Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance 9780520960015

Table of contents :
Online Film Clips
Acknowledgments
Contents
1. Introduction
2. A Lesson with Eisenstein
3. Mickey Mousing Reconsidered
4. Lubitsch and Mamoulian
5. Dialogue Timing and Performance in Hawks
6. Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

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ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION

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and 4; in bar 3 the three descending eighth notes are off the third beat because of the tie. The second section, bars 5 through 11, consists of repetitions of the pleading leitmotif, which begins in bar 5 on E-flat.39 Not only is this motive given a prominent place in Ivan’s address to the boyars, but it also figures at the end of the scene, during Anastasia’s wordless appeal to Kurbsky. The timbre of the bass or cello really shines in this motive, and in the film it is often heard without any verbal overlay. It is played twice (bars 6 and 7). Then, after a crescendo on the five ascending eighth notes in bar 9, it repeats in bars 10 and 11, now raised in pitch by a fourth and played louder than before. Both the change in pitch and the dynamic markings suggest an escalation in the performance of the theme. The rhythm in this section of the melody reinforces the meter. The third section of the theme, bars 11 through 15, begins with an upbeat in bar 11. It is characterized by ascending half steps (high B–C) followed by three low notes, also in half-step increments (low C–CK–C). This section is softer and more relaxed and leads to a cadence on C. Although bars 12 and 13 would seem to preserve the rhythmic accents on beats 1 and 3 (dotted quarter on beat 1 and accented quarter on beat 3), this is complicated by the fact that the C-sharp on beat 3 is a leading note that moves to C, the tonal center of the phrase, on beat 4. The rhythmic accents thus fall on beats 1 and 4 for bars 12 and 13. The melodic structure and meter come into congruence again at the cadence in bars 14 and 15.40

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This analysis suggests that the schemas for audiovisual montage in Ivan the Terrible laid out by Eisenstein do not do justice to the role played by the music track in producing effects of enjambment. By placing his montage against Prokofiev’s score in this scene, Eisenstein is virtually assured that subtle displacements from, and periodic realignments with, the musical meter permeate the scene as a whole. I think it is no exaggeration to say that the music provides him with this device in a continuous, repeated form.41 It remains to detail the ways in which speech, music, and movement are aligned with musical rhythm or work independently as rhythmic elements.

Ivan Gets Out of Bed Let us examine how Eisenstein syncs up movement, speech, and editing with the melodic line in the second repetition of the theme (the following discussion dovetails with the marked transcription in fig. 20 and clip 4). If we look at how the film is edited relative to the music, we see most cuts respect the rhythmic and melodic groupings in Prokofiev’s score (the cuts to shots 15, 16, 17, 18, 19). With the cut to shot 19, for example, Eisenstein cuts before the end of the bar so that the E-flat that begins the pleading motive remains in continuity with the succeeding notes. Exceptions to this rule may be found in the cuts to shots 14, 20, and 21, which interrupt either half steps (14, 21) or a group of ascending notes (20). I discuss the subtle discontinuity represented by these cuts in more detail below. The end of shot 13 (following the exit of Efrosinia and Vladimir) shows Ivan looking off left in their direction to the accompaniment of the upbeat in the first bar. There is an axial cut-in to a medium shot of Ivan and Anastasia on the first dotted quarter note in bar 2 (figs. 21 and 22). Over the course of this shot, 07:22, Ivan turns in the opposite direction to address himself to the other boyars to his right (fig. 23). This action is effectively coextensive with the first two half steps in bar 2 and the sixteenth notes and dotted quarter in bar 3. Thus, the first cut, the rhythmically jolting axial cut-in on Ivan, coincides with the interruption of the first ascending half step of the cue. This measured discontinuity then gives way to a coherent phrase. We get three short two-second graphically matched shots of boyars returning Ivan’s look (figs. 24 to 26): the first coincides with the descending eighth notes at the end of bar 3, the second with the ascending half step at the beginning of bar 4, and the third with the ascending half step that completes the measure. The return to Ivan in shot 18 (fig. 27) is also accompanied by a half step so that the last two shots of the boyars and the shot of the czar are accented in the same way by the music (du-DAH, du-DAH, du-DAH). A crescendo also

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figure 20. Pleading theme with shot and dialogue breakdown.

@  @ @ @  »

1

End 13

± K

MLS Ivan 18 Synu krest tseluite

3

Ivan looks left 14 Axial cut-in Ivan turns right

@   @ @@ K     

5

G  

G   @  K  2

6

   

15

4 G    K    K 

Boyar 1

Boyar 2 Boyar 3 16 17

7 8 G G KK K  K  K  K      (     (       

19 Axial cut-in Ivan leans

Tokmo vlast’ edinokrovnaia edinaia Moskvu

20 MLS Ivan stands ogradit ot Ne to tatary vorogov ot ras - prei

12        K  @  @ @ 10  ( 11  @@    K   K     ( (

9

21 ELS Ivan out of bed snova livontsy vtorgnutsia po - liaki dvinutsia

@   @ @@ 

13

ne za syna proshu

K G   K  22 Ivan sinks to knees

Ivan advances to camera

Ne za sebia

K  K   Æ 

14

Ob edinstve

K G   K  Ivan turns right

15

KÆ

G± œ  Ivan falls off

frame

russkoi zemli moliu

conjoins the last two shots of the boyars with the cut back to Ivan. On the last and the loudest of the three ascending half steps, Ivan sits up and speaks at high volume: “Synu krest tseluite!” (Kiss the cross to my son!). Despite the important rhythmic quality of the editing here, note that this small subsegment of the action is not defined exclusively by the shot breaks. The subsegment is initiated musically with the upbeat heard at the end of shot 13, and by the action of Cherkasov turning his head to look in the direction of the boyars in shot 14. It is closed off in the middle of shot 18, when the musical phrase reaches its highest point, and is capped off by Ivan’s words. Thus, all of the formal parameters of the film—sound, movement, and cutting—are interwoven to define a rhythmically coherent subsegment or phrase. In the next section Ivan gets up, a process staged across shots 18 to 21. Cherkasov rises in stages, a pattern of upward movement periodically interrupted by the gesture of leaning back. Eisenstein expands the duration of

figure 21. Shot 13 (end). figure 22. Shot 14 (beginning).

figure 23. Shot 14 (end). figure 24. Shot 15.

figure 25. Shot 16. figure 26. Shot 17.

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figure 27. Shot 18 (midshot).

this movement, and emphasizes it, by axial cuts matched on movement. Shot 18 thus works like a hinge between two different levels of the audiovisual sync. As noted above, it works with the music to complete the first phrase of the melodic line and the first interchange of looks between Ivan and the boyars, but, at the level of character movement, it also initiates the action of getting out of bed. After pulling himself up to an upright sitting posture and uttering his line in shot 18, Cherkasov begins to lean back against Ludmila Tselikovskaya (playing Anastasia). Eisenstein cuts, and the action is completed in shot 19, an axial cut-in to close-up (fig. 28). The actor leans until the end of the shot, when he abruptly moves upward in the frame. Again, there is a cut on movement to shot 20, an axial cut-back into medium long shot showing Ivan standing on the bed supported by Anastasia, who also stands (fig. 29). For the second time, the actor leans back until the end of the shot, when Cherkasov propels himself forward, right arm outstretched, and Eisenstein again cuts on movement. Shot 21 (fig. 30), an axial cut-back to extreme long shot (somewhat closer than shot 4), shows him standing rather unsteadily in the space in front of the bed.

figure 28. Shot 19 (near beginning). figure 29. Shot 20 (near beginning).

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figure 30. Shot 21 (near beginning).

The distribution of words and music across this movement adds greatly to the effect. The cut to shot 19, the close-up of Ivan with Anastasia behind him, coincides precisely with the beginning of the pleading motive. Cherkasov’s leaning action is synched with the high E in bar 5 and the eighth-note figure that follows; the initiation of the pleading motive is thus made clearly audible. Cherkasov then speaks, largely in rhyme and with each phrase slightly louder than the last. Over the dotted quarter note (F-sharp) in bar 6: “Tokmo vlast’ edinaia” (Only the power undivided); over the second eighth-note figure in bar 7: “Edinokrovnaia” (power of the same stock/blood); over the dotted quarter note (F-sharp) in bar 7: “Moskvu” (Moscow) and the next phrase “ogradit ot vorogov” (will guard from enemies). The cut to shot 20 interrupts the three other elements of the audiovisual montage: the first ascending half step in bars 7 and 8, the phrase “ot rasprei” (from quarrels), and Ivan’s movement of standing. Although continuity of sound and movement is often used to smooth over cuts in the classical Hollywood cinema, this does not happen in this case. Within the terms of the classical continuity system, cuts along or near the lens axis such as Eisenstein typically employs are considered rough and potentially disruptive.42 The

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slight jolt produced by Eisenstein’s axial cut in the transition from shot 19 to shot 20 goes through the multiple layers of synchronized elements like a toothpick piercing a sandwich: it disrupts and therefore accents all of the unfolding temporal strands. The next ascending half step is followed by Ivan’s phrase “Ne to tatary” (Without it the Tartars), during which he leans back again. The end of the phrase “snova vtorgnutsia” (will again invade) coincides with the beginning of the rising eighth-note pitches at the end of bar 9. The cut to shot 21 is also a “toothpick” cut. It occurs on G, before the completion of the rising chromatic passage at the end of bar 9 and just before the high A-flat that leads into the pleading motive in bar 10. In addition it interrupts the phrase “Poliaki dvinutsia” (Poles will encroach) and Cherkasov’s leap to the floor. Moreover, as noted above, the eighth notes at the end of bar 9 build in pitch and volume to the most intense statement of the pleading motive. Ivan’s movement out of bed thus coincides precisely with both the litany of Russia’s most dangerous enemies and the dramatic high point of the music cue. After the cut Cherkasov puts his right forearm to his forehead, staggers back, and completes the recitation of threats: “livontsy” (Livonians). He lowers the arm and advances toward the camera, arms bent up at the elbows. The pleading motive is heard for the fourth time (bar 11), without any dialogue and with volume diminishing, as he moves toward the camera. The systematic coordination of montage elements, accented by the disruptive “toothpick” cuts between shots 19 and 20, and 20 and 21, lead me to argue against a narrow interpretation of the music as simply “imitating” the shape of the character’s movement, that is, the claim that the rising pitch and volume of the music in bar 9 is mickey-moused with Ivan getting out of bed.43 All four of the temporal strands of the audiovisual montage build to the point where Ivan stands, and the pleading motive is heard at its highest pitch and loudest volume. The music softens, and the dense texture of the montage thins and slows at the point where Cherkasov approaches the camera. But this change in rhythm and tempo is used to underscore an even more emphatic moment. Having moved into medium-shot framing, Cherkasov speaks directly to the camera. Shot 21 is a relatively long take (17:06) compared to shot 18 (04:03), shot 19 (11:15) and shot 20 (07:10). Speech alternates with movement, and both are spaced out in a one-to-one relationship with the rhythmic figures in the score. On the first ascending half step (bars 11–12), Cherkasov turns right into profile, head tilted upward. The phrase “Ne za

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sebia” (not for myself) coincides with the low C–CK–C. He angles his body to look right, in three-quarter view (fig. 31). On the second ascending half step he speaks, “Ne za syna proshu” (Not for my son I ask). A cut to medium close-up, initially showing only Ivan’s torso, is followed by the low C–CK–C. Cherkasov sinks slowly to his knees in front of the camera and is framed left, looking up right in three-quarter view (fig. 32). He leans forward. On the eighth-note figure in bar 14, he speaks: “Ob edinstve” (For the unity); and on the half-note C-sharp: “Russkoi zemli moliu” (of the Russian land I beg). The words are rhymed in coordination with the musical cadence: “moliu” at the end of shot 21 rhymes with “proshu” at the end of shot 22, which is immediately followed by the final C in bar 15. This strong point of closure is accented even more by the actor’s gesture: Cherkasov lifts his left hand and then sinks below the bottom of the frame.

