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4 OUND TRACKAVAILABLE S Essays on Film and Popular Music Edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 2001

5 2001 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Scala by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

6 Contents List of Illustrations, vii Acknowledgments, ix Overture ARTHUR KNIGHT AND PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK, 1 POPULAR VS. SERIOUS Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition RICK ALTMAN, 19 Surreal Symphonies: L Age d or and the Discreet Charms of Classical Music PRISCILLA BARLOW, 31 The Future s Not Ours to See : Song, Singer, Labryinth in Hitchcock s The Man Who Knew Too Much MURRAY POMERANCE, 53 You Think They Call Us Plastic Now... :The Monkees and Head PAUL B. RAMAEKER, 74 SINGING STARS Real Men Don t Sing Ballads: The Radio Crooner in Hollywood, ALLISON MCCRACKEN, 105 Flower of the Asphalt: The Chanteuse Réaliste in 1930s French Cinema KELLEY CONWAY, 134 The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema NEEPA MAJUMDAR, 161 MUSIC AS ETHNIC MARKER Music as Ethnic Marker in Film: The Jewish Case ANDREW P. KILLICK, 185 Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film BARBARA CHING, 202

7 Crossing Musical Borders: The Soundtrack for Touch of Evil JILL LEEPER, 226 Documented/Documentary Asians: Gurinder Chadha s I m British But... and the Musical Mediation of Sonic and Visual Identities NABEEL ZUBERI, 244 AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITIES Class Swings: Music, Race, and Social Mobility in Broken Strings ADAM KNEE, 269 Borrowing Black Masculinity: The Role of Johnny Hartman in The Bridges of Madison County KRIN GABBARD, 295 CASE STUDY: PORGY AND BESS It Ain t Necessarily So That It Ain t Necessarily So : African American Recordings of Porgy and Bess as Film and Cultural Criticism ARTHUR KNIGHT, 319 Hollywood Has Taken on a New Color : The Yiddish Blackface of Samuel Goldwyn s Porgy and Bess JONATHAN GILL, 347 CONTEMPORARY COMPILATIONS Picturizing American Cinema: HindiFilmSongs and thelast Days of Genre COREY K. CREEKMUR, 375 Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema JEFF SMITH, 407 GENDER AND TECHNOLOGY The Girl and the Phonograph; or the Vamp and the Machine Revisited PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK, 433 Bibliography, 455 Contributors, 475 Index, 479

8 List of Illustrations 1 Author s photo of some 16 Publicity still from Nashville, soundtracks available, Publicity still from Casablanca, 17 Publicity still from Coal 4 Miner s Daughter, Sears catalog ad for a 18 Publicity still from Touch of song slide company, 20 Evil, Film Daily cue music ad, Publicity still from Broken 5 Poster for Rose of Washington Strings, 275 Square, Publicity still from The Bridges 6 Balaban and Katz memo of Madison County, 296 explaining song-slide 21 Publicity still from Carmen techniques for War Nurse, 29 Jones, Doris Day in The Man Who 22 Record album cover, Ella and Knew Too Much, 54 Louis (1957), The Monkees, Record album cover, Ella and 9 Rudy Vallee, 1929, 106 Louis Again (1958), Bing Crosby, Record Album cover, Miles 11 Fréhel, 141 Davis and Gil Evans s Porgy 12 Damia (Marie-Louise and Bess (1959), 338 Damien), Samuel Goldwyn, 1942, Lata Mangeshkar in the 26 Sammy Davis Jr, 365 recording studio, Publicity still from Shree 420, 14 Publicity still from Fiddler on 377 the Roof, Advertisement for Alam Ara, 15 Publicity still from Cabaret, Publicity still from Tezaab, 388

9 viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 30 Naushad (Hindi-Urdu film composer) with superstar playback singers Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi, Advertisement for live show of Indian film stars in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (1998), Publicity still from Romy and Michele s High School Reunion, Publicity still for Little Voice, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany s, Jeanne Moreau in The Bride Wore Black, Excerpts from Spinner Records story, Dick Tracy Weekly #27, 450

