Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a martial arts film for those who hate martial arts films.

The movie tells the tale of two venerable warriors (Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh) whose fates are tied to a mysterious young woman (Zhang Ziyi). Together the three become involved in the theft of a legendary sword, the Green Destiny, and the search for an infamous thief and killer known as Jade Fox (Pei-pei Chang).

Ang Lee’s fluid direction combined the rhythms and movement of martial arts with an almost ballet-like grace. The film bridged the gap between popular and art house fare and went on to become the highest-grossing foreign film ever.

Classical composer Tan Dun was brought onto the project by Lee four years earlier, long before shooting ever began. The two conceptualized the musical approach together.

“We had to find a bridge,” Dun said, “between low and high art, between East and West, and musically between classical orchestra sonorities and world music, Chinese music and desert music sounds.” Mixing tender Asian instruments (such as the single-string erhu) over and within a traditional orchestral palette, Dun was able to convey the exoticism of the story as well the emotional conflict between the two pairs of lovers.

It also didn’t hurt to have legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma onboard to give the haunting melodies the Western voice they needed. Because of Ma’s familiarity with Chinese performance techniques, he says he was able to bend certain notes “so it doesn’t just sound like a classical or romantic cello performance but could refer to a wider family of instruments.” Dun said Ma brought a “soulfulness” to the score.

Lee staged the fight sequences in the film as “musical numbers,” like in old film musicals, giving Dun the opportunity to create specific musical set pieces. These were usually scored with a variety of drums and other percussive elements to heighten the dramatic action onscreen.

A prime example is the first fight scene which is scored, like in the Peking Opera in which Dun began his career, using only traditional stick percussion with the percussion telling the “whole landscape, the whole story of something happening.” For the character of Jade Fox, Dun used an instrument called the bawu, which involves sticking a wand of metal reeds into a bamboo. When blowing into it, the sound is a cross between and the bamboo and the clarinet. (Or, as Dun says, “It’s a feeling really very much like opium.”) For the fight scene among the bamboo trees, sliding string techniques mixed with western orchestral sounds “so that it is something between green and air, strangeness and passion.”

The score was roundly praised by critics. Variety called it “a consistently superior and resourceful score” and The New York Times commented on the “gorgeous–sometimes almost weeping” cello solos.

When a prestigious classical composer writes music for a critically-acclaimed international hit, it’s not difficult to see how the score nabs a nomination. And the snob factor helped Dun’s lush, romantic score beat out the more obvious choice of Hans Zimmer’s raucous Gladiator.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Tan Dun’s music is pretty damn good to boot.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

“Welcome to Sherwood, my lady!”

The Adventures of Robin Hood is the quintessential Errol Flynn swashbuckling film. Pitch-perfect casting begins with Flynn as the lord who robs from the rich and gives to the poor, Olivia de Havilland as the lovely Maid Marian, and Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone as the heavies. Stunning Technicolor cinematography and snappy direction and editing adds up to one of the grandest entertainments in film history.

A critic at the time wrote that Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score makes “the leaves of Sherwood Forest even greener…virtually bringing Robin and his Merry Men to life!” From the opening march to Robin’s syncopated trumpet call and the beautiful love theme for Robin and Marian, Robin Hood contains what many believe to be the archetypal Korngold score.

Robin Hood relies heavily on action and Korngold’s cues for these sequences are some of the best ever heard in film music. Robin’s escape from the castle and the final duel between Robin and Sir Guy (Rathbone) are particularly effective. Even when the action slows down a bit, as in the feast in the forest, Korngold gives us a grand Viennese waltz. The brass are heard to great effect during the fanfare and processional march for the golden arrow. Thankfully the studio mixing crew favored the music more than the sound effects, allowing Korngold’s score to be heard to its best advantage.

Today we can’t imagine the film without Korngold’s marvelous music. But it almost didn’t happen.

Korngold, at home in Vienna, wrote to producer Hal B. Wallis, “Robin Hood is no picture for me. I have no relation to it and therefore cannot produce any music for it. I am a musician of the heart, of passions and psychology; I am not a musical illustrator for a 90-percent action picture. Being a conscientious person, I cannot take the responsibility for a job which, as I already know, would leave me artistically completely dissatisfied.”