The Coda Much could be done with the third and fourth repetitions of the theme, where Ivan addresses the boyars by name, often while lying or sitting on the floor, the action staged and shot in a series of mind-boggling eyeline matches and entrances and exits that use all four sides of the frame. But in the interests of making comparisons with the earlier section, I will move to the end of the segment, to the point where Ivan curses the boyars, climbs on the bed, and collapses. Although the actor’s movement during the curse is similar to the section in which he gets out of bed, the montage is faster and the mix certainly louder. Dramatic changes in rhythm and tempo lend great power to this moment, the narrative apex of the scene. The shots get progressively shorter across the course of the section leading to Ivan’s collapse: shot 35 (08:15), shot 36 (06:18), shot 37 (04:07), shot 38 (03:13), shot 39 (03:22), shot 40 (03:08), shot 41 (03:05). In addition Eisenstein uses more disjunctive axial cutting. When Ivan got out of bed, Eisenstein simply enlarged the field of view, cutting from close-up to medium long shot to extreme long shot. But when Ivan collapses, Eisenstein cuts from medium long shot to close-up and back again. So, as Cherkasov climbs up on the bed, the framing moves in and out along the lens axis. The sound track is not synched with this jolting acceleration of the editing tempo; instead, it is structured by fairly abrupt changes in the volume and timbre of the music. The pleading motive is initiated in shot 35, with Ivan stretched out on the floor, and continues in shot 36 as he sits up and begins cursing the boyars: “Vo vse vremena” (Forever). The music quickly fades out after this line, however, and the following phrases “za to

figure 31. Shot 21 (near end). figure 32. Shot 22.

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prokliaty” (for this cursed) and “budete” (you’ll be) are heard without accompaniment. As Cherkasov starts to rise, new music is introduced. It begins softly in the strings with no determinant direction. (The music heard in the film here differs from the coda in the published score.) The brass enter about eleven frames before an axial cut-in to close-up. Fifteen frames after the cut, the film music comes into accordance with the published score at bar 48. The first of several pronounced sforzando chords accentuates the downbeats.44 The first chord (E–AK–G) is held over Ivan’s words “Russkoi zemli predateli” (To the Russian land, traitors). Eisenstein cuts back to shot 38, a medium long shot, which shows Ivan on his feet. The next line, a repetition of “Vo vse vremena” (Forever), coincides with the downbeat chord of 49 (E–B–G–DJ). As Cherkasov leaps upward, Eisenstein cuts in to a low-angle close-up of Ivan as he stands on what appears to be the platform that supports the bed. The cut interrupts, and stresses, the repetition of the phrase “za to prokliaty” (for this cursed). The downbeat chord of bar 50 (E–B–G) is held over the repetition of the word “budete” (you’ll be) enunciated at very high volume. The cut to shot 40, an axial cut-back to medium long shot as Ivan leans and begins to fall, is sandwiched between the third and fourth beats of this bar, an effect emphasized by a ritard. The fall is integrated within a pattern of descending notes in the bass that lead from E to C (EJ–DJ–CK–C). This progression is brought to a halt on C-sharp when the music cuts out for about a beat (eight frames) before the cut to shot 41, the prone Ivan, and the first of three soft iterations of the final C-minor chord. It is important to note that the acceleration in cutting rate is not the sole determinant of the rhythm and tempo of this dramatic high point. The escalation of tension is also achieved by pronounced discontinuities in the music track that make sense in relation to Ivan’s language. The shift from the pleading motive to silence serves to heighten key phrases of the curse “za to prokliaty” (for this cursed) and “budete” (you’ll be) by paring down the density of the track. The introduction of blaring brass at high volume, arising with almost no musical preparation, and the way in which the halfnote or dotted-half-note chords on each downbeat impose themselves on the final lines of the curse add further stress to the words. The rhythm and pacing of the music, though not its harmony, recall the lines in Don Giovanni where the Commendatore consigns Don Juan to hell. Thus, while the editing effectively extends and accelerates the actor’s movement, the music provides a weighty and majestic counterpart to the actor’s speech. The contrast between a fast visual and a slow aural tempo seems to be at the heart of Eisenstein’s strategy for this section.

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four provisional conclusions First, take the risk of thinking small. I have followed Eisenstein’s lead in examining audiovisual montage at the level of beat-to-beat relationships. I hope to have demonstrated that this is productive: that rhythm is constructed frame to frame, sync point to sync point, and involves very small durations of a half second or a quarter second. This proposition may seem obvious to anyone who has been involved in editing or scoring film music. Classical Hollywood click tracks measured tempi to fractions of a frame as defined by the sprocket holes, and there are clear indications that composers and editors haggled over durations of five or six frames.45 But it is worth reiterating the importance of very fine-grained analyses given the current emphasis in film studies on statistical measures of shot duration (average shot lengths).46 The shot is often not the ideal vantage point from which to define rhythmic relationships. Shot duration is one parameter among many, and it can be integrated into other levels of audiovisual montage in various ways. Thus, a long take, such as the thirty-four-second one in the opening of the scene with the boyars, may be divided into smaller units of duration by other means—for example, movement and music. In addition, relatively short shots, such as the three matched cuts of the boyars, can be fused into one unit through close synchronization with a unified musical phrase. Second, start with the mix. In the absence of fixed metrical units (with the obvious exception of the music track), the editor and director in conjunction with the composer must define the relevant rhythmic parameters, taking into account the range of possible concatenations of image and sound, and their relationship to the narrative context. Duration is structured through the relationships established among disparate temporal levels: music, dialogue, other sounds, figure movement, camera movement, shot duration. One temporal element may dominate (e.g., music), or there may be a match between two elements (e.g., a procession with march music in back of it), or there may be a calculated disjuncture between two elements (e.g., a procession with music in 43 time). The relationships established among the elements in the mix may define regular or irregular temporal patterns, and they may or may not produce a strongly felt pulse (consider Carl Dreyer’s praise of camera movement for its “fine, soft rhythm”).47 Third, take your tempi where you find them. Tempo can be defined through the pacing of a single, structurally important element (sound, editing, character movement) or through a combination of elements (as the

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mix becomes denser, “more” seems to be happening, and it usually feels faster). Changes in tempo are typically registered “horizontally” in the contrast between one section and the next (e.g., the subsegment in which Ivan moves around the room is faster than the opening confrontation with the Staritskys in which he remains confined to his bed). But differences in tempo can also be registered “vertically” in the contrast between two temporally simultaneous elements (e.g., the contrast between a fast visual and slow aural tempo in the mix leading up to Ivan’s collapse). Finally, the mix is not the whole story. As Gérard Genette has demonstrated, the structure of narrative events contributes powerfully to one’s sense of duration.48 A film that makes extensive use of ellipsis or other devices that collapse story time, or one that employs many scene changes and scenes of short duration, has a relatively fast narrative pace. In contrast, a film that eschews ellipsis and employs a small number of temporally continuous scenes or sequences, such as Ivan the Terrible, has a relatively slow pace. Narrative organization can be pitted against the mix so that one may have both a slow pace and a fast tempo. For example, the famous banquet scene in Ivan, Part II builds gradually to the moment in which Ivan dresses Vladimir as czar, preparing for his murder. The feast is long in terms of screen time with minimal advancement of the plot: Ivan and Vladimir simply drink and talk while the oprichniki dance. However, the density of the mix is very high, with fast cutting, complex choreography, and music, “Dances of the Oprichniki,” marked Allegro ben ritmico, metronome mark Q = 144. Ivan the Terrible is a singular work. A formalist masterpiece masquerading as Stalin-era propaganda, its carefully orchestrated juxtapositions and convergences between music and speech, and image and sound, have few precedents. Perhaps only the Disney Silly Symphonies so beloved by Eisenstein achieve a similar level of integration of musical structure, editing and figure movement, and narrative development. But precisely because it carries its organizing principles to such extremes, Eisenstein’s work has much to teach us about the construction of rhythm and tempo in filmmaking more generally.

3. Mickey Mousing Reconsidered I do not believe there was much thought given to the music as one thing and the animation as another. I believe we conceived of them as elements which we were trying to fuse into a whole new thing that would be more than simply movement plus sound. —wilfred jackson

One of the earliest sound genres to achieve thoroughgoing rhythmic organization was the animated cartoon, which, as is well known, came to be structured around the music track, a process known as mickey mousing. The term encompasses a number of different aspects of the relationship between music and action, and music and other sounds. Most important for my purposes is the idea of a tight synchronization between movement and/ or cutting and the beat. But, it is also used to refer to the musical imitation of physical movement, as in the use of a glissando when a character slides down a rope. The term is also sometimes applied more generally to any tight integration of music and sound effects, as in the use of what is supposedly a frog’s croak in the place of a bass-line note. As the term suggests, mickey mousing began at Disney; it is evident in the studio’s first cartoon conceived for sound, Steamboat Willie. However, the practice quickly spread to other studios, such as Walter Lantz’s animation unit at Universal and Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising’s company, which was under contract to Leon Schlesinger and released through Warners.1 As Michael Barrier has argued, Disney “set the pattern for what a sound cartoon should be like, that is, dominated by music, and the other studios’ cartoons fit that pattern, however imperfectly.”2 Given Disney’s prominence in pioneering the style of the early sound cartoon, my account is restricted to that studio. The animated cartoon was freed from a number of the constraints on the rhythm of live-action filmmaking in the early years of the transition. In the absence of live actors there was no felt need to capture an authentic and continuous sound record that foregrounded human speech. This, as well as the difficulty of drawing lip movements in sync, meant that dialogue was initially minimized in favor of other elements of the track. In addition animators necessarily conceived of film sound as something they 58