10 Acknowledgments Editing a collection of essays is a collaborative effort, much like making a film or cutting a record. From this book s inception to its release, we have been fortunate to have the assistance and contributions of many people and institutions. This project s origins go back to our days as graduate students. We met through the Mass Culture Workshop at the University of Chicago, where we found a community of scholars interested in film and popular music. At the University of Chicago we had two particular mentors who deserve thanks: Gerald Mast and Miriam Hansen. In very different ways, they inspired us to examine popular film music. The Chicago Recorded Music Reading Group at Northwestern University provided a then sorely needed forum for thinking about popular music and introduced us to new friends and colleagues. Students from courses in film and popular music at the University of Newcastle and the University of Notre Dame, from Multicultural Media Representations at DePaul University, and in a variety of American studies, film, literary and cultural studies, and English courses at the College of William and Mary provided direct inspiration for this book, and sometimes road-tested essays for the collection. Our colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Newcastle in Australia provided welcome support over the course of this project. Ken Wissoker has encouraged this project from the beginning. Thanks to Ken and the anonymous readers at Duke University Press for their advocacy and their advice. For help with illustrations, we owe thanks to Carbon and Josh Yumibe at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, Cheryl Kelly in Multimedia Services at the University of Notre Dame, and Dorinda

11 x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Hartmann at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research. We owe the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame a special thanks for funding many of the costs associated with illustrations. Our contributors have been patient and conscientious throughout this process. We re delighted to have had this opportunity to work with established scholars whose work has influenced us, as well as new talents whose work we were pleased to discover. Finally, we thank Rick Wojcik, Martha Howard, and Nora and Djuna Knight. Their love and support provides the unheard melody that shapes our work.

12 Overture ARTHUR KNIGHT & PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK I think we are starting to think in soundtracks. Alan Rudolph Increasingly, it seems, we think in soundtracks. Popular music, in particular, governs our thoughts. Filmmakers, whether due to their own inclinations or market demands, conceptualize scenes in relation to popular song, and the mixing board becomes a storyboard. As viewers, we recall movies through song. Who can any longer hear Stuck in the Middle with You without seeing Mr. Blonde s chilling dance of torture in Reservoir Dogs (1991)? Songs used in films recall us to our past, or they conjure up a past we never experienced and, through the familiar language of popular music, make it ours. Witness the spate of seventies pop soundtracks, whether for films set in the seventies such as Dazed and Confused (1993), Boogie Nights (1997), and Dick (1999) or for films set in the present but with nostalgic or deliberately outdated camp soundtracks as in Reservoir Dogs (1994), Muriel s Wedding (1994), or The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert (1994). In the worst cases, the songs are inserted cynically and clumsily, booming over montage sequences and credits as if they are Pavlovian advertisements for synergy. In the best cases, the soundtrack is a product of thought, and, more than mere triggers for soundtrack sales, the songs become essential components of the film experience. Consider the soundtrack for Wayne s World (1992). The film includes thirty different songs, ranging from Tchaikovsky s Romeo and Juliet: Fantasy Overture to the theme from Mission Impossible, and including music by Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Alice Cooper. Song cues move seamlessly between diegetic and nondiegetic, subjective and objective. Often, songs cue us to characters subjectivity, as

13 2 ARTHUR KNIGHT AND PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK 1 Author s photo of some soundtracks available. [Author s collection] when we hear Tchaikovsky as an internal diegetic soundover for Garth s fantasy girl, Donna Dixon. In a similar moment, Dream Weaver subjectively marks Wayne s experience of love at first sight. The theme from Mission Impossible plays nondiegetically as ironic commentary on Garth s selfperception as he prepares to avenge a bully by strapping on a high-powered stun gun. The characters in Wayne s World frequently perform with the music in what could be seen as a reinvention of the musical. For instance, Garth lip-synchs Foxy Lady in a subjective fantasy when he imagines himself seducing his fantasy girl rather than just dreaming about her. Wayne sings Happy Birthday to You in a parody of Marilyn Monroe s famous Madison Square Garden birthday serenade for JFK, and Garth whistles the theme from Star Trek as he and Wayne watch airplanes taking off. In a moment of pure postmodern referentiality, the film launches Wayne and Garth into a full-blown imitation of the opening credit sequence for Laverne and Shirley when they see a road sign for Milwaukee. And, in one of the film s most memorable moments, Wayne, Garth, and friends sing-a-long with headbanging abandon to Queen s Bohemian Rhapsody as it plays on their AMC Pacer s 8-track tape deck. Both by virtue of its postmodern credentials and the phenomenal sales of its soundtrack, Wayne s World may be a particularly privileged example

