Unfortunately, this cue was replaced by a similar piece—not by Fried—when the short film went into franchise. Most existing versions of the film feature this other music. When asked about this change, Fried had no explanation: “Somebody, for some reason, replaced the original music.”11 The “Gloved Gladiators” theme exists in its entirety on two compilation albums (see appendix C), so one can still enjoy Fried’s triumphant fanfare.
The uncredited driving march that accompanies the title cards continues throughout the first two minutes of the film, during Kubrick’s exposition on boxing and its popularity. The segment ends with a montage of knockouts from various fights that are accompanied with rat-a-tat brass and worried tremolos. When the narrator asks, at about two minutes in, “But why do they do it? The fighters,” the music changes. The underscore becomes sweeter, with a melody in the strings as Kubrick shows us from where—and from what professions—boxers come. But as we return to the gym to see these men from various walks of life train to fight, once again the music becomes more aggressive to match the rhythmic sounds of punching bags and jumping rope. There is something militaristic—even patriotic—in the music here. Once again, the music changes tone as Kubrick cuts to footage of boxing historian Nathaniel Fleischer, who is flipping through a book about boxing.12 The smooth descending melody once again relies on the strings and the woodwinds for a sweeter sound. There is hardly a need for percussive underscore to accompany Mr. Fleischer’s turning of pages. When Fleischer stops on a particular page, the narrator says, “Let’s take one name out of the book at random. Say, Walter Cartier. What would his story be like?”
Now that we have reached the focal point of the story, Fried’s music enters the soundtrack and reflects the change. The tone darkens considerably as Kubrick shows footage of New York City while the narrator explains that during the day of a big fight, waiting is the hardest part. Fried has the low woodwinds pulse a relentless moderate beat over which the higher woodwinds play slightly dissonant and ominous-sounding chords.13 The low brass adds to this dark mood, which culminates as Walter and his twin brother Vincent take communion at an early mass on the day of the fight. The narrator intones: “It’s important for him to get holy communion in case something should go wrong tonight.” Fried’s music shows hints of doubt, melancholy, and darkness. Boxing is a dangerous sport, he seems to be telling us, but of course, that is what makes it so intriguing to its audience. The tone of the Look feature on Cartier struck a similar mood. One caption read: “Boxing’s atmosphere discourages gaiety and lightheartedness. The scenes are grim, filled with slashing blows of leather on flesh.”
Kubrick found ways to bring contrast into the film, as did Fried. In an interlude, Vincent makes breakfast for Walter. The short cue is in a major key, underscoring the neutral activity of breakfast as the narrator explains that Vincent—who lives out of town—stays with Walter before big fights. Vincent, in addition to being a lawyer, is also Walter’s manager. Kubrick seems to want to stress their connection, the sweetness of their relationship, and Walter’s gentleness (he is later seen playing with a dog)14 to bring a sharp contrast to the violence of Walter’s day job. This gentle theme is played by the oboe (with harmony provided by the other woodwinds).
Example 1.2. Gentle theme from Day of the Fight.
As Walter is examined by a physician, the music again takes a darker turn that continues through Walter’s lunch at a steakhouse owned by a friend. According to the narrator, the time is four o’clock, and there are still six long hours to the fight. Fried’s music becomes a bit more anxious, especially in the sequence where Kubrick shows Walter’s “tools of [the] trade”: gloves, robe, ice pack, shorts, tape. The cue at the end of this sequence gives way to tense music with a driving, percussive beat in the woodwinds and brass. The music grows to a fever pitch as the narrator explains Walter’s necessary transformation as fight time approaches:
Walter isn’t concerned with the hands of the clock now, just his own hands. As he gets ready to walk out there in the arena, in front of the people, Walter is slowly becoming another man. This is the man who cannot lose, who must not lose. The hard movements of his arms and fists are different from what they were an hour ago. They belong to a fierce new person. They’re part of the Arena Man: the fighting machine that the crowd outside has paid to see in fifteen minutes.