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constructed or synthesized rather than as the result of a direct recording process. Well before the technology for sound editing, rerecording, and mixing became available, animation studios such as Disney’s were postsynchronizing complex combinations of music, effects, and speech in single continuous recording sessions. But although animation allowed, indeed required, that image and sound tracks be produced separately, it also necessitated extensive coordination between them. Jon Newsom has referred to the unforgiving nature of animation, which has to be planned to the frame.3 The various accounts of the production history of Steamboat Willie to be found in Barrier and Newsom revolve around Disney’s innovative strategies for integrating music within this planning process and using it as a guide for timing the finished work. Thus, unlike the music for silent-film accompaniment, ideas about music for the early sound cartoon, and particularly decisions about rhythm and tempo, were operative from the moment of a film’s inception.4 The Disney studio utilized bar sheets, first created by Wilfred Jackson during the animation of Steamboat Willie, to organize the action in relation to the score. Figure 33 shows part of a bar sheet (in this case dubbed a “layout sheet”) for Santa’s Workshop, a Silly Symphony released in 1932. Each square represents a measure, although with all musical notation removed. Writing of the Disney studio’s production methods in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in 1933, William Garity explained: “The director and the musician work hand in hand, measure by measure, frame by frame; each one trying to adjust his particular problem to meet the demands of the story. When the layout sheet is completed, the director has his picture completely laid out to the frame, and the musician his master score to the note. Slight changes may later be made in order to accommodate the exigencies that may arise when the pictures are animated.”5 Many aspects of the production were planned via the bar sheet. Note that in the case of Santa’s Workshop the lyrics are written above the bar, indicating the placement of words in relation to the beat (dialogue was handled the same way). The length of the lap dissolve in bars 18 through 20 is indicated in frames. Similarly the location of cuts is precisely specified; for example, the cut in bar 31 comes eight frames before the end of the measure. More generally, the timing of the animation and tempo of the action is indicated by figures at the beginning of each section, showing the number of beats per bar and number of frames per beat. Thus the title sequence of the film has four beats per bar and twelve frames per beat (4–12s) while the first sequence, showing the preparations being made by the elves, has two beats per bar and sixteen frames per beat (2–16s). Garity

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figure 33. Bar sheet for opening of Santa’s Workshop.

notes that “certain basic tempos, multiples of the frame speed of the film, have been established. For example, the fastest tempo employed is one beat every six frames, amounting to four beats per second. The total range is from this to one beat every twenty frames, or one beat every 5/6ths of a second.”6 In the case of Santa’s Workshop one can hear the tempo change from the titles to the first section of picture. In the first few years of sound-cartoon production the Disney studio (and other studios such as Walter Lantz and Harman-Ising that followed Disney’s lead) produced many films that were synchronized by matching movement, often conceived in repetitive cycles of a fixed number of frames, to the beat and to the bar. Figures 34 through 36 indicate the cyclical organization of movement in thirty-two frames, or one bar, from the second section of Santa’s Workshop. The movement of the elves as they clean the sleigh is animated on twos (each cel was photographed twice). The movement of the large broom is on a thirty-two-frame cycle: at seventeen frames (fig. 36) the broom is directly opposite where it was positioned in frame one (fig. 34). It thus takes a full two beats for the broom to return to its position

figure 34. Santa’s Workshop, frame 1 of cycle. figure 35. Santa’s Workshop, frame 9 of cycle.

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figure 36. Santa’s Workshop, frame 17 of cycle.

in frame one (the action of sweeping is emphasized by a sound effect on the beat). Other movements in the frame occur on shorter cycles. For example, the elves bounce up or down on the beat, requiring only sixteen frames to complete. Michael Barrier has documented the extent to which the collaboration between director and composer was institutionalized at the Disney studio by 1933. Each of the three directors was paired with a composer with whom he normally worked: Wilfred Jackson was paired with Leigh Harline, the newest addition to the music staff; the recently appointed director David Hand was paired with the most senior musician, Bert Lewis; and Burt Gillett was paired with Frank Churchill.7 In an interview with Ross Care, Wilfred Jackson recalled, “In the early and mid-’30’s, the musician usually did not begin his work on a Disney cartoon until the director began to time the action. This was after the story work had all been okayed and the picture was moved from the story (or gag-man’s) room into the director’s music room.”8 The reference to the director’s office as a “music room” stems from the fact that each one contained a piano, strong evidence of the importance of music to the preproduction process.

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figure 37. Transcription of Three Little Pigs score, showing added beat.

 @  @ @ @  K     K   @ @ @  @

 K K     

 Æ  K  K ÆÆ  œ

Æ

    ± ( ± ( ± (  



 K 

Following the completion of the bar sheet, director and composer would fill out an exposure sheet with the action broken down by frames numbered in sequence and with tempo, cuts, and sound effects precisely notated.9 Intended as a guide for the cameraman in shooting the successive frames, it became the equivalent of the continuity script in live-action studio production and was also utilized by animators and musicians. Carl Stalling, who composed the music for Disney’s earliest sound cartoons before leaving the studio in 1930, recalled scoring films from the exposure sheets.10 Similarly, according to Garity, the exposure sheet provided animators with tempi and initial timings, expressed as footage limitations, for the shots and sequences assigned to them.11 Animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston described the process of animating within the constraints of a fixed tempo and proscribed length: “With the metronome running, the moves were tested; how long does the character walk, how many steps does he take, when does he stop, how long is he held?”12 They also recalled negotiations over the final form of the score: There were other times when the animator simply could not put over all the business demanded within the footage limitations imposed by the music, and then the musician would be asked to add just one more little beat to his music—just one? Astounded at this lack of comprehension of the basic mathematical structure of music, the musicians would insist on a full measure, or better yet, a phrase, but that only seemed to add more problems. The action could not be padded by that much. So the “3–12 measure” was invented. To a measure containing two beats, an extra beat was added, creating a measure of three beats. . . . When an animator with a musical background asked how this was possible, he simply was told, “Oh, Churchill knows how to do it!”13

A transcription of the music track for Three Little Pigs reveals the addition of a beat in the scene in which the two frivolous pigs react to the wolf’s destruction of the house of sticks, so evidently such compromises did occur (fig. 37). They were rare, however. The animation in the Disney shorts that

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I have analyzed in detail usually stays within the constraints of a given musical meter, although there are calculated shifts of rhythm and tempo from one narrative segment to the next, to be discussed below. Given that the synchronization had been worked out down to the frame, or 1/24 of a second, maintaining the sync during recording sessions was clearly an issue in the early years of sound cartoon production. Carl Stalling recalled that initially prints were marked with lines that moved on the beat to guide the conductor in the recording process (and he claims that Disney’s first attempt at synchronization, Steamboat Willie, had problems maintaining synchronization of all the elements).14 Stalling first utilized a click track of his own devising to keep the musicians on the beat in The Skeleton Dance in 1929.15 In his article on production methods at Disney, Garity mentions the problem of timing the effects: “To synchronize the orchestra is relatively easy; the greater problem is to synchronize effects, because of their unmusical character and irregular occurrence. The effects man has quite a problem, as he sometimes has on his table dozens of sound production devices, which he must pick up and operate at very definite places in the score.”16 This suggests that in 1932 when Garity’s example, Santa’s Workshop, was in production, they were still recording all the sound in one take and were not building separate effects tracks. I have not been able to date the point at which Disney began to mix multiple effects, dialogue, and music tracks, but it seems from the evidence of the films themselves that they began to do so sometime in 1933; certainly Playful Pluto (1934) has an extremely complicated effects and music track that would have been difficult to record live.17 In the first few years of sound the Disney studio produced many films that were synchronized according to the methods utilized in Santa’s Workshop: movement, often conceived in repetitive cycles, was fitted to the beat, usually animated on twos. The consequent visual emphasis on the rhythm of the music track was often seconded by having dances, songs, or musical performances within the diegesis (note that the elves in Santa’s Workshop are singing). A listing of just a few of the early Disney titles suggests the importance of diegetic performances in these films: Jungle Rhythm, The Barnyard Concert, Monkey Melodies. The prominence accorded to the music track in the early sound cartoons by Disney and other studios, and the very close interpenetration of music and movement, has come in for criticism by historians of animation. Michael Barrier, for example, notes a welcome exception to the mickey mousing tendency in Egyptian Melodies, a Silly Symphony of 1931, in which “remarkably, the trees (animated by Charles Byrne) move not just rhythmically but irregularly, as if struck by a breeze that picks up and dies down.”18 In addition, the

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reliance on animation cycles to match movement and melody, as in the case of Santa’s Workshop, is often unfavorably contrasted with the complex character animation that Disney developed just a few years later. Considered in the historical context of the transition to sound, however, the importance and aesthetic interest of mickey mousing becomes evident. The early Silly Symphonies and Mickey Mouse cartoons should be considered synchronization experiments. They explore and showcase the possibilities the technology opened up through their precise and inventive matches of sound and image. As I suggested in chapter 1, mickey mousing represented a surprising innovation for filmmakers, musicians, and audiences in the 1920s who had been accustomed to the looser and more intermittent forms of matching that could be achieved with the live accompaniment of silent films. Hell’s Bells, a 1929 Silly Symphony directed by Ub Iwerks, with music by Carl Stalling, is indicative of the experimentation characteristic of the early period. The plot of the film is highly episodic. An opening section sets the tone by introducing a succession of monsters, bugs, and ghouls, denizens of Hades who do not recur. In the middle section, the longest and most involved, a succession of musicians and dancers entertain the King Devil. In the final section, the king feeds one of his minions, a small mouse-like creature, to his three-headed dog, a take-off on the mythological figure of Cerberus. A second minion recoils from the king, who gives chase. The film ends with the small creature escaping and the king plummeting off a cliff into the fires of hell. The music track includes highly imitative passages. In the opening section, for example, a large spider swings toward us on the z-axis, accompanied by an ascending chromatic scale; then, as he swings away from us, the scale descends. In addition there are snatches of familiar “light” classics: Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” for the dances in the middle section and Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” and Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” for the final part of the film. Although the time signatures shift across the course of the piece, a constant tempo is set by the animation at twelve frames per beat (the animation is usually, but not always, on twos). The tempo of twelve frames per beat was a common one. Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston quote their colleague Milt Kahl: “Everyone walks on 12s—unless there’s something wrong with them!”19 More pragmatically, twelve frames per beat is a good basic tempo because it is one-half a second of film and readily permits multiple divisions of the beat. In Hell’s Bells the animation on 12s permits easy assimilation of the two basic time signatures: 44 and 86. In the first the quarter note is twelve frames, in the second the dotted quarter is twelve frames.

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figure 38. Transcription of Hell’s Bells chase.

   

          K K 

    





 

 



   

       

This duration is readily divided further into halves, quarters, and thirds (a division that would not be possible if, for example, the animation had been timed to eleven frames per beat). 4 4

time (12 frames per beat) quarter note = 12 frames eighth note = 6 frames sixteenth note = 3 frames

6 8

time (counted in two, 12 frames per beat) dotted quarter note = 12 frames quarter note = 8 frames eighth note = 4 frames

An examination of how animators manipulated these divisions of the beat reveals the complexity of rhythmic organization in the early sound cartoon and permits us to appreciate the aesthetic opportunities that recorded music opened up for filmmakers. The inventiveness of mickey mousing rests on the clever synthesis of music and movement, not the musical mimesis of the depicted action. The King Devil’s pursuit of his minion in the third section begins with an apparently simple run held for four bars of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (fig. 38 shows two of these). The movement is animated on ones, the figures running in cycles with the background scrolling behind them. (The runs are not at all anatomically convincing—it looks as if the moving background is pushing the characters’ legs along.) The king takes one step every twelve frames, following the basic division of the bar into two groups of twelve frames.20 Rhythmically, he steps on quarter notes, each step underscored by a beat on a bass drum. The animators structured this walk with a leap pattern: foot on the ground for frames one to seven, leap for frames eight to eleven, other foot on the ground for frame twelve. The small minion is running four times as fast to keep ahead of the large king. He takes one step every three frames. Rhythmically, he steps on sixteenth notes, each step underscored by a note on the xylophone. (Their respective run cycles may be seen in figures 39 through 41, which show frames one, four,

figure 39. Hell’s Bells chase, frame 1 of the run cycle. figure 40. Hell’s Bells chase, frame 4 of the King’s run cycle.

figure 41. Hell’s Bells chase, frame 10 of the King’s run cycle. figure 42. Hell’s Bells chase, the small minion leaps only on the longer notes in the melodic line.