While waiting for his opera, Katrine, to premiere in March, Korngold received word that neither star Richard Tauber or conductor Bruno Walter was available. Korngold wanted to go ahead without them but his manager suggested he wait till October. Leo Forbstein, head of the Warner Bros. music department, made a personal appeal to Korngold, to which his manager said, “It’s an omen. Go to Hollywood and come back in October.” Korngold accepted, as his son George remembers, “on the condition that he would take the assignment on a weekly basis, and that he would be allowed to resign should he find himself unable to continue on artistic grounds.”

As The New York Times reported in May, Korngold’s “two houses have been confiscated by the Nazis, the ‘Katrine’ is waiting to be born in a more friendly hospice. Korngold is grateful to ‘Robin Hood.'” “If I hadn’t accepted that omen and come over to Hollywood,” Korngold said, “I would probably be dead now.” According to the Times, “he hummed all the way over on the boat, and by the time he got to Hollywood the whole score was pretty much in his head.”

George also remembers, “My father was on the verge of stopping several times. I shall never forget his anguished protestations of ‘I just can’t do it,’ which I overheard in the middle of the night through my bedroom wall. He was suffering, and at the same time producing one of his finest scores…” The score took seven weeks of work, 257 pages of sketches, 2,788 bars and forty-seven numbers. The score is approximately the length of Strauss’ opera, Salome (i.e. ninety minutes).

Thankfully because of the rule changes in 1938, Korngold himself was finally able to receive an actual Oscar, as opposed to the music department studio head. Alan Burt states unequivocally, “Korngold’s score has proven to be the quintessential romantic epic score, timeless and universally affecting.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Anthony Adverse (1936)

Based on Hervey Allen’s bestselling epic novel of historical romance in the Napoleonic era, Fredric March stars as the hero, Anthony Adverse. The film follows Adverse from orphan to his adult adventures that span the globe from Spain to Italy, Cuba to Africa, including his love for the beautiful Angela (Olivia de Havilland). The larger-than-life situations and numerous locales were ripe for the Warner Bros. treatment, and its celebrated musical star, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, was the perfect choice to score the film.

Korngold’s approach to film scoring was, in his words, “operatic,” sans the arias. The music would sing for the characters that could not. Korngold used a technique (later copied by many composers) in which the music is pitched just underneath the voices of the actors and surges into the pauses in the dialogue. He also used the Wagnerian leitmotif approach whereby characters and situations were assigned themes (forty-three of them!) that recur throughout the score. Anthony Adverse was the longest Warner Bros. film to date (two hours and twenty-one minutes) and elicited the longest score yet written in films.

Though Variety described the music as “pleasant, rather than exciting,” from the opening bars the music is, like our hero, brash and bold. Then we ‘re off and running as the orchestra furiously gallops along with the out-of-control horses and carriage in the opening scene. The first thirty minutes of the film, which are continuously scored, are about as close to a symphonic tone poem as you will find in film music. Like it or not (and there are some who don’t), Korngold was one of a handful of composers whose grandiose music set the stage for the next decade in film music. And, as was stipulated in his contract, Korngold was able to recycle themes from Anthony Adverse in his Violin Concerto (which also included melodies from Another Dawn, Juarez, and The Prince and the Pauper).

Anthony Adverse was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. At the end of the night, it won four, including the first ever Oscar for Supporting Actress (Gale Sondergaard), cinematography, Film Editing and Korngold’s score. However, as was still the practice in 1936, the head of the music department (in this case, Leo Forbstein) won the Oscar instead of the composer. When Forbstein tried to give the statue to Korngold, he politely refused it. As biographer Brendan Carroll stated in an interview with Film Score Monthly: “For many, many years after that, Korngold still refused to accept the Oscar….It stayed in Leo Forbstein’s office. It finally went into Korngold’s house after Forbstein died. By then Korngold had gotten over it. He didn’t bear a grudge but he just didn’t really want the thing. He didn’t feel it was his.”

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

In a film filled with scarcely a wrong move, The Best Years of Our Lives tells the story of three soldiers (Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell) returning to the homefront after World War II and their difficulties in assimilating back into civilian life.