The pulse of the music at this point has gotten faster, louder, and higher in pitch. But once Walter walks out to enter the ring, Kubrick makes an interesting choice. The underscore disappears, as does the narrator, and the sound of the arena becomes the soundtrack. Because the music has been constant, the ambient noise of the fight draws the audience in. We hear the announcer on the tinny microphone (in typical announcer-speak, he introduces “Walter Car-teer”), the clang of the bell, the cheers and whistles of the crowd, and the sounds of the gloves hitting their targets. The fight becomes real, and the audience experiences it in real time. For the fight itself, Kubrick and Singer both shot from different angles—so as not to lose any footage—and Singer caught Cartier’s knockout of his opponent while Kubrick was reloading.15 As Cartier’s opponent Bobby James hits the canvas, Fried’s score starts again, cymbals heralding the “Gloved Gladiators” cue—which makes its first and only appearance here, and in truncated form—before the referee has even finished counting to ten. The narration returns for a brief comment to neatly tie things up, and Fried’s music ends with a triumphant major chord and crash of the cymbals. Fried led the nineteen musicians well and achieved a tight score for the project. He would go on to score more newsreels for RKO, and indeed his career as a composer for film and television was quite successful thereafter. He continued to work with Stanley Kubrick, scoring the director’s first four features.
After the successful completion of Day of the Fight, Kubrick went on to do another short for RKO called The Flying Padre, this time for the Screenliner series. The score for this film was written by Nathaniel Shilkret, a successful composer and instrumentalist who worked for RKO-Pathé. This short is the story of two days in the life of Father Fred Stadtmueller, a priest who commutes among his eleven parishes in New Mexico by Piper Cub airplane.
Synopsis and Score Description for The Flying Padre
For the opening shot, Kubrick shows a beautiful vista and the skies over what we assume must be Harding County, New Mexico. This is accompanied by the voiceover and Shilkret’s pleasant music. Because of the location of Father Stadtmueller’s parishes and the population he serves, Shilkret composed a lively opening that echoes some of the Latino-inspired local music. We see footage of Father Stadtmueller flying his plane, the Spirit of St. Joseph, both from inside the cockpit, and from the ground. As the Flying Padre goes in for a landing, Kubrick is sure to let the audience hear the sounds of a herd of cattle that must move out of the way for Stadtmueller’s descending plane. When Father Stadtmueller lands in Gallegos to perform a funeral mass, the music becomes more solemn, entering into a minor key to accompany the footage of the simple funeral procession. As Father Stadtmueller returns to his main parish in Mosquero for evening devotions, the score brightens up. The accompanying music for his actions on the altar includes heavenly chords on a harp. When a young girl visits the priest after breakfast the next morning, Shilkret features a playful melody with accents on a solo guitar, suggesting folk music. As Father Stadtmueller rushes to fly to a woman fifty miles away with a sick child, the music becomes quick and apprehensive. As he arrives, landing in a field, the music becomes grand, nearly triumphant. He prepares to take mother and child to Tucumcari where an ambulance waits. Kubrick and Shilkret build tension here, but once the plane lands in Tucumcari, we breathe a sigh of relief that Father Stadtmueller has saved the day. The final shot is taken from the ambulance as it drives away, leaving Father Stadtmueller and his plane to recede into the distance.
Unlike Douglas Edwards’s narration in Day of the Fight, Bob Hite’s narration is less stylized and more pleasant. There is no noir poetry here,
and there is no darkness in either the shots or Shilkret’s music. It is a businesslike affair that gets the job done, although there is little to suggest elements of Kubrick’s style that we have come to expect. The music is a bit clichéd at times, even mimicking the actions on-screen with musical gestures (for example, an ascending melody accompanying the rising airplane), a practice that has come to be called, “mickey-mousing.”