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and ten of the king’s twelve-frame walk cycle as compared to his minion, who cycles on three frames.) The small minion’s run is structured without leaps in beats that are entirely made up of sixteenth notes. However, in beats with longer note values he leaps in the air at about the same time as his pursuer (fig. 42). For the beats ending in eighth notes the leap pattern is as follows: step on every note for the sixteenth notes; then during the eighth note, step for two frames, leap for three frames, step for one frame. For quarter notes the pattern is step for three frames, leap for eight frames, step for one frame. The run cycles of the respective figures have been arranged so that both are off the ground simultaneously on the longer notes but not for the same number of frames. One might think that such minute differences in movement and timing would not be noticeable to an audience, but the coordination of the leaps with the longer notes infuses the run with the pulse of the music, and the variations in the pacing of the steps creates contrast between the characters and emphasizes the vulnerability of the smaller one. Even more precise slicing and dicing of the beat occurs during one of the many devilish dances. A winged creature dances to “Funeral March of a Marionette,” his shadow looming large on the wall behind him in a miseen-scène that anticipates Fred Astaire’s “Bojangles of Harlem” number in Swing Time. Following his entrance, the dance begins with two eighth-note triplets followed by a dotted quarter note (refer to fig. 43 for a transcription of the music of the dance, with all sync points indicated by vertical lines). As indicated in bar 90 of the musical transcription, the devil stomps his foot, with a percussive click on each stomp, on the first and third note of each triplet (recall that each triplet eighth note is four frames, thus the stomps occur on frames one, nine, thirteen, and twenty-one).21 He stomps again at the beginning of the dotted quarter note. Then, remaining in place, he spanks himself, with percussion accompaniment, on frames nine and thirteen as indicated in bar 91. The timing of the spanks thus continues the division of the beat into units of eight and four frames. In the next two bars, made up of triplets followed by quarter- and eighthnote pairs, he leaps on each beat, every twelve frames.22 When the melody shifts to bars made up entirely of triplets, bars 94 and 95, he steps on each and every note (every four frames), while waving his arms on a twelveframe cycle. The next four bars consist of a repeated rhythmic pattern consisting of a dotted quarter note followed by a triplet, another dotted quarter note and a dotted quarter rest. On the second and fourth dotted quarter note (on A), he holds a pose, elbows bent, hands open with fingers visible (they are especially noticeable in the shadow behind him). He wiggles his

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figure 43. Transcription of Hell’s Bells dance.

 @   89

 @   94

G œ  G  

G G G œ  G             

      K   









 œ  @      K          G   K   œ       K          G   K  @ 







œ  G    K  

 G    K   œ

fingers on a pattern of twos (frames 1–2 out, frames 3–4 in, frames 5–6 out, frames 7–8 in). For the duration of these dotted quarter notes the beat is thus divided into sixths. One would think that the prominence accorded to triplets and to dotted quarter notes in “The Funeral March of a Marionette” might pose a problem for the choreography of a dance. But the animators only rarely take the simple option of dividing the movement into twelve frame units and working entirely on the beat. Instead, they engage with the musical rhythm in multiple ways, dividing the triplets into two (as in the stomps and the spanks on the first and third note of each triplet), working on every note of the fast passages, and even dividing the beat into sixths for small rhythmic flourishes. The variety and exuberance of this treatment of movement can be enjoyed for its own sake, but the metrical organization of the action also contributes to many of the gags, a point that becomes especially obvious in the section of the narrative that precipitates the chase between the king and his would-be victim. After the two small mouse-like minions serve the king a bowl of burning dragon’s milk, he tosses one of them to the dog (or dogs). This action is metrically organized according to nine bars of “Fingal’s Cave” (fig. 44). On the downbeat of bar 213 the film cuts to a long shot showing the king on his throne, the minions in front of him, and the three-headed dog rear right. On the last two beats of this bar the king raises his hand. After the initial eighthnote rest in bar 214, he raises the minion by the tail on F; the little creature begins to squirm. In bar 215 Cerberus comes to life, and each head barks once,

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figure 44. Transcription of Hell’s Bells, feeding Cerberus. Shot 20 ELS King, minions, Cerberus

    ± G    

213

    TT   

216

 



±

holds up minion

  ± (       TT

3 barks

Æ      ± (     

T T

Shot 21 MS

Cerberus  œ ± Æ            ± (       ±                TT TT  œ   3 barks

6 salivations

œ œ          ± (  ± œ (   T T

219

»

bite

swallow

toss

Shot 22 LS King, remaining minion

Æ

lick teeth

TT

    4 laughs   

œ



 œ

on beats 2, 3, and 4. This action is repeated with the same rhythm over a similar musical motive in bar 216. In bar 217 all three heads salivate, the drops hitting the floor together in midbeat, according to the following rhythmic pattern: beat 1, frame 8; beat 2, frames 2 and 8; beat 3, frames 2 and 8; beat 4, frame 2. The physical action of the toss is prepared in the last remaining ten frames of bar 217. The minion is actually tossed into the air on the downbeat of bar 218, the music having built up to a high B. He remains offscreen, up in the air, for the second beat. On the third beat cut to Cerberus in close-up. The middle head opens its mouth as the creature descends into the frame on beat 4. The mouth of the middle head closes for the bite on the downbeat to bar 219. On beat 3 the head closest to camera swallows, to the accompaniment of a downward slide on a slide whistle. During the first and second beats of bar 220 the third head licks his teeth, with an ascending scale on the xylophone as accompaniment. Cut to a close-up of the king at the end of the third beat. In bar 221 the king laughs once on each beat.

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Unlike the run or the dance, the animation here does not depend on subdivisions of the beat. The 44 meter rules: with the exception of the heads salivating and the preparation of the toss all of the action is initiated on the beat. In addition the most important elements are reserved for the downbeats, including the cut that initiates the scene, the action of picking up the creature by its tail, the toss, the catch, and the licking of the teeth. Even incidental elements such as the dogs salivating, which would not seem readily to lend themselves to metrical treatment, are in fact organized in relation to the beat. Much of the humor of this scene derives from this rigorous application of the meter, especially as the action is distributed between the three heads of Cerberus, each allotted two beats in succession to bite, swallow, and savor. The gags are not simply a function of the musical imitation of the action (although we already have the slide whistles, xylophones, and other such effects so beloved by Carl Stalling); they are a function of the thoroughness with which narrative action has been conceived, paced, and timed in relation to Mendelssohn’s familiar melody. Animation historians such as Michael Barrier and J. P. Telotte have argued that the development of Disney’s style depended on ending this tyranny of the beat in favor of what is considered a more realistic style. The transformation of the studio’s style is said to begin with the departure of director and animator Ub Iwerks in 1930. It was carried further when a distribution contract with United Artists in 1932 provided much higher production budgets, which supported more intensive instruction in drawing at the studio, and the establishment of strategies for anatomically convincing representations of figures and figure movement.23 It is clear, however, that most of the cartoons of the 1930s and later continued to “match” music and movement in some way, even as other considerations such as conforming movement to the laws of physics and the creation of more rounded and palpable figures also became important to animators. That is, the filmmakers at Disney did not simply abandon musical rhythm as an organizing principle as they experimented with more complex and realistic movement but, rather, developed more subtle and varied methods for synchronizing the music and image tracks. A close analysis of two films usually considered hallmarks in the development of character animation at Disney—Three Little Pigs, a Silly Symphony released in May 1933, and Playful Pluto, a Mickey Mouse cartoon released in March 1934, both from the team of Burt Gillett and Frank Churchill—will demonstrate how the technique of mickey mousing was reconceived and refined in this period.24 By the time the Disney studio produced its famous version of the familiar fairy tale, story editors and gagmen had been added to the staff, and

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regular story conferences had been institutionalized.25 The studio had also largely given up the practice, derived from silent film accompaniment, of drawing on already-published and familiar music in favor of through-composed scores. Both the narrative and the music of Three Little Pigs are more coherent than was the case in Hell’s Bells, and they are integrated in a much more thoroughgoing and complex manner. Movement synched to the beat remains a common practice and is augmented by metrical, rhythmed dialogue. However, these devices are employed within the context of a more general effort to control and vary narrative pacing, as well as the tempo of movement and music, from segment to segment. The film is constructed through the alternation of two sorts of segments: relatively slow sections of song, speech, and gags; and agitato sections in which the wolf pursues the pigs and tries to destroy their houses. The former dominate in the beginning, before the initiation of the chase, but they continue intermittently throughout. Thus, the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” is reprised twice after the chase begins, once in the house of sticks and once in the house of bricks (in each case it is interrupted by the wolf knocking at the door). Even at the height of the struggle the pace will abate and the narrative relax into gags. For example, when confronting the frivolous pigs in the house of sticks, the wolf does not immediately blow it down but first employs a series of tricks, including adopting a sheepskin disguise in which, cradled in a basket, he pretends to be an orphan. Movement in the slow sections is almost entirely organized on the beat, although with greater finesse and control than may be found in Hell’s Bells. As befits his characterization, a parody of the role of the villain in a nineteenth-century melodrama, the wolf is introduced with movement matched to the prototypical villain’s pizzicato. Appearing in shot 13, he sneaks from behind one tree to hide behind another over the course of two bars, his footsteps synched with the staccato quarter notes in the bass (see fig. 45 for a transcription of the music of the wolf’s walk). In the next two bars he peeks out four times from behind the tree trunk (on the right and left, and high and low on each side). These appearances coincide with quarter notes in both treble and bass. In the following bar he proceeds to the next tree, walking on eighth notes, and is on sixteenth notes for the final bar of the walk (the speed of his walk doubles and then doubles again in relation to the initial walk on quarter notes). The pigs move to the beat quite differently. In shot 12—as they dance and sing to the tune of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”—their articulated forelocks move delicately in time to the melody. They move with the words of the song, stepping twice on beats with eighth notes, with an extra

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figure 45. Transcription of Three Little Pigs wolf’s walk. Shot 13

        Wolf behind tree

   

walks on eighth notes





  @

@  

@    @  @ 

 @ 

         

peers out on quarters

 





 

 

walks forward on quarter notes











walks on sixteenth notes

   

 K  K     

  K  



hop on the two sixteenth notes of the second beat of the first bar (“of the”) and once on the beats with quarter notes (the repeated word “wolf”). The effect of mickey mousing is mitigated here by other movement in the shot that does not easily devolve into rhythmic units: they join hands and circle round, blocking and revealing each other as they move in depth (figs. 46 and 47). Later, they dance in single file as the camera “pans” laterally to the left (the effect of camera movement in animation in this period was most commonly achieved by moving the background frame by frame, not by moving the camera, but in what follows, I will refer to these movement effects as if they were real camera movements). The circular and lateral movements partake of the rhythm of the dance but create a sense of smoothness and lightness apart from the discrete bouncing steps of the dancers. A surprisingly ironic use of mickey mousing occurs with the introduction of the serious pig in the opening section of the film. Shot 5 concludes as one of the frivolous pigs, having sung his chorus of the “I Build My House” song as he works on the house of sticks, produces a fiddle and plays a lilting bridge section. The music continues over a dissolve to his more serious brother, who slaps down bricks and mortar for a wall on the beat of this tune. He then begins his version of the “I Build My House” song, shifting his body from side to side on the rhythm of the quarter notes in the bass, as he speaks on the even eighth notes of the tune:

figure 46. Three Little Pigs, start of dance. figure 47. Three Little Pigs, later in dance.

