I'm looking at the 1950s because in that decade filmmakers began to explore the connection between music and acting in a way that held considerably more nuance than in much previous filmmaking. This was in part due to the influence of contemporary stage acting techniques, referred to with the blanket term “method acting,” on movie acting: the intensification of emotion displayed by the actor could be further heightened by using music to mirror the emotions being portrayed. Experiments in the scoring of acting were frequently made in Hollywood in the 1950s, which was also a decade of broader musical experimentation in film scoring. Having established a film scoring style in the previous decades, Hollywood composers and audiences were seeking ways to move beyond the post-Romantic symphonic score by incorporating sonorities from popular music and the avant-garde, often in the same film. Established composers like Franz Waxman and emerging ones like Leonard Rosenman used these influences to create a newly expressionistic language of film scoring, akin to the expressionistic acting styles of James Dean and Marlon Brando and expressing the extreme emotions of their characters.
The chapter breakdown gives a clearer view of what is actually going to be in this book. This is all work-in-progress of course, so the specific case studies and the ordering of the chapters might well change. The framework is going to stick, though, because there are simply too many films and actors to explore. If I start rethinking too much I'll never finish. Even with the limited topics chosen there is a corpus of 146 films that I can bring in. That's rather a lot.
Chapter One: Hitchcock’s Time-Vectors of Acting and Music
This chapter introduces the book’s first major concept, that time’s forward axis in films is created by music and performance, using the films of Alfred Hitchcock as case studies. Hitchcock’s films often feature sequences of travel, his films of the later 1950s especially foregrounding the automobile culture of mid-century America. His characters drive around with various purposes as they attempt to come to realisations about themselves and the world around them, creating differing temporal vectors to achieve (or not achieve) their goals. Bernard Herrmann’s modular scores for the driving sequences in Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and North By Northwest (1959) are partly responsible for these vectors, but it is also the acting of James Stewart, Janet Leigh, and Cary Grant (in character as Scottie Ferguson, Marion Crane, and Roger Thornhill) that, when experienced in tandem with the music, presents these vectors of time. Here we see the triangulation of character, acting, and music operating in pure form. Little else exists in the driving scenes beside these three points. In Psycho, without our knowledge of Marion’s feelings about stealing the money, Janet Leigh’s performance of Marion’s emotions, and Bernard Herrmann’s music, this would be merely a dull series of scenes of a car driving down a highway. The camera mostly focuses on Leigh in the driver’s seat, and we hear Marion’s inner thoughts, the sound of the rain, and Herrmann’s music. In Vertigo, we have only James Stewart and the music, without the benefit of Scottie’s internal monologue. The music provides the affect, allowing us to stitch together Scottie’s thought process when we watch Stewart’s facial expressions and body language. The suspenseful driving scene in North By Northwest, when Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is forced to get drunk and is put in a car with the intent of staging a fatal drunk-driving accident, offers a different case of temporal vector: unlike the other two scenes, this sequence of suspense drives time forward inexorably, making the audience think that the next curve will be Thornhill’s last. The cue uses musical modules like the others, but here the modules are shorter, faster, and alternate more rapidly, creating a sense of unpredictable forward motion. Marion’s decision-making vector contrasts with the cyclical music that accompanies it while Scottie’s confusion causes him to go around in circles like the car and the music, and Roger whirls out of control. Scottie’s journey is circular, Marion’s arrow-like, and Roger’s circumlocutious. All three journeys demonstrate the power of music and acting in creating a sense of time’s vectors in film.
I've been living with these films for a long time, my first real film obsession having been with Hitchcock (especially Vertigo). That will make writing about them a challenge.
Chapter Two: Musicalising Montgomery Clift
This chapter introduces the second main component of my theory, the musicalisation of the actor’s body, exemplified through the work of Montgomery Clift. Drawing from Vivian Sobchack’s four-part framework for interpreting the body of the actor and the character, I add music to her physical theorisation in order to show how film scores can embody characters’ psychologies and physicalities. Unlike earlier classically-trained actors, who usually found their characters with makeup, costume, and movement (working from the outside in), Clift and other “method” actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando (to be discussed in subsequent chapters) worked from the inside out, starting with character psychology. Many of Clift’s performances are mirrored by scores that also work from the outside in, accepting the challenge to musicalise the new model of mid-century American masculinity that Clift presented. The scores for films such as A Place in the Sun (Franz Waxman, 1951), From Here to Eternity (George Duning and Morris Stoloff, 1953), and Wild River (Kenyon Hopkins, 1960) all reflect Clift as the sensitive centre of turbulent, emotional films. These scores when matched with Clift’s physical and vocal performances demonstrate the richness and variety of Hollywood film scoring beyond the standard “classical” model of mood music and leitmotivs, and offer a new perspective on musical characterisation.