14 OVERTURE 3 of the successful soundtrack. 1 It is, however, by no means unprecedented. As Jeff Smith s The Sounds of Commerce details, Wayne s World has many varied antecedents, including such notable commercial successes as the soundtracks for A Man and a Woman (1966), A Star Is Born (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and Pretty in Pink (1986). In stylistic and aesthetic terms, Wayne s World exists alongside such critically acclaimed compilation scores as Martin Scorsese s Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), Spike Lee s Do the Right Thing (1989), or Quentin Tarantino s Pulp Fiction (1994). These scores have their roots in works of the American avant-garde like Kenneth Anger s Scorpio Rising (1964) or Bruce Connor s Marilyn Times Five (1973). Thinking beyond compilation scores, the popular score can trace its family tree to European directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder who, rather than simply spotting songs for soundtrack sales, create various alienation effects through their use of global popular music. The popular score is not, as many seem to suggest, exclusively a post- 1950s, rock-and-roll-era phenomenon. Popular music of all kinds has been a crucial component of film from the beginning. It reaches back to the silent era, when phonographs, player pianos, or live musicians would accompany films, and early exhibitors would include song slides, musical illustration films, live singers, and sing-a-longs as key elements of the film program. The silent film industry even had its own brand of synergy as exhibitors sold sheet music for movie tie-ins. 2 To accompany feature films, live orchestras would play familiar standards in a kind of proto-compilation score. In the case of The Birth of a Nation (1915) D. W. Griffith specified what the musical accompaniment should be and so audiences heard such familiar folk and patriotic songs as Dixie, Home Sweet Home, and Bonnie Blue Flag along with Wagner s The Ride of the Valkyries and, from Grieg s Peer Gynt suite, In the Hall of the Mountain King. 3 In the classical Hollywood era, of course, the musical synchronized or in industry parlance, married the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Harlem to film. While musicals emphasized singing and dancing as key components of the mise-en-scène, other films incorporated musical performance consistently but seemingly transparently. To fully appreciate the expressive weight of such transparent uses of popular music in Hollywood film, imagine Casablanca (1942) without Dooley Wilson s repeated performances of As Time Goes By. Or consider what a Marlene Dietrich or Mae West film would be if they didn t include song. Beyond these specialty numbers by musical performers, nonsingers too were somehow always called upon to sing in Hollywood. Recall Jimmy Stewart s drunken

15 4 ARTHUR KNIGHT AND PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK 2 You must remember this... Dooley Wilson,HumphreyBogart,andSydney Greenstreet on the set of Casablanca. [Author s collection] crooning in It s a Wonderful Life (1946) or Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant singing I Can t Give You Anything But Love to a leopard in Bringing Up Baby (1938). Popular music becomes a key aural component of the mise-en-scène in genre films. The western, for instance, seamlessly integrates scenes of country dances and cowboys strumming guitars. In a John Ford western like My Darling Clementine (1946), for instance, the dance takes on ritualistic significance. In a different vein, film noir seems to take any excuse it can to enter a jazz joint or a nightclub, giving rise to such musical moments as the wild orgiastic drum solos of Elisha Cook Jr. in Phantom Lady (1946). A screwball comedy might include a song for comedic effect, as in The Awful Truth (1937) when Ralph Bellamy bellows Home on the Range or Irene Dunne, impersonating a tacky southern showgirl, sings the hilariously inappropriate, pseudosexy My Dreams Are Gone with the Wind. In various genres, the piano bar has provided the setting for romance and, crucially, enabled African American specialty acts to steal into nonmusical films. Remember Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame listening to Hadda Brooks at a chic piano bar in In a Lonely Place (1954), or

16 OVERTURE 5 Rock Hudson and Doris Day singing Roly Poly with Perry Blackwell in Pillow Talk (1959). These examples signal the degree to which film has incorporated popular music and the variety of roles it has assigned this music. In addition to serving as nondiegetic score, popular music enters the soundtrack by way of musical performance, source radios, and record players. In films, people sing, sing-along, lip-synch, dance, and play to popular music. These examples also highlight how wide-ranging and flexible the broad category of popular music is. It includes folk, country, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, jazz, disco, pop, rock-and-roll, rap, selections and adaptations of classical music, and more. We both film scholars and music scholars need to think more deeply about soundtracks to consider fully the range and variety of popular musical moments in film. Rather than erect a false barrier between musical and nonmusical films, or between post-1950s compilation soundtracks and diegetic performance in nonmusical film, we need to consider how these various practices are related. Instead of dismissing popular soundtracks as signs of cinema s waning integrity, or the public s being suckered by synergistic marketing practices, we need to consider how fundamental popular music is to the cinematic experience and, often, how fabulous. Soundtrack Available seeks to capture this broader sense of pop music s relationship to film. The impetus for this volume came from a belief that most writing on film music has not adequately described popular music s role in film or people s experience of it (in the theater or outside). We believe, nonetheless, that serious thinking about soundtracks in their many varied manifestations is crucial to our understanding and experience of film and music. Heard Melodies Until recently, film music criticism has largely ignored popular music in favor of analyzing the classical nondiegetic film score. Film music histories, whether coffee table books for buffs or serious academic works by musicologists, have tended to treat film music history as a series of great works by great composers. Typical in this regard are Mark Evans s, Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies, and Roy M. Prendergrast s Film Music: A Neglected Art. 4 Emphasizing Hollywood s debt to Romantic traditions, these works, for the most part, quarantine film music away from film and focus on presumably pure musical patterns and structures without any consideration of how those patterns and structures are placed in film or how they