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I build my house of stone I build my house of bricks I have no chance To play and dance ’Cause work and play don’t mix.

This veritable song and dance against singing and dancing contains anomalous movements, but even these are rhythmically integrated. Thus, he slaps the mortar on his trowel down on the second beat of the first bar (on the word “stone” and the point at which the camera stops tracking in on him); and on the first three beats of the last bar, on the words “work and play don’t mix,” the swaying movement abates as he moves his body farther and farther to the right on each beat. A close examination of the initiation of the chase in shots 15 through 18 provides a good example of the contrast between the rhythmic organization of these slow sections, devoted to song, dance, and patter, and the agitato sections, which are composed of rapid scale passages or ostinato chord patterns. Moreover, it indicates how the alternation between these segments contributes to the pacing of the narrative as a whole. Shot 15, in which the pigs sing and frolic while unaware of the proximity of the wolf, has the longest duration of any in the film, 25:02 (see fig. 48 for a transcription of the music for shot 15, and refer to clip 5). Suspense builds over this long take as the filmmakers carefully lead up to the pigs’ discovery of the wolf and their consequent flight. The shot begins with the pigs still singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” The camera pans left, and they prance left behind a tree that is split low to the ground. The wolf will eventually hide in front of this tree and peer at them through the fork in the branches. In the next bar, with the tree now off-frame right, the pigs play their instruments, and the leftward movement ends as the music resolves in the song’s cadence. Beginning on an upbeat and for the next four bars, the pigs speak alternately in rhyme. They boast of how they will take down the wolf in a meter that alternates beats of sixteenth notes (four syllables) and eighth notes (two syllables), ending in a quarter note (one syllable): Upbeat: Beat 1: Beat 2: Beat 1: Beat 2: Beat 1:

“I’ll” “punch him in the” “nose / I’ll” “tie him in a” “knot / I’ll” kick him on the”

figure 48. Transcription of Three Little Pigs, shot 15. Shot 15

   

124

   





punch him in the nose I'll



 



    

 



 

  

put him on the spot



track back pan right







pigs see hold on pigs, him their hats fly off

big bad wolf?



big bad wolf,

      

    @ ÆÆÆÆ    

 



kick him on the chin we'll

      

big bad wolf? Who's a-fraid of the



      

± (

Wolf leans towards pigs

    

    

Who's a - fraid of the

œ









I'll

     

dance music pigs dance

( - mach-ine gun sounds - )

 

 

 

tie him in a knot I'll

œ ± (

big bad wolf?

 



play instruments

 



of the



hold instruments as guns











     

138



a - fraid



leftward motion ends

pass behind tree

           

133





Who's

 

    129



 

big bad wolf?



pigs move left pan left

Æ



pigs regain hats exit left

ÆÆÆÆ

 @ K ÆÆÆÆ

K ÆÆÆÆ

Æ

Æ

Æ

Wolf enters

track ends

 



big bad wolf,

 







Wolf climbs over tree

K@@ K@@

  

K@@    

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/ Beat 2: Beat 1: Beat 2:

Chapter 3 “chin / we’ll” “put him on the” “spot.”

This is followed by two bars of play machine-gun noises supposedly made by the pigs buzzing their tongues as they pretend to shoot down the wolf using their flute and fiddle as gun props. The last gun blast is essentially a quarter note, and the three previous beats are more or less sixteenth notes, although they are not evenly spaced. Eight frames before the end of bar 134, the bass note for the wolf song is snuck in. The pigs hop up on this cue, and the camera begins to track back and pan right. The pigs join hands on the downbeat of the next bar and begin to sing and dance as the camera movement continues and reveals the tree. The wolf enters in the foreground, hidden by the tree trunk, on the downbeat of bar 137 (on the second iteration of the phrase “big bad wolf”). He leans over the trunk of the tree in bar 139, making the pigs aware of his presence and precipitating the chase. This important narrative event is timed and organized to the beat as follows: Bar 139, beat 1 (“Who’s a-): Bar 139, beat 2 (“-fraid of the”):

Bar 140, beat 1 (“big bad”):

Bar 140, beat 2 (“wolf”):

The wolf rises up. The wolf leans through the fork in the tree coming within the line of sight of the pigs and begins to salivate. The pigs are positioned ideally within the circle of their dance to see the wolf, but they continue dancing and singing, while the wolf salivates (fig. 49). The music fades after the first six frames of this beat, and the pigs look directly at the wolf on the seventh frame, halfway through the fourth beat (fig. 50).

The discovery of the wolf is thus entirely mickey moused (although it should be noted that unlike Cerberus, the wolf does not salivate on the beat). But the synchronization consists of more than a straightforward match between movement and music, the pigs stepping in time to the song. The action is parsed according to the beats so that the film builds to the

figure 49. Three Little Pigs, bar 140 beat 1. figure 50. Three Little Pigs, bar 140 beat 2.

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figure 51. Three Little Pigs, bar 142 beat 1.

discovery across the course of the bar, with the actual sighting of the wolf taking place on beat 4 and on the word “wolf.” But shot 15 does not end when the pigs finally see their enemy. The filmmakers allow four bars for the pigs to react to him and to create the sonic equivalent of a double take. Two chords, each held for four beats, lead from the G major of the film’s opening to the G minor accompaniment of the chase. The action in these bars may still be divided into “beats” but only on the basis of the fourteen-frames-per-beat frame rate that has been established in the preceding section. In bar 141, at beat 1 the pigs, who react identically throughout, stare, mouths open, and curve their bodies forward. Over the next two beats the pigs stand up straight, shaking, their hats popping off their heads and spinning around as they go upward (fig. 51). On the fourth beat of the chord the wolf leans forward even more and opens his mouth. On the first beat of the next chord the hats descend and return to the heads of the pigs. They begin to turn to the left. On beat 2 the turn is complete, and the pigs leap into the air. On beat 3 the pigs run off left. On beat 4 the wolf begins to climb through the fork in the trunk of the tree. The pause underscored by the held chords in bars 141 to 144, which amounts to a little more than two seconds, is quite different from the pauses

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that often separate distinct sections of music in the earlier sound cartoons. In Hell’s Bells, for example, the succession of performances done to “Funeral March of a Marionette” is followed by a silence covered somewhat awkwardly by three seconds of the King Devil clapping, followed by his ringing one of the eponymous bells in a call for supper. But in Three Little Pigs the transition to the agitato section involves more than the dropping away of one musical interlude and the commencement of another. It is a calculated suspension of the action both at the level of the music, given the shifting tonality, and at the level of the plot, as the filmmakers further postpone the chase that we have been expecting at least since the wolf’s appearance in shot 13 (and, given our knowledge of the fairy tale and the cartoon genre, perhaps from the very beginning of the film). The pause is important for the film’s tempo, as well as the pacing of the narrative; it functions to increase the apparent speed of the agitato through contrast, bringing movement and music almost to a halt before ratcheting them up. As is typical of the editing of the later Disney shorts, the cut to shot 16, which shows the pigs running for the house of sticks, is buried off the beat in bar 146 (see fig. 52 for a transcription of the music for the first agitato, and refer to clip 6). The cut is additionally disguised by continuity of action as the wolf climbs over the tree to follow the pigs in bar 145.26 Despite the continuity of action over the cut, the apparent tempo of the music picks up considerably as it shifts from the long-held chords in bars 141 through 145 to an eighth-note ostinato bass in bar 146. Shot duration also decreases with the commencement of the chase and is a factor in the acceleration of the tempo. Shot 16 is 06:03. Shot 17, a cut to the exterior of the house of straw, is 11:02. Shot 18, from inside the house, is 03:12. Shot 19, with a duration of 22:04, is almost as long as shot 15 (25:02), but since it involves the wolf’s huffing and puffing, the destruction of the straw house, and the resumption of the chase, it feels much faster than the latter. At the initiation of the chase the movements of the wolf and the pigs break away from the close mickey mousing that has been the dominant organizing principle for the film until shot 16. Synchronization occurs on larger musical units: scale passages or other motives that can extend over several beats or over bar lines.27 Tight synchronization points are limited in number, distinguished by the use of longer notes and prominent sound effects or percussion. The Disney animators Thomas and Johnston refer to these isolated sync points as “accents.” These “accents” should not be confused with either of the two musical definitions of the term—as the stress on a note that derives from its articulation or the point of strongest rhythmic stress within a particular grouping of notes. For Thomas and Johnston,

figure 52. Transcription of Three Little Pigs first agitato. Shot 16 house of sticks

@  @   146





 @  @  



  K



door slams Pig 2 enters

 @@



@ @ 



@

 @@ 

153

@





door slams door remains closed









 K

K



Pig 2 enters









 

 

 

@





pushes door with paws











 

 







approaches door







door slams

      





removes door mat







Pig 2 reappears





grab/squash/ thud/escape Wolf angry

Wolf enters



K

Wolf moves into position at door





6

K



   



@ @ Æ  @@



     K  

@ 

156







    





Pig 2 into house

 @ @ 

 

Shot 17 house of straw

151



Pig 2 hits ground crash/squash

Pig 2 falls

     



Pig 1 to house







@ @  148

Pig 1 on frame

Wolf enters



       leans into door with shoulder

 

 



