(Reposting this because JAWS. Do I need a better reason than that? JAWS! I wasn’t allowed to watch JAWS until I was a teenager, which is both probably a wise move on my parents’ part and also really lame. I mean, come on! JAWS! But hey, it instantly became one of my favorite movies ever when I finally did get to watch it all the way through, instead of seeing little bits and pieces through sneaky glimpses at this or that telecast. Anyway, here’s a bit of silliness….)
I’ve seen a few of these photos surfacing online the last few months, and they make me really happy because there’s a kind of absurdity going on. These are behind-the-scenes snapshots from JAWS, featuring actor Robert Shaw and “Bruce” the Shark, in between takes. Bruce, if you didn’t know, was the name lovingly bestowed upon the mechanical shark they made for the movie, which ended up not working half the time, forcing director Steven Spielberg to rely on implied-shots, shadows, oblique techniques and other ways of creating the sense that the shark was there without actually showing that the shark was there. It’s generally accepted that the difficulties with the model are a big reason why the movie ended up as good as it is. I love these shots because they have a kind of absurdity to them, as if Bruce was really a living part of the cast, waiting for his next take like everyone else. They just scream out to be captioned, so:
“Come on, Bob, sing it with me! ‘Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies….” “Shut UP, Bruce.”“I mean, it was a great fight scene and all, but you gotta admit, Bob, the way your character in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE lets James Bond get one up on him is kinda lame.” “I didn’t write it, Bruce.”
“Haha, in your big speech you’re supposed to say ‘We delivered the bomb’ but you make it sound like ‘We delivered the bum’! Hahaha…ouch, please get your hand off my eye! It’s not REALLY like a doll’s eye!” “Too bad, Bruce.”
What’s it like when the music and the visuals of a film meld together perfectly? Well, here’s one such example, which is simply the greatest opening credits sequence history ever. Yes, I said it.
(This is a repost from a number of years ago. I recently saw the movie Cousins for free on YouTube, so watched it over several breaks and lunches at work, as I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years. It actually holds up pretty well, and when I looked up my earlier post, I realized that I honestly wouldn’t change much of it at all, except to maybe accentuate more the point that the movie really is a fantasy of sorts, and if a situation like this movie’s came to pass in real life the participants would all need extensive therapy. Still…I love the damned movie. Here’s the post!)
(Oh, and I’m adding a new “Romance” tag, because I’m watching and reading more romance of late, so I may well find myself talking about those things in the future….)
I’m not sure if I’ve ever held forth on the movie Cousins before in this space, but I recently watched it again and wanted to flesh out my thoughts on it a bit.
Cousins is a remake of a French movie that I’ve never seen. It came out in 1988 or 1989, somewhere in there, so by this time it’s full of the kinds of fashions we like to laugh at nowadays. (Mullets and big hair, chiefly. I actually like the big hair, but the mullets, not so much.) It’s directed, very well, by Joel Schumacher, a guy who isn’t on anybody’s list of great directors but whom I think tend to produce well-made films (from a technical standpoint).
In the movie, Ted Danson plays Larry, a dance teacher who is married to Tish (Sean Young, who never looked more beautiful). Isabella Rossellini plays Maria, who is married to Tom (William Petersen, ten years before he started following the evidence). In the opening scene, Larry’s Uncle Phil marries Maria’s mother, so Larry and Maria become cousins of some sort. They also meet in the reception hall after the reception has ended, because neither is sure where their respective spouses have disappeared to. Well, it turns out Tom and Tish have been doing the dirty (Tom turns out to be quite the philanderer), and after Larry and Maria realize this, they decide to pretend to be having their own affair in order to get back at them. It’s a little joke…except they end up becoming close friends and then falling in love with one another. Hilarity ensues.
Of course, this is a remake of a French movie, so it all gets more complicated than that. Uncle Phil dies of a heart attack after being married for a couple of weeks, and then Larry’s father Vince (Lloyd Bridges, who has most of the film’s best lines) shows up and starts to woo Maria’s mother. More hilarity ensues.