This is the chapter I'm working on at the moment. Clift is my favourite actor, which means there is a risk of blind cinephilia in the writing. The work here exists already as a conference paper, so most of what needs to be done is 'writing up' rather than research.
Chapter Three: Kazan, Brando, and Mélomanie
This chapter explores the musical relationships that resulted from the collaborations of director Elia Kazan and actor Marlon Brando. These two icons of mid-century American theatre and film made three films together: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), and On the Waterfront (1954). All three feature prominent scores, the first two by Alex North, the last by Leonard Bernstein, that at times threaten to overshadow Brando’s performances but that, in their very prominence, end up creating a strong sense of Brando’s star persona. A close look at Kazan and Brando also allows for a closer exploration of the “Method” as it developed musically in the 1950s, as well as questioning the role film directors have in shaping performances musically.
This one also exists as a conference paper, although it didn't include Viva Zapata! and didn't look much at Brando specifically. All three of the scores here are musically very interesting, so I will need to find the right balance between musical analysis and looking at Brando's acting. I hope there is a way to convincingly combine the two. The tight motivic connections in Bernstein's score are akin to the 'spine' of a method performance, so that is probably the way forward.
Chapter Four: Monroe, Day, and Gendered Music
This chapter focuses on the gender issues that are latent in the previous two chapters’ explorations of Clift and Brando (as well as pointing forward to the following chapter on James Dean). 1950s cinema presented two strongly contrasting types of men: the “soft” male represented by the “Method” actors in social dramas and, increasingly as the decade went on, the broad-chested “hard” masculinity of historical and religious epics. This is mirrored by the way these men are scored, with dissonant contrapuntal language for the dramas and regularly-phrased, modal, goal-directed phallic language for the epics. Only rarely, however, did female actors and characters get much of a musical personality; 1950s cinema is generally focussed on male-centric narratives and psychology. Marilyn Monroe stands as the major exception, a megastar whose music served constantly to gender her as quintessentially female, albeit in subtly variable ways. From the extreme sexiness of Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953) to the more innocent sexuality of The Seven-Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955) and the Method extremes of The Misfits (John Huston, 1961), the music for Monroe’s performances always exudes femininity, but the subtlety of many of her performances often contrasts with this blatant musicalisation of sex to create interestingly nuanced visions of gender in the 1950s. Doris Day presents a very different vision of 1950s femininity, presenting a more domestic version of sexuality than Monroe’s. The music that accompanies her characters, and which she often sings along with, enhances this sense of domesticity. Contrasting Day with Monroe will show the variety with which women were musicalised in the 1950s.
The first version I submitted did not include Doris Day, but the proposal's reviews suggested that more women needed to be included. Day was the obvious choice: a huge star, very different from Monroe, with lot of musical acumen. But as I say, the 50s is a very male-centric decade in its films, and I'll need to be careful that Monroe and Day contribute to the 'spine' of the book (there I go using method terminology) and that they're not just token.
Chapter Five: James Dean and Semiotic Efficacy
All three of the films James Dean starred in before his death in 1955 at age 24 feature prominent musical scores. In East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) the actor’s radically stylised performances are aided in their communication with the audience by Leonard Rosenman’s scores, which draw equally from modernist concert music and traditional Hollywood film scoring practices, helping to negotiate the gap between Dean’s characters on the screen and his audience in the cinema. The dissonance in the music matches the dissonance of Dean’s characterizations, described by François Truffaut as containing within them “all our ambiguity, our duality, our human weaknesses.” The ambiguity and duality of tonality and atonality provide a musical illustration of Dean’s characters’ confused psyches. Rosenman’s scores were groundbreaking in their attempt to score not merely the action and mood of the film in classical Hollywood style, but also the psychology of the protagonists as they attempt to negotiate midcentury American masculinity. In Giant (George Stevens, 1956), on the other hand, Dean’s performance as the inarticulate oil man Jett Rink is betrayed by Dimitri Tiomkin’s traditional “Western” score, the lumbering cowboy theme given to Rink so at odds with the performance on screen that the music acts as a barrier between audience and character. Giant is usually seen as Dean’s least successful performance, and the music is at least in part to blame. An analysis of these three performances and scores will attempt to further open a space for analysing music’s role in creating character, scoring the actor and his/her role.
This chapter is finished (at least a first version) because it's the sample chapter I submitted with the proposal. It feels good to have something done.
A Non-Hollywood Interlude with Gérard Philipe
This short chapter will offer a look at the specific non-Hollywood example of Gérard Philipe to demonstrate that the musical practices described in previous chapters are not unique to American film. Philipe, little known in English-speaking countries, was the biggest box-office draw in France in the 1950s. He traversed the decade playing a wide variety of roles, from early films playing vulnerable Dean-like young men to a middle period of Brando-like brash swashbucklers, and finally a late period (before his early death) in Clift-style men ravaged by time and circumstance. The chapter will explore the question of whether such a broad range of characters coming from a single actor are scored in a musically consistent manner, examining such films as Une si jolie petite plage (1948), Fanfan la Tulipe (1951), and Montparnasse 19 (1958). Is there something about this actor’s personal body (to use Sobchak’s term) that was intriguing to composers?