œ

Mickey Mousing Reconsidered

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accents are a function of synchronization, a punctual union of movement, music, and other sounds.28 The accents in the agitato sections of Three Little Pigs are key to creating a freer and faster alliance of movement and music than in the earlier song-and-dance section. They work on the level of the phrase rather than the beat or the bar. I would argue that the crashes, bangs, and toots typical of the cartoon effects track, as well as the abrupt rhythmic shifts characteristic of cartoon scoring, help to delineate audio-kinetic filmic units that are akin to the rhythmic delineation of the phrase in music.29 In the first three beats of shot 16 the first pig runs to the house of sticks and enters. He shuts the door, accompanied by a slamming noise on high D (the downbeat to bar 148), an eighth note that supplies a resting point, both melodically and rhythmically, within the faster ornaments and sixteenth notes of the passage. The second pig enters following the slam (on the sixteenth notes A and C). Over the next two beats (bar 148 beat 2 and bar 149 beat 1) the second pig looks back at his pursuer, trips and falls, arcing upward before he hits the ground (a fine example of “squash” animation). The tripping-and-falling movement is synched with the sixteenth-note descending scale from C to F-sharp that crosses the bar line. The accented moment, the squash, occurs after the downbeat, on the eighth-note A, the slightly longer note further emphasized by a prominent clanging noise. The wolf enters on the descending sixteenth notes in beat 2. He grabs and squashes the pig on the downbeat to the next bar, to the accompaniment of a whooshing sound. The pig slides out of his grasp and off frame at the end of this beat. The following beats allow for a pause and a reaction: over the course of bar 150 beat 2 and bar 151 beat 1, the wolf expresses chagrin (“anger lines” appear briefly around his head), and he rises to his feet to continue the chase. The rhythmic contour of shot 16 can thus be summarized as follows: pig 1 runs on—slam (bar 148, beat 1)—pig 2 runs on— fall/squash (bar 149, beat 1)—wolf runs on—grab/squash (bar 150, beat 1)—pig 2 runs off—wolf reacts and prepares to run off. The film cuts to shot 17, the house of straw, after the second beat of bar 151. This section is organized around two synchronization points, both door slams, which are situated in relation to the two long runs in bars 153 and 154, rather than in relation to the beat as such. The pig shuts the door to his house with a prominent slam in bar 153 at the end of beat 1 on A. The sound leads directly into the first run, a chromatic ascent from G-sharp to C-sharp, and is emphasized by that flurry of notes. The pig reappears and bends down to grab his welcome mat on the next downbeat, high D. Although this is a quarter note, and the high point of the run, it is not emphasized by any sound effect and consists largely of preparatory movement. He retreats back

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into his house with the welcome mat over the course of the descending octave scale from high to low E-flat. The next slam occurs just after the downbeat note of bar 155, a low D. The phrase thus works out as follows: slam, quick ascending scale, pause, quick descending scale, slam. It begins at the end of one downbeat and is completed at the beginning of the next. As Thomas and Johnston note in their discussion of this shot, the slam and closing of the door that ends the welcome-mat gag is followed by a very slight pause. The slam and visual action of the door closing occupy the first seven frames of the downbeat. The film holds on that door for the second half of the beat, to allow the action to resonate and to provide a respite prior to the entrance of the wolf. Aside from the closing of the door there are no other sync points in bars 155 and 156, in which the wolf enters and approaches the house. The movement is all preparation for his assault on the house in bar 157. The aggressivity of this assault is emphasized by mickey mousing. The wolf pushes on the door bending it inward four times, the action coinciding with the eighth-note octaves. Then he leans his shoulder into the door twice, shaking the house on its foundations, on the two quarter-note chords in bar 158. In addition to accenting every one of the wolf’s gestures, this brief reassertion of mickey mousing on the beat prepares the way for the rhymed and metrical lines that follow: “Open the door and let me in!” “Not by the hair on my chin-ny-chin chin!” Our sense that the chase has a fast tempo is thus constructed through a number of factors that serve to differentiate this section of the film from the opening. The long take of shot 15 contrasts with the shorter takes that follow. The prevalence of fast scalar passages in the upper voices in the agitato section, as well as the move from a bass line dominated by quarter notes during the opening section to one dominated by eighth and sixteenth notes during the pursuit, makes the tempo seem faster although the number of beats per second does not rise. Finally, the synchronization of action with almost every note in the melodic line, the method followed in the song, dance, and gag sections, is abandoned in favor of phrasing movement around isolated sync points that tend to fall on the downbeat, although they do not necessarily fall on every downbeat (the measures without a sync point on the downbeat in this section include bars 151 and 152; bar 153, where the slam is displaced to the end of the first beat; and bar 156). This allows the animation to move from one visual and sonic high point to the next with more apparent speed. Narrative pacing plays into and is reinforced by this manipulation of tempo: the careful delay of the chase and the two-second pause following the discovery of the wolf make the succession of multiple locations and actions that follow seem all the faster.

Mickey Mousing Reconsidered

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85

My discussion has so far been concerned with the apparent speed of the action: both the slow opening section and the agitato take place at 14 fpb, or metronome marking 104. Of the many factors that contribute to the pacing and tempo of the film as a whole, one of the most subtle and far-reaching is the change in the actual frame rate of the animation at shot 23, from 14 fpb to 12 fpb. This change in the timing of the movement is more or less buried within a sixteen-bar melodic passage that is never repeated. Attempting to trick the frivolous pigs, who have both taken refuge in the house of sticks, the wolf pretends to give up and leave for home. He speaks on the beat, accompanied by half notes, and there is a slight ritard on the words “guess I’ll go home.” Cut to a long shot, in which the wolf, who has been walking upright to this point, runs on all fours with pronounced gallop sound effects. The tempo picks up, and the rhythm alters to what Ross Care dubs a “wolf-trot,” referring to the cut-time rhythm of the fox trot.30 At the initiation of this syncopated rhythm the filmmakers go to 12 fpb or metronome marking 120, a rate that is maintained for the rest of the film. Thus, when the frivolous pigs reprise “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” a short time later in shot 25, it is noticeably faster than the many repetitions heard in the opening segment. As has been argued, the psychological sense of tempo is affected by many parameters and is not limited to time as measured by the clicks of the metronome or the number of frames per beat. But the change in the frame rate in shot 23 has structural ramifications for the film as a whole: it is not just a matter of a localized contrast between a slightly slower section, in which the wolf apparently gives up the chase, and an up-tempo, jazzy gallop in which he plays his trick. The filmmakers have raised the bar for just how fast the fast sections can be in the latter part of the film. The first section of the chase leading to the straw house seemed rapid at 14 fpb, but the chase following the destruction of the stick house moves even more quickly. This is partly a function of the faster frame rate, partly a function of narrative action (the wolf comes closer to catching the little pigs), and partly a function of a very fluid editing style. The cutting in the second chase is much faster than that in the first. In shot 33 (05:18) the pigs react to the wolf’s destruction of the house of sticks with a double take similar to that employed when they first see him in the woods. Shot 34 (02:12) shows the wolf leaping after the pigs. Shot 35 (12:20) provides the most extensive part of the chase as the wolf, holding the pigs by their tails, is pulled along a road until he runs smack into an apple tree. This gag is followed by two brief shots. In shot 36 (02:00) the pigs run up the front walk of the nearby house of bricks, and in shot 37 (03:12), an interior, they enter through the front door and run directly under the bed to hide. In

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figure 53. Transcription of Three Little Pigs final agitato. Shot 35 Wolf pursues pigs

@ @  K  @ @    K    

272

 @@  Æ @@ 

J 

 J    

Æ

±

Æ

  (

J 

  ± ( ± (

             K   @@ @ @                œ  Wolf hits tree

 

285





Shot 36 pigs run to brick house

J 

  ± ( ± (

  ± ( ± (

J 

 ± (

Æ Æ

K  K   œ KKKK  

 œ 

ÆÆÆ

KKKK

Shot 37 pigs enter pan to follow them under bed

                             ÆÆ          Æ

 Æ

J 

last apple on Wolf

apples fall

279

   @ @ @               Æ @ Æ

J 

J 

Wolf holds pigs by tails

Æ

Æ

Æ

Æ

ÆÆ Æ Æ

addition to the rapid editing, the music accelerates in the sense that it increases from an eighth-note run for pursuit, to an ornamented eighth-note ostinato for the moment when the wolf has them by the tails, to a sixteenthnote ostinato over the portion of the chase in which the wolf is hammered by apples from the tree and the pigs make a break for the house and land under the bed (see fig. 53 for a transcription of the music for the final chase). The increase in tempo over the course of the film culminates in a musical gag that occurs during the final assault on the house of bricks. The wind noises and orchestral underscoring associated with the wolf’s huffing and puffing alternate with brisk snatches of diegetic piano music—supposedly the serious pig playing running triplets of octaves and then even more rapid sixteenth-note chords (see fig. 54, and refer to clip 7). The build in the apparent pace of the music, and the shift into what Martin Marks has described to me as a virtuosic “concerto style” of performance, work in

figure 54. Transcription of Three Little Pigs pig concerto. Shot 46 Exterior brick house




   

 


  





  


 

 

 

Shot 47 Interior Pig at piano 

  























  
  

played by Pig at piano


  

 
  


  

played by Pig at piano

Pig listens Wolf exhales (off)




Wolf inhales

Wolf inhales (effects) Wolf exhales (effects)








  











Pig listens Wolf exhales

 

 

 

 

Shot 48 Exterior



Wolf exhales




 


 




Pig plays piano (off)












Wolf exhales


 




Pig plays piano (off)





Wolf exhales





  

Pig plays piano (off)

    continued

figure 54 (continued)


 
 


  


 
   
 
   
 
     




 
       

Wolf exhales; non-diegetic orchestral underscore




  










 






Wolf ’s face turns blue, then purple

Wolf pants

  





Wolf recovers

 

 





Wolf pulls doormany bangs


 

Shot 49 Interior


             

  

Pig plays piano



Wolf bangs (off)






Door bangs


  







                Pig plays piano



Pig plays

 

 








Door

Pig

Shot 50 Exterior Wolf bangs on door orchestral cadence

  

  

 

 

Last chord by Pig (off)

   

Mickey Mousing Reconsidered

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89

tandem with fast cutting between interior and exterior. The gag playfully mocks the tradition of mickey mousing by having the serious pig himself “perform” the musical buildup to the wolf’s breaths (and in a musical idiom that is readily absorbed into the film’s own underscoring). At the same time, the gag does work as mickey mousing, creating an inventive blend of sound effects and musical fragments that, along with the editing pattern, helps to accelerate tempo and increase dramatic tension at every level. The change from 14 fpb to 12 fpb initiated at the midpoint of the film clearly helps to pave the way for this high-powered effect at the film’s close. It is usually said that the scoring of the Mickey cartoons was less coherent than that for the Silly Symphonies in which gags and story followed from the music to some degree.31 This generalization seems problematic in that Mickey cartoons and Silly Symphonies both often foregrounded music and musical performances, and both employed musical rhythm and meter as principal devices for timing the action and as a key component of narrative pacing. I think it is fair to say that symphonic and operatic styles were largely confined to the Silly Symphonies, with the exception of Mickey cartoons that actually parodied these styles, such as The Band Concert (1935) and Mickey’s Grand Opera (1936). In addition, with the appearance of films such as Playful Pluto (1934), Mickey’s Service Station (1935), and On Ice (1935), which foregrounded character animation and complex gags, there was much less emphasis on coherent melodies or songs. The scoring of these films is much closer to the agitato sections of Three Little Pigs. Playful Pluto provides a good example of the way scoring evolved in the Mickey cartoons in the mid-1930s. This film is best known for Norm Ferguson’s celebrated animation of the flypaper sequence. But the music for this sixty-eight-second sequence is relatively restrained: a prominent ostinato on quarter notes moves to eighth notes for increases in the tempo of movement, with prominent sync points marked by longer-held chords or, more rarely, trills or brief melodic motives. I have thus chosen to focus on the opening of the film, which has greater musical variety and interest. The film begins with a relatively relaxed section as far as the animation is concerned, although the music is up-tempo. Pluto leaps around as Mickey rakes leaves, and after a tug-of-war over the rake, Mickey throws a stick for his pet. The segment is highly melodic, providing one of two full-fledged tunes in a score dominated by chromatic runs, ostinato passages, sound effects, and other rhythmic elements (see fig. 55 for a transcription of the music of the opening). The tempo is MM W = 120. I think it likely that the musicians and animators counted the bars in two, so the frame rate is best represented as 2–12s. This characterization of the timing is based on the fact

figure 55. Transcription of Playful Pluto opening. Shot 3 Iris in Mickey raking

1

rake

rake

        Æ

 Æ

 Æ

    Æ

KÆ

Æ

Æ

Æ

   œ

5

  Æ

  Æ

 K      ( thud

10

  K Æ

thud

Æ

Æ

 G    

Æ

Æ

Æ

Shot 4 Pluto kicks at leaves

  (  Æ

Æ

          Æ Æ

Æ

Æ

Æ

Mickey falls

Æ

15

 