It’s hard to honestly appraise a movie like this, since one must acknowledge that a state of affairs anywhere remotely resembling this one would result in all manner of emotional trauma for all concerned. (The movie does address, in passing, the effects of all this on Maria and Tom’s daughter.) But the movie itself is awfully well-made, with chemistry positively dripping between virtually every couple it shows us, so I end up looking past a lot of that. Of course Danson and Rossellini have great chemistry; the movie wouldn’t work at all if they didn’t. But so do Danson and Young, and so do Rossellini and Petersen, and so do Young and Petersen. Heck, in a couple of scenes, even Danson and Petersen have good chemistry (although as rivals). It’s also to the film’s credit that its characters do bad things without being bad people. Even Petersen’s Tom, the “cheating husband”, is a fairly low-grade jerk who is genuinely hurt when he realizes that he’s losing his wife. “Are you in love with him?” he asks; “If I am I’ll get over it,” she replies. “Yeah,” he says, in return. “We were in love once, and we got over it.” (It is kind of unfair the way the movie’s finale leaves Tom in a limbo state; we get some idea that Tish will be just fine, but Tom’s just tossed aside.)
Of course, this is a romantic comedy, so one must also judge it by if it makes one laugh, and it certainly makes me laugh. The Lloyd Bridges character has zinger after zinger (“At my age, you don’t want to get too close to an open grave”, “I’d rather have a case of the clap than a case of that wine.”), and there’s a hilarious scene set inside a wedding theme park where one of the cherubs is shown smoking behind a bush.
And the score is wonderful. Angelo Badalamenti writes a very French-sounding score (apropos, obviously), bound by two main themes: a love theme in waltz time (heard in a big way when Larry and Maria run away on Larry’s motorcycle), and a simpler, beautiful theme for Maria. In a very nice touch, Maria’s theme turns up throughout the film as diagetic music, played by street musicians as Larry and Maria wander by. The movie is also great looking, filmed in Vancouver, with lots of sweeping shots of that city’s environs. Cousins is wonderful froth, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Here’s the love theme I refer to above. I mean, isn’t this great stuff? This is easily one of my favorite movie melodies ever.
This morning I got in the car, turned on the radio, and as I was preparing to switch it over to my phone’s output so I could listen to a podcast, the announcer on WNED indicated that they were about to play a suite of Max Steiner’s wonderful music for Casablanca, because the film opened eighty-three years ago today.
That movie has been a part of my world my entire life. I didn’t watch it myself until sometime during, or immediately after, my freshman year of college, but I was always aware of it, and my parents always spoke very highly of it. I remember when I watched it the first time I thought, “Yeah, that’s pretty damned good, I don’t know if it’s quite as good as everyone makes it out to be, but that’s a damned good movie.”
A while later I watched it again, though…and I discovered something that Roger Ebert would later write about: the fact that Casablanca is, somehow, always better the second time. There’s just something about it that makes it a “pretty good” watch the first time and makes it utterly engrossing the second time around…and each and every time thereafter.
Eighty-three years.
When I was a kid, Casablanca was my benchmark for “an old movie”. Since it was only 29 years old when I was born, I guess I kind of set “twenty-nine years old” as my thought for what constituted an “old movie”. So, using that metric, here in the Year of Our Lord 2025, new “old movies” include Independence Day, Scream, Jerry Maguire, and the first Mission: Impossible movie.
Anyway, here’s the Max Steiner suite I listened to this morning on my ride to work. This is music to put you in the mood to be a big inconvenience to Nazis…which honestly, is saddeningly needed right now, innit?
We all have those movies, don’t we? They’re the movies where we’ll be going about our day, doing stuff that we’ve planned out and intended to get done…but then we’ll see that one of those movies is on teevee or something, and that’s that, screw the To Do List, we’re watching that movie again!