17 6 ARTHUR KNIGHT AND PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK relate to filmic patterns of narration, character, editing, framing, or miseen-scène. Since the late 1980s, film theorists and critics have increasingly turned their attention to the film score, thus avoiding some of the pitfalls musicologists face by emphasizing the nondiegetic score s importance for film narrative. The major texts in this vein are Claudia Gorbman s groundbreaking Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Caryl Flinn s Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music, Kathryn Kalinak s Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, and Royal S. Brown s Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. 5 Approaching film music from within a film studies perspective, these theorists have written about the semiotics and ideology of film music, stressing its power to simultaneously be invisible or unheard, produce spectacle, and enhance the narrative in its utopian or affective dimension. This approach, however, still tends to laud the work of a coterie of great composers, like Bernard Hermann, Max Steiner, and David Raksin, and to have an auteurist bias in its selection of films. In addition, most work on classical nondiegetic scores ignores the nondiegetic soundtrack s existence outside the cinema its circulation through phonograph recordings, sheet music sales, Academy Awards, and so forth. Overall, then, rather than simply electing to discuss the Romantic tradition in film scoring instead of popular traditions, this work privileges the Romantic nondiegetic film score over popular traditions in a familiar high/low split. In part, this work on the classical nondiegetic score, especially in its early manifestations, needs to be understood as a response to the effusive fan discourse that grew up around the Hollywood musical, a genre dedicated to ensuring to invert Claudia Gorbman s famous and influential formulation that its melodies were emphatically heard. The problems with the musical, from the perspectives of many of its critics, were that it was too clearly tied to its theatrical forebears and that it did not respect the apparent natural primacy of the visual over the acoustic experience of cinema. In Gorbman s more subtle analysis, songs require narrative to cede to spectacle, for it seems that lyrics and action compete for attention. 6 What Gorbman doesn t say is that for many critics the problem of the musical spectacle is that it is either not spectacular enough (a singing head) or it is too spectacular (Busby Berkeley) when considered against the classical and classically scored narrative cinema. Roughly congruent with the rise of film scholarly work on the classical score, which was one flavor of reaction to low Hollywood, came a wave of serious film scholarship on the musical genre, which worked to

18 OVERTURE 7 complicate fan discourse while still taking the musical seriously. The key works in this wave were Rick Altman s edited collection, Genre: The Musical, Jane Feuer s The Hollywood Musical, Altman s The American Film Musical, and Gerald Mast s Can t Help Singin : The American Musical on Stage and Screen. 7 Together these books are the first works of film criticism to examine popular music in film, and in important regards they are a cornerstone of Soundtrack Available. They opened the door for many of us to finally hear the movies we cared about. At the same time, this work on the musical developed across the 1980s and is limited, from our present vantage, by being produced as the musical was becoming the music video and by having to do the hard, groundclearing work of, in Feuer s formulation, peel[ing] away the tinsel... [to] find the real tinsel underneath the genre. With the partial exception of Mast s book, the work on the musical focuses on the genre s structuring tension between narrative and musicalized spectacle and it skirts specific, extended analyses of music. Because of this focus, musicals that at least tend toward formal integration are favored objects of analysis, displacing more fragmented, less narrative-driven films like the extraordinarily popular This Is the Army (1943) and less fully musicalized films like She Done Him Wrong (1933). In the paradoxical critical archeology of the musical, many of the cultural (and scholarly) values, like coherence and inflexible hierarchies, that the genre seems to abjure, sneak in the back way. 8 For instance, Mast s book does spend considerable time with the popular music of the musicals and with the notion of popular music s portability and multiple media, but opts to tame pop s profusion through recourse to a familiar masterworks schema organized around composers and lyricists. A pair of more recent works, Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton s collection, Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, and our contributor Jeff Smith s The Sound of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, both served as inspirations for Soundtrack Available, and this book may be profitably read and used in the classroom with one or both. 9 Both books extend the work on both the classical narrative score and the musical by focusing on the nondiegetic popular music score. For its part, Celluloid Jukebox displays the virtues and limits of the program catalog, which was its original function. On the one hand, it contains accessible overviews of a number of pop-rock film subgenres, an interesting filmography, and helpful interviews with film directors about how they conceptualize their uses of popular music. On the other hand, it is still entirely focused on the United States and England, on rock and roll, and on the near-present. By contrast, Smith s excellent study offers a much broader

