Archives for 2009

“Westerns are timeless. The soundtracks rarely are.” Lileks tweeted that pithy two-liner a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I love Westerns, but most of them have scores that are inoffensive at best, appallingly banal at worst. The exceptions to the rule are as rare as they’re noteworthy. The other night Mrs. T and I watched André De Toth’s Ramrod, a wonderful little 1947 ranch-war film starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake (it wasn’t their first film together, by the way). I confess to not having noticed the music when I first saw Ramrod, but this time around I was startled to discover that it was the work of Adolph Deutsch, a very fine composer who also scored The Maltese Falcon and The Apartment, and I was struck by how much his taut, cliché-free music contributed to the film’s total effect.

The next day I remembered that in 2003 I posted a list of my favorite Westerns, one of which is Ramrod. Here are the others, together with the names of the men who scored them:

• Blood on the Moon (1948), directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Mitchum and Barbara Bel Geddes. The music is by Roy Webb, RKO’s insufficiently appreciated house composer, a specialist in suspense who also scored Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Notorious, and Out of the Past. Alas, I can’t recall the music, which is surprising, since I’m a great fan of Webb’s work.

• Canyon Passage (1946), directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward. The uncredited music is by Frank Skinner, a prolific studio hack, and I don’t remember a note of it. Fortunately, the film also features several songs written and sung by Hoagy Carmichael, including the delightful “Ole Buttermilk Sky.”

• Four Faces West (1948), directed by Alfred E. Green and starring Joel McCrea. I’ve seen it four times and still can’t tell you anything about the score, which was written by Paul Sawtell, another forgotten studio journeyman who churned out functional background music by the yard. (This, by the way, is the only Hollywood Western in which not a single shot is fired.)

• Hondo (1953), directed by John Farrow and starring John Wayne and Geraldine Page. Part of the score is by Hugo Friedhofer, who wrote the masterful music for The Best Years of Our Lives, and the rest is by Lionel Newman, Alfred’s brother, who was better known as a studio conductor. It isn’t hard to tell who wrote what: Friedhofer’s work is original and incisive, Newman’s conventional.

• Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. Dimitri Tiomkin scored this one in his usual Tchaikovsky-goes-West manner. Not my thing, to put it mildly, but at least it doesn’t get in the way.

• Ride Lonesome (1959), directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott and Pernell Roberts. Heinz Roemheld’s score is a repetitious string of clippity-cloppety clichés. It’s a tribute to the film’s dramatic force that the trite music doesn’t sink it. (The only Boetticher-Scott film with good music is Seven Men from Now, which was scored by Henry Vars.)

• Ride the High Country (1962), directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. The music is by George Bassman, who is best known for writing “Let’s Dance,” Benny Goodman’s theme song. It’s a first-rate piece of work built around a spacious main theme that Bassman ingeniously transforms into the powerful ostinato-based set piece used to accompany the climactic gun battle. A classic of Western film music, though not widely recognized as such.

• Rio Bravo (1959), directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Angie Dickinson. Another Dimitri Tiomkin score, dramatically effective but musically undistinguished. (Do any of Hawks’ films have memorable background music? I’m coming up blank.)

• The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. Max Steiner, of all people, scored the greatest of all Western films, and though he was more at home with romantic melodrama, his lush, expansive idiom works unexpectedly well here.

• Winchester ’73 (1950), directed by Anthony Mann. Did this one even have a score? Walter Scharf supposedly wrote it, but he didn’t get screen credit and it hasn’t stayed with me.

Not a very good batting average, in short, and I can’t think of many other Westerns that have noteworthy scores, though Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven, Jerry Fielding’s The Wild Bunch, Bernard Herrmann’s Garden of Evil, and Jerome Moross’s The Big Country are all deserving of enthusiastic mention. For the most part, though, I’d have to say on reflection that Lileks called it: the best Westerns tend as a rule to be far better than their music.

UPDATE: Everybody’s been asking me about Ennio Morricone’s scores for Once Upon a Time in the West and the “spaghetti Westerns” featuring Clint Eastwood. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the inverse of what I was talking about in the above post: Westerns whose music is better than the film it accompanies.