Kubrick’s third short, The Seafarers, was a documentary for the Seafarers International Union, Atlantic and Gulf Coast District AFL. Because the work was produced on such a small budget, the music for the film is stock. It is an innocuous background score with the main purpose of filling in sound in between sections of narration. The film explains the benefits of joining the union, including medical benefits, insurance, and a place to socialize with other seafaring men when ashore. Will Chasan wrote the copy and Don Hollenbeck narrated the film. This short was often omitted from filmographies of Kubrick until the mid-1970s, when Gene Phillips mentioned it in a monograph about Stanley Kubrick. Phillips learned of it from Frank Tomasulo, the audio-visual director of the Seafarers International Union. When Tomasulo began the job, he asked to see all of the previous AV materials for the union and was shocked to see that “the” Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the film.16 The film remained lost to the general public until recently, when Alexander Pietrzak bought the rights to the film from the Seafarers Union and released the short on DVD.
First Features
Kubrick’s first feature was Fear and Desire. Intending to produce the film without the financial support of a studio, Kubrick raised about $10,000 from family and friends. Before shooting began, Kubrick told an interviewer at the New York Journal-American, “I’m very certain we can do it for $50,000. The answer is careful planning. We have worked out every scene, every shot. There will be no writers, producers, directors or art directors to contend with. There won’t be any time lost in argument or discussion. There will be only one boss—me.”17 The production ended up costing about $53,000 in the final tally. Shooting the film without synched sound—a decision Kubrick thought would save money—actually added a great deal to the cost of the film. Kubrick said of the decision, “The dubbing was a big mistake on my part; the actual shooting cost of the film was nine thousand dollars but because I didn’t know what I was doing with the soundtrack it cost me another thirty thousand.”18 Investor Richard de Rochemont (whose older brother created The March of Time newsreel series) helped Kubrick deal with the costs of post-production, including paying part of the fees for the twenty-three musicians who played on the score. After Fear and Desire, de Rochemont gave Kubrick a job shooting second unit footage for a television series on Abraham Lincoln. One of the main investors in the film was Kubrick’s uncle, Martin Perveler. Perveler was a wealthy man who owned a couple of drugstores in California, and he believed in Kubrick’s talent. After asking for—and not getting—a multipicture deal with his nephew, Perveler settled for an associate producer credit on this single film. Kubrick chose Gerald Fried to compose the score. Fried had grand designs for the music.
The music was supposed to mourn the world’s innocence. . . .This movie was supposed to say everything. There were going to be no more movies after this. So I had to be sophisticated, profound yet emphatic with the fate of us poor human beings. So it had to be important, profound, meaningful, touching, despairing but yet triumphant. I thought it was pretty good at the time.19
A review of the film in the New York Post said, “The musical score is considered especially important, since it runs the gamut of the film drama’s expression.”20
Fear and Desire was released in theaters on 31 March 1953. Despite Kubrick’s intense work on the film, reviews were mixed. A review in the New York Mirror said, “Kubrick is at his best with the camera. He shows flashes of brilliance, then spoils the impact with repetition.”21 Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Mark Van Doren wrote a blurb for the film that was quoted in many ads. It read, in part, “A brilliant and unforgettable film. Everything contributes to a total effect that is both serious and original, and to a suspense that nothing ever breaks.”22 John McCarten of the New Yorker expressed a contrary viewpoint, calling Fear and Desire “almost a classic piece of malarkey.”23
In this film, four soldiers from an unnamed army are in an unnamed war against an unnamed enemy. The characters are of the type often seen in war movies, the leader who guides through intellect (Lieutenant Corby), the passionate, brave, if impetuous sergeant (Mac24), the young, impressionable newbie (Private Sydney), and a character whose most pronounced feature is a southern accent (Private Fletcher). Caught behind enemy lines, this quartet makes a plan to build a raft and float downriver to their own territory. Their plans are complicated by the discovery of an enemy base and by the presence of a woman who accidentally finds them.
Synopsis and Score Description for Fear and Desire
The film opens with a cue called “Meditation on War.” It begins with a lonely solo line played slowly, and with much rhythmic freedom, by the bassoon:
Example 1.3. Meditation on War.