Producer Sam Goldwyn set the wheels in motion after reading an article in Time magazine describing the reaction of a trainload of Marines home on furlough. He called in author MacKinlay Kantor and asked for a screen treatment of 50-60 pages of prose. Kantor turned in 434 pages of blank verse (later published under the title Glory For Me). Goldwyn then worked with director William Wyler and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert E. Sherwood to fashion a real screenplay out of Kantor’s overlong tome.

One of the biggest changes from Kantor’s original treatment was the part of Homer. Harold Russell was a real WWII double amputee veteran who had never acted in a film before, and Wyler had Sherwood change the character (a shell-shocked, suicidal spastic in Kantor’s version) to fit Russell’s disabilities. Russell’s portrayal was so inspiring that not only did he win the Oscar for Supporting Actor, but he also received a Special Award for “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.”

Another outstanding element is Hugo Friedhofer’s classic Americana score. Considered by many to be one of the finest film scores ever written, Friedhofer’s music is one of the few scores that has been dissected and discussed by musicologists, a right usually reserved only for classical composers.

On a recommendation from Alfred Newman, Friedhofer was hired after Aaron Copland turned it down. Oddly enough, the score has often been compared to the works of Copland. Friedhofer responded, “Actually the [Copland] influence was largely in paring, in my weeding ou the run-of-the-mine Hollywood schmaltz, and trying to do a very simple, straightforward, almost folklike score. I don’t think I actually looked over Aaron’s should, but there was a certain use, perhaps a certain harmonic similarity at times.”

“At bottom it’s practically monothematic and repetitious as all get-out,” Friedhofer continued, “something one isn’t particularly aware of when listenint to it in the film, since the silent strethes are spaced out so that the thematic repeitions and their variants take the curse off the monotheism–practically nothing but a bunch of triads with ‘wrong note’ bass lines.”

As did many film composers before and after him, Friedhofer used the Wagnerian leitmotif approach. With three separate storylines overlapping, it was Friedhofer’s job to musically make them distinct and yet connected. He accomplished this by going against the obvious choice and NOT giving separate themes to the three soldiers. Instead, the main title (also known as the “Best Year’s” theme) provides a C-major triad motif that Friedhofer was able to fragment and connect the three characters.

Other themes were given to the hometown (“Boone City”); Homer’s girlfriend, Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell); a theme for Homer and Wilma’s families; the bluesy theme for the burgeoning, tentative relationship between Fred (Andrews) and Peggy (Teresa Wright); and one for Peggy herself.

Outstanding musical cues abound in the film. One of the most poignant occurs when Homer tests Wilma’s love by demonstrating the many tasks needed for him to get ready for bed and how helpless he is after a certain point. The strings, without a trace of sentimentality, signal Wilma’s courage and acceptance of Homer’s disability. My favorite cue happens early in the film as the soldiers return to their hometown. In this cue, Friedhofer condenses into six minutes every joyous, yet anticipatory, feeling about homecoming.

One of the most famous cues, and the most dissonant, accompanies Fred’s visit to the bomber graveyard filled with planes waiting to be turned into scrap. As he hoists himself into the nose of the plane, the music turns more martial and discordant as he relives the horrors of the war. Friedhofer discusses the scene as

pure musical sound with just the barest smidgen of actual physical motor noise. But the real wallop was in the sound of the orchestra itself. Strangely enough, it was a trick that I had done years before, not as elaborately as this, but a plane taking off, in which I fooled around with the simulation of motor noise. But at that time, nobody paid any attention to it, but here it was so dramatically valid that I think that, rather than anything else in the score, was responsible for the Oscar. Because this was something that the completely tone-deaf members of the Academy could grab onto. The subtleties were, I think, probably wasted on all except the music branch, but who cares? And that is why I’ve said on several occasion that I attach a great deal more importance to an Academy nomination than I do or did to the award itself, because this was something that was bestowed onyou by a jury of your peers.

Even though Wyler encouraged Friedhofer to avoid the typical Hollywood sound and to write something “native and American,” the director later complained that the score should have sounded like Alfred Newman’s music to Wuthering Heights (1939). Goldwyn didn’t like it much either, though after Friedhofer won the Academy Award, Goldwyn’s attitude understandably improved.

