The Screengrab : anatomy of a murder

OST: "Anatomy of a Murder"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Last week in this space, we discussed the highly effecting soundtrack to The Man with the Golden Arm -- a moody post-bop jazz score that came from a highly unlikely source in the person of Elmer Bernstein. This week's original soundtrack focus, the 1959 courtroom classic Anatomy of a Murder, was penned by someone who hardly needed to prove his jazz credentials. Duke Ellington was a jazz elder statesman by the time the movie started production, but jazz had long been considered off-limits in most movies thanks to its connotation as "race music" through most of the '30s and '40s. It took the work of men like Bernstein and Henry Mancini to normalize it for film use to the degree that Otto Preminger could call upon a living legend like Ellington to score his crime drama a few years later. The picture wrapped in record time, and Preminger rushed to get it into theaters, partly in fear that its highly controversial nature (it was built around a revenge killing for the rape of the accused's wife, and used language that was extremely explicit for its day) would cause it to receive flak from the censors, so Ellington was pressured to work fast. Luckily, years of working with a talented group of improvisors -- some of whom, including Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, and Cat Anderson, can be seen and heard in the film -- had prepared him well.

Ellington had done film work before, but by and large, it was for shorts, concert films, and the like. Anatomy of a Murder would be his first full-length feature film, and the pressure was on in more ways than one, since for all the controversy surrounding it, it was meant to be an A picture. It featured a prestige director, a highly coveted source for its script, and some of Hollywood's brightest actors in the lead roles: Jimmy Stewart, George C. Scott and Lee Remick among them. (Ellington even has a minor role himself, playing the owner of a local roadhouse.) He was also something of a grandee of jazz, one of the old men of the medium's golden age, and not exactly known for being able to hit the clanging, atonal, and often dark aspects of the post-bop era. But he acquitted himself better than anyone could possibly have expected: his score to Anatomy of a Murder reels convincingly from swinging to subtle to romantic to comic to clever to violent when the scene calls for it. While it's not quite a great enough accomplishment from one of the finest jazzmen in history to stand unquestioned alongside his greatest sides, it's a remarkably effecting film score that strikes -- if a bit late -- a mightily convincing blow in favor of using jazz as a material for film scores just as suitable, if not more so, than the second-rate symphonic music that was the norm at the time.

What makes the score even more accomplished -- and credit here is due to Preminger and his editors as well as to Ellington and his sidemen -- is that it was designed and executed as a diagetical piece, where the music does not exist extraneous to the filmed action, but is meant to be heard in the context that characters in the film might hear it. The fact that it succeeds so well in this regard and stands up so strongly as an album, independent of the film, testifies to both Ellington's strengths as a composer and Preminger's as a director. Anyone seeking out an album version of this critically important moment in the history of jazz on film is highly advised to find the 1995 Columbia CD reissue; it features restored cover art based on the original ad campaign (which drew heavily on the Blue Note Records design style of the day), a lengthy and engaging interview with Duke Ellington, numerous outtakes, studio sessions, and rehearsal pieces, and best of all, an expert digital remastering that dumps the unnecessary and distracting level of echo that mars some of the original releases. The result is a much clearer, more immediate sound for what should be remembered for decades as one of the best blends of film and music of the 1950s.

BEST TRACKS: Most people who have only seen the film remember only for its opening theme, and that's perfectly understandable: "Main Theme/Anatomy of a Murder" is a dynamite piece of music, jazzy and powerful but with a good pop music composer's understanding of what makes a memorable movie theme. But there's plenty more than that to enjoy on an album that could easily be stuck in alongside Ellington's better work of the 1950s: the moody, steamy "Midnight Indigo", the bouncing, witty "Flirtibird", and, especially, the majestic and melodic "Sunswept Saturday", with its terrific, hooky clarinet work by Jimmy Hamilton.

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OST: "The Man with the Golden Arm"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions. Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies. There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties. Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental. Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.

Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model: Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day. But Elmer Bernstein? Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long. Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard. Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook: the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments. He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie. Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?

Frank Sinatra, for one. Sinatra knew Elmer Bernstein well from his early sojourns in Hollywood, and once he was cast to play the lead in Otto Preminger's adaptation of a harrowing Nelson Algren novel about a recovering junkie, he approached the director -- not known for his stylistic daring -- and tried to convince him that Bernstein could swing. Preminger decided to take a chance, and as a result, two careers were charged with new vigor: Sinatra won widespread praise for his performance, and convinced skeptical critics that he was capable of being a great actor. As for the composer, he turned in, to the surprise of everyone but Francis Albert Sinatra, one of the most compelling -- and compulsively re-listenable -- crypto-jazz scores of the 1950s. When combined with one of Saul Bass' most stunning title sequences, it all adds up to an absolutely riveting blend of music and visual. Anyone teaching a class about the particular spirit of that period of urban drama needs nothing more for their audiovisual centerpiece than the first five minutes of The Man with the Golden Arm.

BEST TRACKS: The finest tracks on the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm are those where Bernstein collaborated with an actual jazzman -- conducter, arranger, trumpeter and former Woody Herman sideman Shorty Rogers. Rogers' bold, accusatory horn is a big part of what makes the movie's opening theme -- better known as "Frankie Machine", after the name of Sinatra's character -- so unforgettable, and his deft arrangement and understanding of Elmer Bernstein's distinct sense of melody, combined with his own rhythmic sensibility, also makes a success of the wonderfully chaotic "Audition". Other great tracks include the manic "Breakup: Flight/Louie's/Burlesque" medley and the mournful "Finale". Overall, it works thematically, but is still strong enough to stand on its own as a skillful period jazz record.

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The Rep Report (April 15--21)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life. At the simplest level, music by Miles Davis or by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet can do wonders for a thriller such as Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows or Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, with Robert Ryan as a racist crook and Harry Belafonte as his unhappy partner in crime. At the other extreme, there's Arthur Penn's Mickey One, a fascinating, incoherent, art-damaged movie that seems to be trying to take its cues from Stan Getz's saxophone improvisations on the soundtrack--bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch just for the visions it gives you of the studio executive's heads melting when they first saw it--and such artifacts as Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, with music by Ornette Coleman, and Shirley Clarke's off-Broadway verite films The Cool World and The Connection, reminders that the American independent film movement once seemed to be an offshoot of the Beats' world. There are also some international obscurities that sound better than intriguing, notable Dilemma, a 1962 film made in apartheid-era Johannesburg by the Danish director Henning Carlsen (Hunger), starring Zakes Mokae and with music by Max Roach.

LOS ANGELES: Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film" at the Linwood Dunn Theater will include screenings of the two great military documentaries that Huston made during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light. Although made with the cooperation of the U. S. military and officially intended as part of the war effort, San Pietro--which is both a strikingly clear and cogent account of a battle and a nonfiction war poem composed on film--met with some grumblings from the higher-ups, and Light, a harrowing visit to a medical ward full of soldiers suffering from the psychological effects of war, was actually kept from public view until the early 1980s. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King makes the point that Huston had to deal with much more interference than some of the people now making documentaries about the Iraq war, but many of those current filmmakers could still learn a lot from his work. She also reminds us that Huston had a ready answer for the jarheads who clucked that his movies seemed "anti-war': ""Whenever I make a film that's for war, you can take me out and shoot me." The screening will be introduced by Huston's son Tony and followed by a panel discussion including Dr. Charles Wolfe, Dr. Betsy McLane, and Richard E. Robbins, the producer-director of the Oscar-nominated doceumentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.