At this stage this interlude is rather likely to get cut, but I'm leaving it in the plan for now because there is so little Anglophone scholarship (and not a whole of of Francophone scholarship) on Philipe and he's extremely good. There was also a lot of interesting stuff going on musically in French cinema in the 50s. It might be best to save this for an article at a later date, though. I've only got 60,000 words and when I was writing up the Dean chapter it ballooned to 10,000, something likely to happen with the other chapters, too.
Chapter Six: Extremes of Musical Characterisation in Sirk
Douglas Sirk, the quintessential director of melodramas or “women’s pictures,” had a little-studied long term collaboration with Universal Studios house composer Frank Skinner. Skinner’s scores have been critiqued as over-determined hackwork that add little to the films they accompany, but this chapter will ask whether the scores of such films as Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959) are truly superfluous or if they create conditions of melodrama in which the actors can more effectively portray their characters. The chapter will question whether the scores are really over-determined or if they can be regarded as adding nuance within the conventions of the melodrama genre.
In the proposal I was going to go back to Europe and compare Sirk with the minimal scores in Antonioni and Resnais' early work. The reviewers rightly argued that I was getting too far away from the spine, so Antonioni and Resnais can wait until a later project and Sirk deservedly gets a chapter to himself.
Chapter Seven: Scoring Race with Ethel Waters and Sidney Poitier
The 1950s saw the beginning of desegregation in Hollywood film, notably with the growing stardom of Sidney Poitier. This chapter will explore how performers’ race was (and was not) musicalised in the 1950s, focusing on the late part of Ethel Waters’ career and the beginning of Poitier’s. Waters starred in The Member of the Wedding, a delicate film with a delicate Alex North score, but it is really Waters’s singing in the film that sets her music apart. Poitier’s physical acting style in his early films presented composers with a challenge, met especially interestingly by Leonard Rosenman in Edge of the City (1957) and by Duke Ellington in Paris Blues (1961). Both films are interracial ‘buddy’ pictures (with John Cassavetes and Paul Newman, respectively), offering their composers a challenge (achieved in both cases) to avoid and/or question musical stereotypes.
This is also a recent addition to the plan, on the advice of the reviewers. This is the chapter that will take the most work because I don't know many of Poitier's films. Edge of the City and Paris Blues are both fantastic examples, though, so I reckon it will work very well.
Chapter Eight: Jake Gyllenhaal, A 50s Star for the 21st Century
The final short chapter will bring this triangulation of actor, character, and music into the present day to explore what modern Hollywood practice has retained of this 1950s film scoring style. One of the closer current analogues of the Clift/Dean/Brando style star is Jake Gyllenhaal: an actor of wide range but consistent performative rigour who has attracted accomplished directors and interesting scores. Gyllenhaal’s performance in Donnie Darko (2001) is not unlike the early performances of Dean and Clift, Gyllenhaal’s masculinity in Brokeback Mountain (2005) shares common ground with both James Dean’s and Rock Hudson’s in Giant, and his performance as alienated characters in Enemy (2013), Nightcrawler (2014), and Nocturnal Animals (2016) is not too far from late Clift. The minimal music used to accompany these performances has little to do with the larger-scale scores of the 1950s, but Gyllenhaal’s acting style continues in the 50s method tradition.
This might end up in the conclusion rather than as its own chapter, but I thought it important to bring us up to date and consider what echoes from the 50s are around today. Gyllenhaal's acting style and choice of characters is an interesting amalgam of Clift, Brando, and Dean, so he seemed a logical choice.
You'll notice that a few of these films date from 1948, 1949, 1960, and 1961 so aren't strictly 1950s. My excuse is that I'm going with the 'long 1950s', which works in a Hollywood context. In 1948 there was a big lawsuit in which Paramount had to divest itself of its cinemas, starting a major change in the way the studios did business. They could no longer rely on income from their own cinemas, which meant they had to completely rethink distribution, eventually affecting the kind of films that were made. Film scholars often use 1948 as a watershed year in which what becomes typical in the 50s begins. Similarly, the early 60s look more like the late 50s than they do like the late 60s, so I feel justified in including those films. Monroe dies in 1962, bringing the era to an end, then the Kennedy assassination soon changes the way America looks at everything. I also could not exclude The Misfits, which feels like a very important film that rounds off the whole era in a pessimistic cloud of desert dust.
So this is my research life for the next year. It's a big ambitious project but an exciting one.
