Music For the Movies: The Hollywood Sound, Bernard Hermann, Georges Delerue, and Toru Takemitsu

These four 1990s documentaries attempt to give the layman some understanding of how film scores work. One does so magnificently, while the others have problems, though each has something for anyone interested in the history of movie music. Such a person should watch the four in the following order.

Joshua Waletsky's The Hollywood Sound -- the longest at 85 minutes; the others run 58 minutes -- examines scores from the 1930s and 1940s by Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin, and David Raksin (where's Miklos Rosza?). Musicians who worked with them, other composers, and a music scholar comment, as does John Mauceri, the film's host and the conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at the time. Roughly a third of the documentary involves Mauceri conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in recreations of the featured scores.

The best parts are Mauceri's memories of discovering movie music through Franz Waxman's theme for the Flash Gordon serials, originally composed for The Bride of Frankenstein, the strong case made for the seriousness of this music (especially Steiner's), a sad account of how the studios neglected and even destroyed the scores in their archives, and Raksin himself. A familiar presence in movie documentaries until his death in 2004, Raksin is a delightful storyteller, especially about his dealings with Otto Preminger on Laura. We should all be so spry and lucid at 83. The weakest part is watching Mauceri conduct. Surely, the best case for the validity of the music would be hearing it in context. Instead, Waletsky constantly cuts between film clips and the orchestra.

I would dearly love for Bernard Herrmann to be the best of the bunch. He is, after all, the greatest film composer ever. Alas, Waletsky, lets us down again. There are some interesting comments by James G. Stewart (sound mixer on Citizen Kane), Claudine Bouche (editor of The Bride Wore Black), Paul Hirsch (editor of Sisters), Lucille Fletcher (Herrmann's former wife and the author of Sorry, Wrong Number), music scholar Royal S. Brown, Elmer Bernstein, Martin Scorsese, and Claude Chabrol. The best commentator is the ubiquitous Raksin, who says Herrmann's "dark tone" has been widely copied and calls the temperamental composer "a virtuoso of unspecific anger." Much of the doc focuses on how difficult Herrmann could be.

Herrmann cavorts in home movies and discusses his work in 1966 and 1972 interviews. Most touching is footage of Francois Truffaut at a recording session for The Bride Wore Black, replacing the music Herrmann composed for a key scene with a Vivaldi guitar piece. We see the scene with both pieces. When the Vivaldi version is over, Truffaut abruptly indicates that his choice is better than the composer's and walks away, leaving the humiliated Bennie with slumped shoulders.

Though Bernard Herrmann was nominated for a best documentary feature Oscar, it is finally disappointing and not just because of Philip Bosco's cloying narration ("The name is not particularly familiar," he begins). With the length and quality of Herrmann's career, it's just too superficial, focusing on only a handful of films, while ignoring too many notable scores: All That Money Can Buy (his only Oscar winner), The Trouble with Harry, The Birds, his entire Fox period, his science fiction and fantasy scores, etc. Even Vertigo, arguably his greatest score, appears only in the closing credits. Herrmann and his many fans deserve better.

The worst of the lot is Jean-Louis Comolli's annoyingly low-tech Georges Delerue, which gives no sense of the composer's greatness. We watch as Oliver Stone, Ken Russell, and several editors -- including Bouche -- talk about working with Delerue. These interviews are presented in a random order, beginning with a rather dour Stone watching a tape of Salvador on what appears to be a hotel lounge monitor. The others watch clips on editing machines, interspersed with an anonymous pair of hands leafing through movie stills (hurry up, we keep shouting). While Bouche talks agreeably about Truffaut wanting his music to be expressive, no one explains the longtime collaboration between the composer and the director.

The best commentator is Russell who, in 1966, made Don't Shot the Composer, a Delerue documentary that mocked too-serious BBC films about composers. Russell explains how Delerue saw the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love as the center of the film, composing an especially dramatic piece only for the director to replace it with music written for an earlier scene. Such anecdotes are, unfortunately, rare.

Best by far is Charlotte Zwerkin's Toru Takemitsu, excelling as a portrait of an artist and an explanation of his art. Filmed two years before Takemitsu's death in 1996, this film offers interviews with the composer, several directors, and scholar Donald Richie. Shohei Imamura, Masaki Kobayashi, Nagisa Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda, and Hiroshi Teshigahara speak eloquently about how the composer enhanced their films. The film is edited almost as if Takemitsu is responding to their comments. He also discusses how during the eight years Akira Kurosawa worked on Ran, the director changed his mind constantly about the kind of music he wanted.

Takemitsu says that Japanese films used only western instruments before he pioneered traditional Japanese instruments. During a recording session, we see several of these strange stringed and percussion instruments. Takemitsu considered himself a sound designer as much as a composer, electronically distorting the music for Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes and using the cracking of wood in Kobayashi's Kwaidan. He talks about his effort to find the erotic in music and the influence of Japanese gardens ("I write music by placing objects in my musical garden"). Takemitsu laments that he seemed to be involved mainly in films about murder and suicide when he preferred comedies.

Of these four Music For the Movies documentaries, Zwerkin's gives us the best understanding of how movie music is created and how it works within the context of a film. -- Michael Adams