One of those movies for me is The Hunt for Red October, that wonderful submarine thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel. (I never read that particular Clancy book. I read a couple other ones and honestly, I wasn’t super-impressed beyond an appreciation for his plotting. My drug-of-choice for late-80s-early-90s spy fiction was Robert Ludlum.) Hunt came out in spring 1990, and I remember a bunch of friends and I in college going to see it. The movie rocked my world even then, and it has never declined in my estimation. It really is a masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned; it sets up every single plot twist in advance but doesn’t do so in such an obvious way that you can see the foreshadowing as it happens. It’s incredibly well-acted and superbly paced, and for an action adventure thriller, it has some absolutely crackling dialog. I just love it.
The music is also great, by the wonderful Basil Poledouris. Its main melodic material is distinctly Russian, and he makes extensive use of choir throughout, along with some techno material in the tense parts of the film. Here is a suite culled together from the soundtrack.
Like I said the other day, there’s a kind of perfect storm of STUFF all coming to a head at once that isn’t leaving me with a ton of time for posting, so posting much, I have not. This is likely to continue for the next week, maybe even two, depending on how things transpire. None of this is bad, by any means: we have a big work event that’s taking up tons of time to prep coming up, and then next weekend is our annual getaway to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and right after that, The Wife has a medical procedure that will occupy a lot of mental cycles and energy.
But, I do need to get something up here at least once in a while, don’t I? And I’m still saddened by the passing earlier this week of Robert Redford, so I’ll discuss my personal favorite Redford movie, to which the title of this post alludes. The film is the 1992 caper film Sneakers.
Here’s the text of a post I wrote some years ago about the film, and then I’ll come back and say a few things more about it:
COSMO: You could have shared this with me.
MARTIN: I know.
COSMO: You could have had the power.
MARTIN: I don’t want it.
COSMO: Don’t you know the places we can go with this?
MARTIN: Yeah, I do. There’s nobody there.
COSMO: Exactly! The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy or money. It’s run by ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons!
MARTIN: I don’t care.
COSMO: I don’t expect other people to understand this, but I do expect you to understand this! We started this journey together!
MARTIN: It wasn’t a ‘journey’, Coz. It was a prank.
COSMO: There’s a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information: what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information!
MARTIN: If I were you, I’d destroy that thing.
I saw Sneakers when it first came out, back in 1992 or thereabouts. It quickly became one of my favorite movies, and I saw it several more times theatrically before it became a fixture in my rotation of movies to rent on occasion, and later, when I had a sizeable collection of movies on VHS. But for one reason or another – mainly because I just never got around to it – Sneakers never got into my DVD collection, so I haven’t seen it in…holy crap. More than ten years. That seems rather wrong to me now, in retrospect, but never fear – I finally watched it recently, with some fear and trepidation that, like many a techno-thriller made more than a decade ago, it wouldn’t hold up very well.
Surprisingly – and satisfyingly – it does hold up, very well. And more than that: it’s striking to me now, twenty years later, just how eerily prescient this movie was.
Sneakers is one of the most entertaining cyberthriller-espionage movies I’ve ever seen. Robert Redford stars as Martin Bishop, the head of a security firm consisting of a group of men whose backgrounds mostly include shady dealings or outright brushes with the law. Their main job is simply to break into places that are supposedly highly secure, in order to demonstrate the lax areas in the security. They seem to be mostly just eking by: when they complete a job for a bank early in the film, a bank officer fills out the payment check, looks at it, and comments that it’s not a very good living. The team gets hired for another job, this time by two men claiming to be NSA agents, who happen to know who Martin Bishop really is (for which he could go to jail). They are to steal a device that decrypts codes which are supposedly unbreakable, which they do, and then give to the NSA guys – only to learn that they’re not NSA guys at all, and that they’ve murdered the mathematician who invented the device.
In a deeply eerie scene, Bishop’s hacker buddies start probing around with the little black box, just to see what it can do – and they discover that it can allow anyone to hack into extremely sensitive computer systems. The power grid of the entire Northeast…the Federal Reserve…air traffic control. They couldn’t have known it, writing this movie ten years before 9-11, but hearing one of the hackers jokingly say, “Anybody want to crash a few passenger jets?” is deeply chilling.