Soon, low strings accompany the line while the title cards flash on-screen. The musical lines descend, giving the sense of things getting worse and more desperate. The title cards for Fried’s name and Kubrick’s name are accented with military-like brass horn calls. The music has gradually grown loud and frantic, but the score softens as the narrative begins with a voiceover:
There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, or one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.
At the end of the voiceover, plane noise takes over from the score and blurs the line between the low rumbling of the soundtrack and the engine sound. There is no music during the exposition of the plot, as Fletcher explains the soldiers’ position; all we hear in the background is distant gunfire. The characters hear rustling in the woods and find a dog with a collar. Sydney, who is gentle and kind, pets the dog, but Corby shoos the dog away. As the men head toward the river Corby warns, “Some more animals might show up,” a line that is greeted with a string-heavy sting complete with pizzicato and tremolos over a woodwind chord progression. Both Kubrick and Fried are foreshadowing the appearance of the woman (she’s called a “strange half-animal girl” in the advertisements, but she seems human enough, even if she doesn’t understand their language or speak very much).
The sting cue continues with tremolos underscoring a cue that seems to reflect both the passing of time (there is a “tick tock” feel to the melody) and the relentless forward motion of the men:
Example 1.4. Tick Tock Cue.
Fried’s contrapuntal music continues, accompanying the overlapping voiceovers of the soldiers as we hear the thoughts of each of them. Their thoughts range from the simple “Getting hungry” to the fearful “No dying in the woods!” to the paranoid “Are they watching me?” The soldiers come upon a road. The score is silent, as are the men, as they wait to see if they can cross. Mac goes up ahead to see if the coast is clear. He signals the men over and the scene fades to black. The transition to the new scene—by the river—is accompanied by a brief musical cue.
Mac spots a small airstrip and a base some ways in the distance. They ignore it for the moment, and finish building the raft they’ll take down the river after dark. An enemy plane flies overhead, forcing them into the woods, and they come upon a house where enemy soldiers are eating dinner. They decide to ambush the house and take the weapons inside. Fried’s tense and fast-moving music accompanies the attack, but only as far as the door of the house. Once the soldiers enter, the music stops and, like Day of the Fight, the sound of the struggle is the only soundtrack. The four soldiers kill the two men in the house and take
their weapons. A third enemy soldier enters a few minutes later and is shot by Mac. Worried about the noise of the gunshot, three of the men leave the house, but the lieutenant stays behind, looking at the dead men. We hear his voiceover, accompanied by low sounds in the orchestra:
We spend our lives running our fingers down the lists and directories, looking for our real names, our permanent addresses. No man is an island? Perhaps that was true a long time ago, before the ice age. The glaciers have melted away and now we’re all islands. Parts of a world made of islands only.
The next day, the men return to the river to find their raft. When a native girl sees them, Mac grabs her to keep her from screaming. They decide to tie her to a tree with their belts to prevent her from running to the enemy base and giving them away. Sydney is put in charge of watching her while the others go to check on the raft. As the other men leave him, Sydney begins to slowly unravel. He remembers the ambush to get the guns and the brutality of his fellow soldiers. In the score, the double bass plays low notes as two lines in the clarinets—one low and one high—echo each other. Soon, a bassoon joins in, as does a violin. Sydney’s parody of the general—to make the girl smile—is accompanied by mocking waltz in the woodwinds. As he drifts further and further from sanity, his unstable mental state is represented in the music by ascending and descending glissandos in the trombone and violin.
The other three find the raft, which does not appear to be surrounded by the enemy. Mac looks around some more, observing the enemy general through binoculars. He begins to become obsessed with killing him. There is no musical underscore for this scene, but the music returns as the scene changes to Sydney trying to entertain the girl. His efforts become more desperate and cloying. He tells her a story about a magician,25 and the music reflects what she must see in him—growing insanity—although she does not appear as frightened as one might expect. The meter and rhythm of the music suggest a courtly dance, but the dissonance of the harmonies tells us that something is wrong with this courtship.
Listening to Stanley Kubrick Page 2