19 8 ARTHUR KNIGHT AND PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK sense of the popular in popular music, a useful history of the film and music industry nexus in the United States, and particularly detailed and sensitive close readings of three crucial pop scores. Nonetheless, a single volume cannot cover the panoply of popular music s wedding with popular cinema, especially in that relationship s full historical scope and international reach. Track List While previous work on nondiegetic film scores, musicals, and popular music has informed and inspired us in our own efforts, the limitations of the treatments available prompted us to create this anthology. As teachers interested in film and popular music, but frustrated by the lack of books and essays available to teach, we wanted to produce a reader that could be used in graduate and undergraduate courses on film and popular music, and that could inspire new courses. At the same time, we envisioned a book that more casual readers would pick up and enjoy, a book for fans and scholars alike. Our goal was to gather fresh new essays that would explore previously unexplored terrain and open up new ways of thinking about popular music in film. In particular, we wanted to expand the range of analysis to include a more complex sense of the variety of functions pop music performs in film, including diegetic and nondiegetic music, title songs, uses of playback technology, and modes of performance in musical and nonmusical films. Therefore, we sought specific textual analysis along with broad overviews to encourage more in-depth analysis of the specific ways in which songs are used in films. In addition, in order to offer a more far-reaching and comparative range of popular music, we sought essays on different kinds of music, from country to disco, jazz to rock and roll. We especially wanted to include essays that dealt with popular music in film from before 1950 and from countries outside the United States, and we aimed to include essays dealing with popular music s extratextual functions. Because we understand popular music to be an overloaded cultural signifying system, we felt that an anthology on popular music and film would, by necessity, deal with issues of cultural identification and ideology, including sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and national identity. Still, when we developed a call for papers, we did not know exactly what to expect. We were not sure how many writers and scholars we would find who were interested in popular music and film, or how many would venture into unpredictable territories. We were surprised and delighted with the response we got. It was exciting to discover that there were so many

20 OVERTURE 9 people writing about film and popular music and that they were working on such a variety of topics. We got exactly what we wanted and more than we could have hoped for. The essays in Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music deal with films and music from India, France, England, Australia, and the United States. Essays cover material from the silent era to the present, in illustrated song slides, musicals, dramatic films, documentaries, rockumentary, and biopics. Writers consider the functions of diegetic songs in dramatic films, nondiegetic scores, uses of and representations of playback technology, and extratextual and intertextual relationships between film and radio and film and soundtrack albums. Categories of popular music discussed include country, teenybopper pop, disco, swing, jazz, classical, Bhangra music, French cabaret music, and showtunes; music by composers Henry Mancini and George Gershwin, and by artists Johnny Hartman, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, the Monkees, Bing Crosby, and Loretta Lynn. The first four essays, grouped together under the heading Popular vs. Serious, each in different ways explore the often false distinctions between popular and classical music, low and high culture, commercialism and art. In Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition, Rick Altman recovers the lost history of illustrated song slides to suggest the origins of popular song-oriented accompaniment practices of early cinema, practices that carried over into Hollywood s sound era and still operate today. Altman s essay sorts through the differences and points of overlap between popular and classical film scores and provides a backdrop for the essays that follow. Priscilla Barlow complicates our understanding of what counts as popular and offers a key example of classical music being appropriated as popular in the 1930 film L Age d or, acollaborativeworkbyluis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. Barlow argues that Buñuel used the most irreproachably bourgeois music one can imagine familiar classical music such as Beethoven s Fifth Symphony to scandalize and shock bourgeois audiences and break down distinctions between high and low culture. Nonetheless, she claims, Buñuel unwittingly reinforced artificial hierarchical divisions between upper and lower classes and between serious and popular music. Addressing the frequent dismissal of much popular music as frivolous, Murray Pomerance s essay elaborates on the importance of the seemingly disposable song Que Sera, Sera (What Will Be, Will Be) in Hitchcock s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Superficially, Que Sera, Sera seems