The entire movie is about security in an increasingly digital world, and at the end of the film, the exchange quoted above takes place, between Bishop and his onetime college buddy Cosmo, who has become a villain since doing time in prison for a crime that he committed with Martin at his side (but who eluded capture by the police simply by going out for pizza when they showed up with the guns). The idea of the world become increasingly governed by, and even defined by, the processing of data was a pretty bold one back in 1992. When I saw this movie, I had not yet even heard of the Internet, and the digital infrastructure that Sneakers portrays – with dial-up modems and not a cell phone in sight – seems utterly quaint. And yet, the movie is somehow fresh, despite all that, largely owing to the charm of the cast, the sparkling dialogue, the engaging direction, the brisk pacing, and – in terms of the technology – the nicely non-specific way the technology is depicted.
There are a lot of very clever touches in Sneakers: the reverse ‘race against time’, for example, in which Martin Bishop has to get a job done and yet literally can only do it at a very slow pace, lest the motion detectors notice his presence. Also the way they enlist Martin’s former (and yet still friendly) girlfriend to help with the problem of recording a particular scientist’s voice for use against the voice-print ID gizmo. (If the phrase “My name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” is in your geek lexicon, then you are my kind of people.) I also like how vague the movie is about Cosmo’s villainy. We never learn who he works for, or if he is the main ringleader; we never learn what exactly it is that he wants to accomplish with the little black codebreaking box. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Cosmo doesn’t even have a specific plan in mind at all, and that he just wants the codebreaker because it will give him power that he as yet doesn’t really know how he intends to use it. He’s almost purely a theoretical villain, which is what makes him even scarier — as well as the sheer optimism of his villainy, which is what makes the quote above so memorable. It’s not about making threats or committing crimes or any of that dirty stuff. It’s about the possibilities inherent in controlling the world’s data.
And that is really makes this twenty-year-old film stay relevant.
OK, that’s the old post. I notice that I didn’t mention the film’s acting much in my original post, so I’m addressing that now, because Sneakers is one of the best-cast movies ever made, in my opinion. If they handed out Oscars for casting, Sneakers would have won it that year. You have River Phoenix as a young hacker, and Dan Aykroyd as an old hacker who is deeply invested in paranoid conspiracy theories. (This was a considerably more charming and entertaining character trait thirty years ago. Now, not so much.) You have Sidney Poitier as a retired CIA spook who hasn’t given up the game just yet, and David Strathairn as a blind hacker. Leading them all is Mr. Redford, a hacker with a past that has led him to assume a false identity. Joining them is Redford’s old girlfriend, played by Mary McDonnell, and the villain is Ben Kingsley as an old friend of Redford’s who went to jail for their escapades while Redford did not.
It’s really something to watch this movie and note the complete chemistry among the cast. At no point is there any break in the illusion; we really believe that this motley crew of hackers and law-benders has spent years working with one another at the weird intersection of legality and morality and…neither of those things. And they really do seem to enjoy doing it; they’re having fun, up until the moment when they realize that they have somehow become embroiled in something very real and very dangerous. But even then, once they sense that the winds have shifted in their direction again…the sense of fun returns.
Speaking specifically of Mr. Redford’s performance, he is doing more than having fun. There’s a sense right from the start that he’s been at this longer than anyone else, and that he’s starting to get a bit weary of the whole business. Redford shows us a Martin Bishop who is genuinely sorry for what happened to his old friend back in college, and who does want to move past the hackery part of his life. He’s also skeptical of what is to come and what Cosmo seems to be embracing, as shown in the exchange quoted above; Bishop’s hesitance to embrace a world where everything is determined by information and who controls it is notable, and in Redford’s hands, very, very real. Redford does things in this film with simple facial expressions that are just wonderful: a rolling of his eyes when he’s told to hurry up when doing a job where moving as slowly as possible is required, or a sudden snarl when he decides to punch out the thug who has been inconveniencing him all movie long. Or his mischievous smile that lets us know he’s pulled a fast one on somebody.
Most of all, though, Redford captures that Bishop is the brains and the heart of this whole operation. He’s the one who suspects first that this whole business with the code-breaking machine is more than he bargained for and that he and his team are involved in something more deep and sinister than they have ever dealt with before. This is something that Robert Redford was always great at, something that made him one of the best. He was always able to suggest, often without even saying anything, the emotional and intellectual lives his characters were leading.
