Possibilities,” 267.
38. “Interview with Gerald Fried,” Archive of American Television, http://emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/gerald-fried.
39. Schultheis, “Expanse of Possibilities,” 267.
40. In some versions of the film, La Marseillaise was replaced by a percussion track. Because it was viewed as being a negative portrayal of the French military, the film stirred up controversy in France and some of its allied countries.
41. Translation mine.
42. Gerrit Bodde, Die Musik in den Filmen von Stanley Kubrick (Osnabrück: Der Andere Verlag, 2002), 37. Translation mine.
43. “Interview with Gerald Fried,” Archive of American Television.
44. “Interview with Gerald Fried,” Archive of American Television.
45. Quoted in Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 37.
46. Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), 177.
47. In this episode of Star Trek, which is the first episode of season two, Spock must return to his home planet of Vulcan to marry his berothed, T’Pring. In love with another man, she chooses kal-if-fee, a fight to the death between Spock and—instead of her lover—Captain Kirk. Fried scored the whole episode, but his battle music is the most famous portion.
48. The music has been in many instances but is notable in the film The Cable Guy (1996) and the television show Futurama. In both cases, the music was associated with battles.
Chapter Two
Love Themes, Leitmotifs, and Pop Music
Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, and Full Metal Jacket
The four films covered in this chapter encompass a number of different scoring techniques. The score for Spartacus (1960) was written by a single composer in response to the narrative of the film and the requests of the director. Lolita (1962) combines newly written underscore with orchestral arrangements of a preexistent tune as the musical centerpiece. Dr. Strangelove (1964) features two preexistent popular tunes used in ironic contexts and varied orchestrations of a military song. Full Metal Jacket (1987)—made more than two decades later than Dr. Strangelove—uses a similar template of minimal new underscore and the ironic use of preexistent tunes. In the intervening years between Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick changed the way he scored his films, using a new paradigm of preexistent and contemporary art music. 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and indeed his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, were part of this new paradigm. Each of these films will be discussed at length in the following chapters.
After the artistic, if not financial, triumph of Paths of Glory, Kubrick and his producing partner, James Harris, were looking for a new project. Marlon Brando was interested in working with Kubrick on a western loosely based on the life of Billy the Kid. It was while Kubrick worked on Brando’s screenplay for the western that Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita was published in the U.S. Although Kubrick and Harris were both excited about adapting the novel for the screen, Kubrick was committed to the Billy the Kid project, so while he worked on that, Harris attempted to buy the rights to Lolita. Kubrick and Brando were both strong creative personalities, and their collaboration was difficult. There are conflicting reports of exactly how Kubrick left the film, later called One-Eyed Jacks, but in the end, Kubrick moved on and Brando directed the film himself.
Meanwhile, Kirk Douglas was preparing to bring Spartacus to the screen. Douglas, both producer and star, encountered plenty of problems on the way, everything from a similar competing project (The Gladiators) to an unusable screenplay to a difficult hunt for a leading lady. The studio funding the film, Universal, wanted Anthony Mann to direct even though Douglas had misgivings. Mann was known for his westerns, and it was his talent for filming outside that Universal felt would serve him well on Spartacus. Mann directed the opening section, in which Romans choose slaves for their gladiator schools, but in the sections that followed, Kirk Douglas found that he wasn’t satisfied with Mann’s work. Douglas fired Mann and suggested Kubrick (with whom he had recently made Paths of Glory) for the job. One weekend after Mann’s last day, Kubrick began directing Spartacus. He reportedly filmed a scene on Monday and then spent the rest of the week rehearsing with the actors.1
Spartacus
Some scholars have omitted Spartacus from discourse of Kubrick’s work since it was not a project he developed himself. James Naremore has said of the film that it “has very few moments when one can sense [Kubrick’s] directorial personality.”2 Kubrick distanced himself from the film as well, painting himself as someone at odds with the material. In one of his lengthy interviews with Michel Ciment, Kubrick said of Spartacus, “I was up against a pretty dumb script which was rarely faithful to what is known about Spartacus.”3 Kubrick fought for changes in the script, although he wasn’t satisfied with reactions to his input. In a 1973 interview, Kubrick said: “When Kirk offered me the job of directing Spartacus, I thought that I might be able to make something of it if the script could be changed. But my experience proved that if it is not explicitly stated in the contract that your decisions will be respected, there’s a very good chance that they won’t be.”4
One aspect of the filmmaking in which Kubrick had more of a say was the
music. Kirk Douglas had engaged Alex North to write the score in pre-production, and North worked on it over the course of filming, which was an especially long time. Usually, film composers are given perhaps three months to complete a score, but according to North biographer Sanya Henderson, Douglas allowed North more than a year to complete the music. This not only allowed North to research ancient Roman music, but also gave him the opportunity to work out the themes in great detail and collaborate with Kubrick. 5
When production on Spartacus began, North was an up-and-coming composer. Previous to his work on Spartacus, North had written some uncredited stock music, music for television, like the theme for the Playhouse 90 anthology television series, and some film scores. Among them were the score to Death of a Salesman (1951) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), both for director Elia Kazan.6 He also wrote the scores for the westerns The Wonderful Country (1959), starring Robert Mitchum, and The King and Four Queens (1956) starring Clark Gable.7 After Spartacus, North began to write for more high-profile pictures, including another epic, Cleopatra (1963), The Misfits (1961) with Marilyn Monroe, and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965).
Because the production time was so long, Kubrick interacted with North over the course of filming. Alex North’s biographer describes their connection as “a deep, mutual understanding.”8 To aid Kubrick during production, North reportedly arranged a temporary track of his music using two pianos and two percussion instruments.9 This allowed Kubrick to get a sense of the musical score as it was being written. In addition, Kubrick encouraged North to listen to Prokofiev’s score to Alexander Nevsky, and within that recommendation, there was the unspoken understanding that brass passages would accompany ceremony and violence, while strings would underscore love scenes.10