“I am a galley slave to pen and ink.”
Honoré de Balzac, letter to Zulma Carraud, July 2, 1832 (trans. C. Lamb Kenney)

What you’ve heard is true: nothing surprising happened at last night’s Tony Awards. The word that comes to mind is unexceptionable. I think that most critics, myself included, would probably have given the best-play award to Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate over Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, but beyond that I’m not feeling or hearing a lot of dissatisfaction with any of the specific awards. Yes, the Brits walked away with more than their share of prizes, but that’s not news. Broadway long ago ceased to be a center of original creative activity–it now mostly imports shows from elsewhere, including London.

The big news, if you want to call it that, is that the Tonys are now a local story rather than a national one. Scarcely anyone outside New York City watches the telecast. And the ceremony itself is mainly about musicals, which in certain seasons has been understandable, but definitely not this time around. Moreover, the Tonys themselves are about Broadway, which means that the most important new play of the season, Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, and the best straight-play revival to open in New York, David Cromer’s Our Town, both went unmentioned at last night’s ceremony.

So who cares who won and lost? The producers of reasons to be pretty do: they posted a closing notice this morning after failing to win any prizes. Conversely, The Norman Conquests is likely to see an upward spike at the box office. Otherwise, I can’t see that this year’s Tony Awards will have any effect whatsoever on the American theater, whether on Broadway or anywhere else–and that’s just fine with me.

UPDATE: I chatted about the Tony Awards with a PBS reporter by phone from Connecticut this morning. The results have just gone up on the website of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, which has launched a blog called Art Beat that runs Web-only art-related audio and video features.

To listen, go here.

“Imagine life without death. Every day you would want to kill yourself out of despair.”
Jules Renard, journal entry (March 1906)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on the most talked-about New York opening of the summer, the musical version of Coraline, and the last of the shows I saw on my recent cross-country run, Design for Living. Here’s an excerpt.
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The phrase “cult classic” sets my teeth on edge, but “Coraline,” Neil Gaiman’s deliciously scary 2002 children’s book, is well on the way to qualifying. It’s already been turned into a graphic novel and a 3-D animated feature film, and now “Coraline” has become an Off-Broadway musical whose previews generated so much buzz that the show’s limited run has already been extended for two weeks. Whether the musical version has any future beyond its current run is another matter. I think it does–but only if future productions slice away the obscuring coyness that keeps this exceptionally promising show from living up to its full potential….
For the stage version, Stephin Merritt, the brainy singer-songwriter whose band, the Magnetic Fields, has spawned a cult of its own, has written a self-assured score that is easily the best thing about the show. Mr. Merritt’s songs, which are terse, pointed and dramatically effective, are accompanied by an “orchestra” consisting of a pianist (Phyllis Chen) who plays a regular piano, a toy piano, and a keyboard that has been “prepared” à la John Cage. The unearthly sounds emitted by the prepared piano accompany the scenes that take place in the alternate world of Coraline’s Other Mother, an evocative and superbly theatrical touch….
The biggest problem with “Coraline” is that the title role is being played not by a girl but by a 56-year-old woman, Jayne Houdyshell, a talented actress whose performance here is inexplicably, exasperatingly twee. Not only does Ms. Houdyshell’s faux-naïf acting have nothing to do with the coolly matter-of-fact tone of Mr. Gaiman’s book, but her distracting physical presence rips up the roots of plausibility without which Coraline’s fantastic adventures in the shadow world of her Other Mother make no dramatic sense….
Anyone who saw the Roundabout Theatre Company’s ill-conceived 2001 Broadway revival of “Design for Living” and wondered what the fuss was about should catch the next train to Washington, where all is made satisfyingly manifest by the Shakespeare Theatre Company. “Design for Living” isn’t Noël Coward’s best play, but it’s one of the most original and challenging things he ever wrote, and Michael Kahn, the company’s artistic director, has underlined the play’s essential seriousness without undermining its fizzy humor….
What I like most about Mr. Kahn’s production is that his actors don’t punch the jokes too hard: They mostly just let them happen. Gretchen Egolf, who plays Gilda, the object of the slightly scrambled affections of Leo (Robert Sella) and Otto (Tom Story), is a gawky, sparkling jolie laide who dominates every scene in which she appears….
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Read the whole thing here.

…there’s lots of new stuff in the right-hand column. Take a peek.