And he was just so damned cool about it. Who wouldn’t want to be Robert Redford, after all?
Oh, this is a delayed Something for Thursday post as well, so here’s a nice suite culled together from the soundtrack to Sneakers, with music composed by the late, great James Horner. This is one of the great “caper film” scores of all time.
Social media has been abuzz lately over the trailer for a new film of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights. I mean, look at this thing:
Yeah, that’s…quite something, isn’t it? Will I watch that? Maybe. I think it will be viewed best at home, after several drinks.
But anyway, here’s a suite of music by film score great Alfred Newman, composed for the 1939 film of the same book.
Of course, I suppose as time marches on it becomes less and less known that the greatest single adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the semaphore version!
The Music Man doesn’t get enough credit for how inventive it is, methinks. The Music Man is known for its Iowa setting, and it generally seems to be viewed as safe Americana. But it makes a lot of interesting choices, and those include its music numbers. This one, “Lida Rose and Will I Ever Tell You”, blends two different songs together, sung by entirely different characters, who aren’t even in the same place. How does that work?
It starts as our hero, con man Professor Harold Hill, is returning to his hotel room where he is met by the local school board, four guys who used to hate each other until Hill noticed that their voices lent themselves to music–and he somehow converted them into a barbershop quartet. The board members are tasked with getting Professor Hill’s educational credentials (which he has entirely made up); he keeps distracting them by tricking them into singing, whereupon he slips away. He does that again here, with a song called “Lida Rose”. But then we shift to Marian Paroo, the woman who is falling for Professor Hill, who is singing a love song called “Will I Ever Tell You”. And then, via the magic of some very inventively-done split screen, we hear both songs together.
The Music Man is a much more sophisticated musical than I think it gets credit for! That’s all I’m saying.
I just finished a remarkable novel the other night, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. The book is a slow burn of a novel about the life of a man (told as a series of memories as he looks back on his life during his last hours, in a seedy hotel in New York City) who, along with his brother, was once a major figure in Cuban music (particularly Mambo music) in the 1950s. Cesar Castillo remembers his childhood with his brother, Nestor, in Cuba, and he remembers the loves they had there before they came to New York, hopefully to establish a life and then move their families and their loved ones along later. Cesar and Nestor become musicians and their lives…well, their lives go on. I don’t want to say a whole lot more than that, because the book is as effective at showing life for what it is–a sequence of things that happen to us, few of which we have any control over–and there are turns along the way that we don’t see coming. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is not a novel that grabs right away…in fact, I was wondering if I’d bother finishing it just after fifty pages or so. But it grows in the mind, and by the time I was in the last hundred pages or so, I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it. I read the book slowly, savoring as it went, enjoying Hijuelos’s chapter-less structure and his very long paragraphs, sometimes extending over several pages, and his long parenthetical asides as one of Cesar’s memories triggered another one, barely related, that took place at some total other point in his life.
The Castillo Brothers’ biggest hit is a song that Nestor writes about the love of his life, a woman he can’t forget even though she is back in Cuba (and their relationship didn’t work out anyway), named Maria. Nestor pens a song called “Beautiful Maria of My Soul”, and this song’s success marks their high point as a musical act and it also somewhat haunts Cesar for the rest of the novel. And thanks to the fact that the book was adapted for the screen in 1992, in a film simply called The Mambo Kings, we can hear the song. It is sung by Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas, who star in the film as Cesar and Nestor Castillo. I have never seen the film, but the song is quite good.
(This is a repost of what I wrote when composer James Horner died ten years ago, very prematurely, in a plane crash. Apparently Horner had been an amateur, hobbyist pilot. My relationship with his music through the years was complicated, but I wouldn’t ever say it was complicated to the point of being “love-hate”. Horner was one of the most important and notable film composers from 1980 until his death, after all, and as prolific as he was, I wish he was still around.)
Composer James Horner died the other day when the airplane he was piloting crashed. He was the sole passenger.