Æ

tug of war

Pluto grabs rake

 Æ Æ Pluto leaps

  @     

Æ

    ( Æ

  (  thud

Æ

Æ

   Æ

Æ

thud

Æ

Mickey enters

Æ

Æ

Æ

Æ

walk

œ                  Æ

Æ

Æ

Æ

Æ

Æ

Æ

Mickey Mousing Reconsidered

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91

figure 55 (continued) Pluto and Mickey

        

20

  Æ

Æ

fakes throw

Mickey pushes Pluto down

      K   G  œ  ( Æ

Æ

Æ

G G   œ

Æ

Pluto runs

       Æ

 Æ

 Æ

  Æ

KÆ

Æ

25

Æ

Mickey picks up stick

Æ

Æ

Mickey winds up real throw

 Æ Æ

Æ

Mickey holds up stick & makes noise

  œ ( (

Shot 5

œ Æ

  Æ

stick lands in front of picket fence

that cyclical elements such as Mickey’s walk and Pluto’s leaps are on 12. It is reinforced by the speed of the music and the prominence of half notes in the bass. In what follows I will count the measures in two and assume twelve frames per beat unless otherwise noted. Several aspects of the score deemphasize the metrical organization of movement on the beat. First, the rhythm of the melodic line alters frequently from bar to bar. For example, when Pluto grabs Mickey’s rake, their tug-of-war, which moves in an alternation of twelve frames to each side, lasts for only two bars, the first composed of half notes and the second composed of a dotted quarter note and tied eighths (bars 6 and 7). This militates against the potentially monotonous quality of matching movement to the underlying meter. In addition to frequent changes in melodic rhythm, the opening is highly syncopated. For example, the first motive, four eighth notes tied to a half note, which accompanies Mickey’s action of raking and is later associated with his walk, makes movement on the duple meter less obvious by placing the rhythmic accent off the second beat. Pluto’s leaps (bars 9 and 10) provide an example of how the filmmakers integrate sound effects within this context. The leaps are accompanied by a double thud, like the galloping of the wolf in Three Little Pigs, heard at the end of the twelveframe leap cycle (thus after D and F-sharp in bar 9 and after D and A in bar

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figure 56. Transcription of Playful Pluto flashlight gag.

G G G @  @ @               ±                

175

 @    @@ 

 

  œ 

 

  œ   

  œ 

G G G G G G @  @ @                   (       

180

 @@    @



 

 

œ        œ   

10). These percussive effects are thus not only displaced in relation to the meter but also fall “between” the syncopated notes in the melody. In addition to the musical devices that downplay mickey mousing, the animators allow some movement to unfold independently of the duple meter, shifting between more and less rhythmically organized movement. For example, as Mickey approaches Pluto later in the scene, he walks with his characteristic bounce (walking on 12s and his head bobbing on 3s). But the ensuing action of Mickey embracing Pluto, pushing him down, and picking up the stick is not particularly cyclical nor strongly synched with the music. The rhythm is then reasserted in the following bar. Mickey bends down and picks up Pluto’s stick in bar 23, to a syncopated eighth-note and quarter-note pattern; he then holds the stick in the air and “speaks,” making a percussive rattle that follows the rhythm of the previous bar (bars 23 and 24). The ensuing action—Mickey winding up to throw the stick and holding back as Pluto leaps—is organized on 12s and fits neatly with the accompaniment, a return to the initial motive. Later in the film, there is a similar avoidance of overly regular mickey mousing. Having swallowed a flashlight in a darkened cellar, Pluto runs twice around the perimeter of the room, barking and howling. He hiccups intermittently, the flashlight going off and on inside his body and revealing his skeleton. The spacing of the hiccups is indicated by the unpitched notes in figure 56. The hiccups tend to occur every other bar, although this pattern alters when it is displaced back from bar 180 to 179. In addition the hiccups usually alternate between the third and first beat, although this pattern is altered in bars 182 and 184, in which it is placed on the first beat twice in succession.

Mickey Mousing Reconsidered

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93

The film thus avoids creating a consistent metrical pattern of hiccups, a point to which the syncopation of the treble register also contributes. By 1934, then, the filmmakers at Disney were resorting to mickey mousing selectively—they employed it rather more heavily in certain contexts than in others—and they had developed ways of making it less obvious. In addition they had devised other ways of coordinating music and action. The bulk of the music track for Playful Pluto consists of prolonged runs or ostinato sections in which animation matches the bar, or a number of bars, without a sync point on every beat. The gain is twofold: the animators have more flexibility in organizing movement, and the musicians escape the constraint of giving a similar weight to every beat. Some beats are deemphasized, used for the physical preparation or resolution of movement; others are accented through some combination of scoring, effects, and visual design. In addition it should be noted that the sound-effects track is denser and used more consistently in this film than in Three Little Pigs. Not only do effects provide isolated sync points that define phrases of movement, but they blend with the score as a form of accompaniment. Consider the first agitato section, in which a wind vortex takes up Pluto’s stick and the leaves Mickey has been raking, to the dismay of both. The rhythmic contour of this episode consists of a largely unaccented flow of movement and music until the climactic gag, which is organized through a series of punctual sound effects and moving holds in the animation. The movement of the vortex throughout is continuous and does not lend itself to percussive treatment. The rate of 12 fpb is maintained, although the agitato section seems much faster than the opening given the eighth-note triplets that dominate the upper voices once the vortex appears in shot 5. Swift ascending and descending scale passages in the upper voices are seconded by persistent wind noise augmented by slide whistles. Over the course of the first eight bars of shot 6 Mickey is taken up in the vortex, swirled around, and deposited on the ground with a gentle thud. The vortex then squashes down in a basket containing raked leaves, lifts them, and carries them off frame. Shot 7 begins with two bars of a rightward pan following the vortex’s movement, still accompanied by triplet runs (see fig. 57 for a transcription of the music of the wind vortex episode, and refer to clip 8). This uninterrupted line of movement and sound is broken up with several accents, almost a stutter, near the end of shot 7 in bars 52 through 54. Mickey enters, running with the basket in pursuit of his leaves, trips over a rake and is struck by its handle. He falls to the ground and is struck two more times by the handle, which bounces off his head (see figs. 58 and 59). The action is underscored by three half-note chords and further punctuated by effects. The

figure 57. Transcription of Playful Pluto wind vortex. Shot 7 wind vortex moves right pan right

3 3 3 3   K  @    K  @  @                 6

49

    K 

51





ÆÆ Æ

Mickey enters with basket, runs after vortex

Æ    ÆÆ

hit (thud)



hit by handle Mickey falls (cymbals) (thud)

 

3

3

3



    K 

  ÆÆÆ Æ 





    K   

   ÆÆ Æ

  

 







ÆÆ ÆÆ

3



ÆÆ Æ

Æ

Shot 8 basket rolls to new location

hit (clunk)

54



            Æ 

3

3

 

 

Mickey steps on rake & drops basket

            3

3

ÆÆ Æ

 

3

    

K     

6

 

6







       K     K        @ 57  @                vortex approaches basket

6

 



vortex deposits leaves & stick

6

ÆÆÆ

6





K ÆÆ Æ

6

 

6



ÆÆ Æ

6

 

Mickey Mousing Reconsidered

/

95

figure 57 (continued) preparation Shot 9 Mickey happy

                6 J 6  ÆÆÆ       Æ

60

vortex exits

Mickey rises Mickey deadpan to knees

G          Æ J J

63

bark

  Æ

bark

Æ

Æ

Shot 10 basket of leaves

Æ

Mickey stomps

G  Æ

Pluto bowls Mickey over bark

 J

Æ

Æ

Pluto climbs in basket

         

Pluto pushes off

G  Æ Æ

Pluto disperses leaves

                    

Æ

assault on Mickey by the rake handle in shot 7 is a conventional gag that has a later narrative payoff, since it removes the leaf basket from his grasp. But this gag has an important rhythmic function, as well as a narrative one, since it provides the first interruption of the smooth flow of the vortex’s movement, the wind-sound, and related music. The chords and clunks that are mickey moused with the blows of the rake handle prepare the way for the more definitive pauses in the action that commence in shot 9. The triplets resume, and in shot 8 the vortex slowly descends and deposits the leaves neatly in the basket that has rolled from Mickey’s grasp. It then flies off, inaugurating a series of actions that are tightly synched to specific beats. The cut to shot 9, of Mickey reacting to the departure of the vortex, is followed a beat later by a shift in the music. In bars 61 through 64 the music is organized on half notes with a motive that builds in pitch. A trill is heard on the first beats of bars 61 and 62, resolving to a half note on the second beat of each measure (E, F-sharp). The ornament recurs in bar 63 and builds continuously to the C-sharp on the second beat of bar 64. These accents on the second beat of bars 61, 62, and 64 are counterbalanced by barks from Pluto that fall on the downbeats of each measure. The climax of the gag is keyed to this metrical organization of the sound track. At the beginning of shot 9 Mickey reacts to the fortuitous turn of

figure 58. Playful Pluto, bar 53 beat 1. figure 59. Playful Pluto, bar 54 beat 1.

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events with a happy pose that the animators hold for ten frames over the last beat of the wind triplets. The action is then organized on the beat as follows: Bar 61, beat 1: Bar 61, beat 2:

Bar 62, beat 1: Bar 62, beat 2: Bar 63, beat 1: Bar 63, beat 2, and bar 64, beat 1: Bar 64, beat 2:

Slow preparation of Mickey’s action. Mickey stomps his foot in pleasure. The stomp, shown in fig. 60, occurs just after the E of beat 2 is heard; it is accompanied by percussion, and the filmmakers may have delayed it so that the note could be heard). Pluto enters left and runs over Mickey, knocking him down. Pluto pushes off, squashing Mickey, as he runs off right (fig. 61). Mickey raises his head and upper body. Mickey looks off right in a sixteen-frame hold (fig. 62), followed by a cut to shot 10, the basket. Pluto enters, and dives into the basket. He subsequently digs out all of the leaves in a search for his stick (to the accompaniment of ostinato eighth notes).