The year was particularly strong for original scores and there’s not a dud in the nominated bunch. But even against such stiff competition as Bernard Herrmann’s Anna and the King of Siam, Franz Waxman’s brilliant adaptations for Humoresque, Miklos Rozsa’s classic theme for The Killers, and William Walton’s masterpiece, Henry V, Friedhofer’s nostalgic, yet unsentimental, score stands above the others by perfectly capturing the myriad of emotions in post-war America.

All About Eve (1950)

The ultimate film about the theatre, All About Eve racked up the most nominations ever (14!) at the 1950 Academy Awards. This record stood for forty-seven years until Titanic tied that record in 1997.

Superbly directed and written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the film contains some of the smartest dialogue ever to grace the screen. People in real life may not talk this way, but for two hours and fifteen minutes thankfully they do.

Bette Davis (in the performance of her career) stars as Margo Channing, legendary Broadway star, and Anne Baxter as the conniving ingenue, Eve Harrington. Anchored by these two powerhouse performances, the rest of the cast is no-less stellar, including George Sanders’ Oscar-winning support as an acid-tongued critic, Celeste Holm as Margo’s best friend, and Thelma Ritter as Margo’s outspoken dresser, Birdie.

The satirical script drips with verbal venom and contains one classic line after another. At one crucial moment in the film, the barbs take a breather and Margo states, “I detest cheap sentiment.” So did Alfred Newman, whose score is anything but sentimental. But when it is, Newman mockingly ladles on the sentiment.

The main titles functions as an overture, beginning with a brass fanfare followed by a martial string meloldy, signaling the theatricality and ambition of the drama about to unfold. Each of the three lead female characters—Margo, Eve, and Karen (Holm)—are given their own themes, all beginning with an octave leap in the melodies that tie their characters and their fates together.

Mankiewicz staged the film as a play (meant as a compliment for a change). Newman steered clear of the witty exchanges, scoring the film sparingly (it occupies only about a third of the running time), and letting the orchestra soar during the transitions, pauses, and wordless interludes.

However, Newman’s music accompanies one memorable monologue with the perfect dose of “cheap sentiment.” When Eve recounts her sad past to her “idol,” Margo, a solo violin and the strings underscore the vapidity of her tale and the music tells us subtly that Eve may be more than just a gushing fan.

In the final scene, a new ingenue (Barbara Bates) stands in front of a wardrobe mirror wearing Eve’s coat and holding Eve’s newly won acting trophy as Eve’s theme and the opening fanfare crash (and clash) side by side. Newman’s music and Milton Krasner’s cinematography with the three-way mirror point out the irony of the tale, continuing the vicious circle of lies told by Eve at the beginning of the film, now apparent in Eve’s downfall.

Alfred Newman provided the perfect musical curtain to showcase this marvelous film. As Page Cook wrote in Films In Review, “Rarely has a film score been so succinct, or so concomitantly enriching as Newman’s…Or so cinematic.”

Guilty

The year was 1980.  I had just graduated high school and the soundtrack of my life consisted of John Williams’ stellar sequel for The Empire Strikes Back, the song-driven soap opera of Fame, and the unlikely successful pairing of Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb for the classic Guilty album.  While Streisand’s voice has continued to gain in body and depth, her later albums lack spontaneity and each successive release features this legendary singer further and further entombed in her own secluded world, rather than enshrined as she should be. 

Not so with Guilty.  What could have easily have turned into the ultimate in pop Muzak instead  became a bona fide classic and arguably qualifies as Streisand’s finest pop album.  Flawlessly written and produced by Gibb, the album has a sound unlike any other Streisand effort.  To this day, even though I can still sing many of the lyrics and certain inner musical lines have lodged themselves in my brain, this unique collaboration sounds just as fresh today as it did 28 years ago.  And the album’s closing track, “Make It Like a Memory,” remains one of Streisand’s lesser-known, yet greatest, tracks (and that’s not even counting the magnificent final two minutes of instrumental playoff!).

On the album’s 25th anniversary in 2005, a remastered version was released as well as the album’s followup, Guilty Pleasures.  Though the later albums has its moments, it could not succeed in recapturing the magic of the earlier album.  One thing is for sure, Guilty is no longer a guilty pleasure.  It’s simply a great album.