This is, quite simply, the worst news to hit the film music world since Michael Kamen, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein all died within a year of each other.
For me, though, the hit is more directly personal. Although my relationship with Horner’s music has been rather complicated over the years, he still wrote a fair number of my favorite filmscores of all time, and when a score of his connected, it connected. He had the ability to hone in on the precise moment of a given scene’s emotional high point and construct his music to reach its high at the same moment. All film composers strive for this, but Horner’s gift for this was something else.
Moreover, I saw Horner’s career take flight, as he rose from obscurity to, well, stardom in his small corner of the film world. He started writing for films in the late 1970s, and I first encountered him in his fifth film, the Roger Corman space opera flick Battle Beyond the Stars. This is the first James Horner music I ever heard:
That score is still a fun listen to this day, even with all its minor faults: its heavy debt to Jerry Goldsmith (one of Horner’s strongest early influences), its occasionally awful orchestration (there is a track called “Cowboy and the Jackers” when you can hear the trumpet section slowly die), and occasional transitional missteps. Horner wrote a swashbuckling score that was better than the film it accompanied (although the film really is not all that bad, as long as you don’t ask too much of it).
When next I encountered the music of James Horner, it was for another science fiction film: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Gone was Jerry Goldsmith’s brightly optimistic bombast from The Motion Picture, and in its place was a lyrical score that had an older and more seafaring quality to it.
It wasn’t all lyricism, though; Horner’s action writing was impeccable, and the film’s climax gives a great example of Horner’s skill for matching the music to the exact visual and the emotional beats of the scene. Here is the music, titled “Genesis Countdown”:
And here is a portion of the scene as scored, starting with the Enterprise backing away from Khan’s crippled Reliant:
This entire cue is a clinic in how to spot a film: you hear the desperation as the ship begins to move so painfully slowly, the drive as Spock climbs down through the ship toward Engineering, a snippet of Horner’s theme for Spock himself as he mind-melds with McCoy, the desperate ticking down of the seconds as the bridge crew realizes they’re doomed, Khan’s final expressions of hatred. When Horner was on, this is what he could do.
Horner would return to Star Trek for the next film, The Search for Spock, but he never did any more Trek after that. This always seemed to me a pity. I would have liked to hear, perhaps, a more light-hearted take on his themes from Treks II and III in IV, perhaps, or maybe his take on the adventures of the Next Generation in any of their films. Alas, it didn’t happen. I next encountered Horner via his score to the SF film Brainstorm, which is notable mainly for being Natalie Wood’s last film and, well, for Horner’s score.
It’s amazing to hear the progression in Horner’s sound from Battle to the Treks to Krull and beyond. You can really tell how much he was learning along the way, and his development along these lines culminated in 1988’s Willow.
One can detect a certain amount of the common lot of the film composer: often the scores are, on balance, better than the films. Not everyone can be John Williams, with a partnership with Steven Spielberg.
Horner was also able to do a lot more than genre films. He scored everybody’s favorite gentle baseball film Field of Dreams, in which he flexed his Americana muscles without quite aping the typical Coplandesque sound, and a couple years later he scored the Robert Redford caper flick Sneakers.
In the mid-90s, Horner reached what was almost certainly the height of his powers, and his filmography from about 1993 to 1998 basically includes one fine score after another, with three that were truly wonderful and one other which would become his single most famous work.
For Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, Horner managed to capture both the optimism of the Apollo moon missions and the elegiac sense, looking back, that that was as far as we were willing to go at that time and for quite a long time afterward. Horner infused that entire film with amazing energy, never moreso than during that film’s incredible rocket launch sequence:
Then there was Braveheart. Horner’s score for this film is amazing, one of my favorites of all time, and I consider its first half to be some of the finest film music ever written. It’s really quite something, what Horner did here. Mel Gibson’s film takes a fairly ‘dreamy’ approach to its subject matter, with long, lingering shots and scenes that feel like meditations. Horner accompanies all this amazingly, never better than in the “Secret Wedding” sequence. This love music is more complex than it seems, with a main melody that is subtly varied through a number of different stepwise progressions, and as the scene becomes more and more intimate in the film, so too does Horner’s score, boiling down to the utter simplicity of the rhythm being set by an ostinato harp. The first half of this score amazes me each time I listen to it.
Also in this same period came what I consider to be Horner’s finest score, Legends of the Fall. This melodrama is actually a favorite film of mine, and Horner’s approach to its big emotions is to basically say, “To hell with subtlety”. It’s a choice that works amazingly well, as Horner moves from big moment to big moment. This is a movie that blends World War I tragedy with Native American mysticism and Depression-era bootlegging with the generational drama of a family of strong-willed men and women underneath the Big Montana Sky, and Horner turns in a lush, Romantic score that proves that sometimes less is not more.
And then, in 1997, Titanic arrived.
Oddly, while I love the movie Titanic to this day, I’m not a huge fan of its score. It does, though, have a number of great moments. Horner would win his only Oscar for Best Original Score for Titanic (he also won Best Original Song that year for “My Heart Will Go On”). Titanic seems to be mostly laughed-at these days, which I always find unfortunate, but Horner did play a crucial part in its success, from the wonderful energy of “Southampton” to the way he scored the scene where Jack shows Rose how to “fly”. Note, in the latter scene, how the music seems to swell, only to swell again, with an upward modulation, when Rose lifts her hand to Jack’s neck, making the kiss all the more intimate.
One thing that’s always struck me about Horner’s Titanic score is how unobvious it is. He doesn’t go for the type of “seafaring” sound that one might expect from a disaster-at-sea film; nor does he particularly try to capture a “British” feel with proper Elgarian pomposity. Horner’s score, even if it’s not one of my favorites of his, still does manage to somewhat lift the film from its period setting, thus helping make the love story a bit more eternal, if that makes any sense.
The best part of this score, though, comes when Horner sends the orchestra home and uses a simple solo piano for the scene when Jack draws the portrait of Rose. It’s the film’s most intimate scene, and the solo piano is an inspired choice. You can hear that track here. (I’m having trouble embedding it because this post was originally written for the old BlogSpot iteration of this site, and the copying-and-pasting of entire blocks of text-and-video doesn’t always play well with WordPress’s “blocks”.)
Listening to all these selections, I’m struck by something I’d never totally noticed before, with regard to Horner’s melodies. He leans toward long melodies that seem at first to meander, before settling into an internal logic that makes a lot of sense.
Since the late 90s, I’ve lost track of Horner a bit. Partly this is because I stopped seeing as many movies, and he wasn’t scoring as many films that I actually wanted to see. Also, it seems that he wasn’t scoring as many films in general. He was active right up to the end, but he wasn’t getting as many of the blockbuster assignments and high-profile films, as tastes in film music have shifted toward the kind of tuneless soundscapes of Hans Zimmer and the like. I think Horner’s style has somewhat fallen out of favor, but he didn’t disappear entirely. The last new score of his that I heard to any significant degree was his music for James Cameron’s Avatar. I didn’t care for it all that much at first, but it has grown on me on repeated listens.
Horner had his detractors, of course, and sometimes they had cause. Over time, it became clear that Horner had little sonic “tricks” that he liked to use repeatedly throughout his scores — a particular motif to indicate that something bad was in the offing, for instance; film music fans would sometimes call this the “Danger Motif”. Another is what I came to call the “James Horner Rolling Chord of Melodic Punctuation”. More than a few times I would see a film with a Horner score and notice these very tricks playing out, and though it wouldn’t much faze the general audience, I knew what was going on.
Horner’s gifts of melody and his skill at spotting a film were always in evidence, however, and I can’t name a single film that he didn’t enhance with his music. After John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner’s music was the most familiar to me growing up. His musical storytelling, in its finest moments, stands with any film composer who has ever put pen to paper.
And his voice will be missed. I may not have heard much of his music of late, but I don’t like knowing that there will be no more to discover. I didn’t like everything he did, but I liked most of it and loved a lot of it. Seeing his name attached to a film was always exciting.
So thank you, James Horner. Your music is part of the soundtrack of my life.