Thus, Mickey’s reactions to both the vortex and the actions of his dog, as well as Pluto’s entrances and exit, are timed to coincide with the rhythmically accented second beats. The phrase structure might be summarized as Mickey happy (hold), Mickey stomps, Mickey squashed by Pluto, Mickey watches Pluto off (hold), Pluto into basket. The episode of the wind vortex has been orchestrated and animated around a contrast between unaccented passages and highly accented ones. The smooth legato of the triplets mixed with wind sound is interrupted by the punctual chords, ornamented with thuds, clunks, and crashes, which mark Mickey’s first fall. The reversal that caps the episode—Pluto bowling Mickey over and the final dispersal of the leaves—is, like the first pratfall, organized on the beat. In this case prominent holds in the character animation, as well as Pluto’s barks, accent the action. In addition the organization of the action off the downbeat, on the “weaker” second beat, an effect particularly audible in bars 61 through 64 but still operative at the level of the depicted action through bar 67, places the action metrically off kilter. This helps build to shot 11, a cut-in to a very angry Mickey confronting his pet,

figure 60. Playful Pluto, bar 61 beat 2. figure 61. Playful Pluto, bar 62 beat 2.

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figure 62. Playful Pluto, bar 63 beat 2.

at which point the film returns the stress to the downbeat, whole-note, chord. The episode reveals the subtle control over rhythm that the studio had achieved by this date. Music, sound effects, and animation are not simply tied together on every beat, but rather, each of these elements can be used separately or in tandem to create accents that themselves can be freely placed with respect to the underlying meter. The episode of Pluto’s encounter with the water hose provides a final example of the evolution of mickey mousing over the course of the 1930s. The episode is narratively more complex than the wind vortex—the action falls into three subsections and contains numerous reversals. The rhythm and harmony of the underscoring shifts repeatedly in relation to the pace of the character animation and the demands of the narrative. Frank Churchill tailors the score so as to reinforce a sense of distinct phases of the action, and the filmmakers vary the density and rhythm of both music and effects from one subsegment to the next. In the first phase of the action Pluto follows water as it travels through a garden hose (it takes the form of a moving bulge) until it reaches the nozzle and hits him in the face. The middle section is defined by the repeated action of Pluto biting the hose. In the first two instances this action rebounds against him and in the

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last instance against Mickey. Finally, with the water supply cut off, Pluto lackadaisically bats at the hose, again to experience a rebound. As the gag builds across these repetitions, each phase of the action is given its own musical treatment and builds to a culminating sync point. In shot 15 Mickey turns on the tap, and water starts to travel through the hose, initiating the “water triplets,” a whole-note scale beginning on B-flat with paired half and quarter notes on each beat (see fig. 63 for a transcription of the music for the water-hose episode, and refer to clip 9). The scale ascends to D and back down over the course of three and half bars while Pluto remains seated, reacting to the water as it makes its way from the tap. He takes off as the scale nears its lowest point, B-flat. The film cuts to shot 16, Pluto running left perpendicular to the lens axis as the camera tracks along with him. Pluto barks just at the cut, a punctuating sound that sets off both his run and the gradual ascent in pitch.32 Pluto gets ahead of the water bulge, and the film cuts as the scale ascends to a new high, E-flat. In shot 17, bar 107, Pluto turns to follow the hose as it extends along the lens axis towards the camera. The scale descends to C-flat over the next two bars, then begins to ascend again as Pluto slides into the foreground, positioning himself in front of the nozzle at the beginning of bar 110. The water bulge comes on frame at this point and travels toward the camera for the next two bars. The water bursts from the nozzle, hitting Pluto in the face as the scale reaches its highest pitch, B, at the beginning of bar 112. The moment is further emphasized by a track in on Pluto and by barking (although at low volume). The high B is held, a whole note tied for two measures, prolonging the moment of impact and giving time for the double somersault that Pluto executes under the force of the stream. Although the physics of this movement is not particularly convincing, it is rhythmically appropriate. Having waited for eleven bars of water triplets, with suspense becoming particularly pronounced in the last three when the spatial setup of dog and nozzle is made manifest, the gag requires a denouement of relatively sustained duration. From this moment on, the pace quickens: Pluto’s multiple attacks on the hose give way to counterattacks in which the dog is spanked, sprayed, and flipped. Instead of a single culminating sync point, as in the opening of the gag, there are numerous light, quick accents that are a function of subtle modulations of the pitch and rhythm of the ostinato accompaniment, as well as brief moments of coordination between sound effects and quarteror half-note chords. Of interest here are the ways in which a basic ostinato figure is modulated in accordance with relatively complex character animation while ratcheting up the pace. The middle section of the gag does not

figure 63. Transcription of Playful Pluto water hose.

Æ =120

100

Mickey turns on hose

Shot 16

Pluto prepares to follow water !

!

!

!

105

Pluto runs laterally along hose

Shot 17 Pluto runs toward nozzle in foreground

!

!

!

!

!

110

Pluto slides in front of nozzle

water travels down hose

BAM!

!

!

barks 115

Pluto bite prepares

Pluto releases hose

continued

figure 63 (continued) 120

lifted by water spouts

ip

lands on rolls to bottom feet

Shot 18 Pluto gets tangled 124 in hose

129

Shot 19 Pluto on back, tangled

Mickey laughs

Nozzle squirts Pluto’s rear end

Pluto leaps turns

bites

Shot 20 133

second bite

Mickey pulled up by hose between legs

starts to pull

Pluto pulls hose, flips

He stands Pluto spins around releases bite

Pluto pulling hard

faucet gives way rises into Mickey somersaults stream of water falls

h = 90

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figure 63 (continued)

138

Mickey pushes against water stream

paw down 142

hose squirts rear leap

Mickey blocks broken pipe

lands on bottom

turns 146

spins on bottom

reacts to Mickey

Shot 21 Pluto sees small spurt from hose

on to feet bark bark

Shot 22

depend on a literal acceleration as measured in frames per beat, but it moves with lightning speed. As the hose continues to spray Pluto, the accompaniment shifts into E minor with an ostinato in the upper register on G (bar 114). The rhythmic pattern—an eighth note, three quarter notes, and an eighth note—seems designed to keep the stress off the meter, almost a textbook example of what Eisenstein would call enjambment, while nonetheless giving an impression of the water pounding. By the third bar of the ostinato Pluto begins to bark repeatedly at high volume, adding to the sonic density and percussive texture of the track. The barking falls off in the next bar, as he moves in preparation for the first bite. His teeth close on the hose at the end of bar 117. In place of an isolated sync point—a chord or a sound effect— the bite is marked by less overt changes in the sonic register. Immediately following the bite, the ostinato shifts down a half step to F-sharp for one

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bar and a low-pitched growl is added to the mix. Pluto, his teeth clenched around the hose, shakes his head to and fro for three beats (that is, across the bar line as the ostinato returns to G). When he releases the hose, water begins to spout from the holes he has made. Unlike the subtle changes in the sound mix associated with the bite, the hose’s revenge is marked by a punctual use of sound effects, as well as a half-cadence. The spout lifts Pluto off his feet in bar 120. He flails his legs for the duration of the bar, accompanied by a pronounced yelp. As the spout lifts him, the scoring shifts into a pattern of continuous eighth notes in the upper register that vary in pitch but center on B. In bar 121 Pluto flips over on the downbeat. On beat 2 the eighth notes abate briefly, giving way to a half-note B chord. This pause coincides with Pluto landing on his bottom with a thud and another yelp. Pluto is on his feet by the end of the bar so that the lift, flip, and fall sequence is of shorter duration than the somersaults and trill that closed the first phase of the action (cf. bars 112–13 and 121). This is an important facet of the pacing; the film gives us comic reversals marked by accents without the elaboration, preparation, or resolution found in the first subsegment. The continuous eighth notes resume with ornaments on the downbeats. In bar 122, beat 2, Pluto bites down on the hose for the second time and pulls on it. Over the course of the next two bars he gets entangled in it while continuing to hold it between his teeth. Cut to a two-second shot of Mickey standing beside the tap. He looks off left and laughs repeatedly off the beat, this effect conjoining with one bar of the F-sharp ostinato (bar 126). The cut back to Pluto at the end of bar 126 reveals the dog on his back, badly entangled. Over the course of two bars of half-note chords the dog stands, spins around, and finally releases the hose at the end of bar 128. The ostinato is briefly renewed for the hose’s counterattack: the music shifts to quarter-note chords (bar 129), all with F-sharp in the upper register and all on the beat. The nozzle snakes on frame during the first beat with a hissing sound, and the water hits Pluto’s rear end on the third, accompanied by a percussive “boink,” rendering it a cartoon version of a spank. Pluto then leaps on the downbeat of bar 130, finally getting free of the hose that had entangled him. The spank and leap are doubly accented. First, they are stressed by means of sound effects that reinforce the meter— downbeat hiss, beat-2 boink, downbeat leap. They are also accented in a more complex way by the return of the F-sharp ostinato. This pitch is used during the cutaway to Mickey, where it apparently functions to imitate his laugh. When it is brought back in bar 129, it is much more emphatic than in the prior iteration since it includes both upper and lower

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voices and coincides with the meter. Further, in contrast with the two previous bars of half-note chords in bars 127 and 128, the quarter-note chords represent an acceleration of tempo. Thus subtle changes in the rhythm and pitch of the ostinato contribute to an escalation of the gag and its apparent speed. The most prominent comic reversal, which is initiated by Pluto’s third bite, involves more extensive preparation and is thus similar in structure to the opening of the gag. A total of six bars of half-note chords, each preceded by an ornament or short run, builds up to the moment in which the tap is pulled out of the wall (bars 130 to 136). Beginning with Pluto’s bite in bar 131, the chords begin to modulate and rise in pitch as the dog moves to the left, apparently pulling harder and harder on each chord. The relatively slow pace of the music in bars 130 to 133 and the very familiarity and intelligibility of the chord changes, which connote rising tension, lead to an expectation of a significant rebound—Pluto is really going to get it this time. This expectation is reversed with the cut to Mickey after the second beat of bar 133 (indeed, the primary function of the cutaway in shot 18 is to prepare for this). Caught on the hose, the mouse is lowered and then pulled progressively higher on a cycle of twelve frames that coincides with the sonic high point of each chord. In bar 136, the whole-note D chord, the tap breaks free from the wall, and Mickey is tossed up by the force of the water that streams out. He falls to the ground with a squash and a cymbal crash. It would seem that this reversal caps the gag. It provides the biggest rebound effect. Moreover, it returns us to the larger narrative pattern in which Pluto’s playful antics undermine his master in some way. The temporal structure of the agitato as a whole becomes evident, then, from the vantage point of Mickey’s pratfall. It starts slowly, with suspense sustained over the eleven bars of water triplets. In the middle section the tempo of both music and narrative accelerates. The ostinato on quarter notes in bar 114 initiates this acceleration, which is then extended with the shift to a pattern of running eighth notes in bar 120. Similarly, as noted above, the comic reversals instigated by the waterspout and the snaking hose in bar 120 are not extensively prepared for or developed, in contrast with the initial blast of water that Pluto receives in the face in bar 112. The film then slows down for the biggest reversal. The half-note chords are sparer and slower than anything that has come before, and the suspense created over the course of the chord progression also involves a pause in the action. Considered simply as music, Frank Churchill’s score for this agitato (indeed for the film as a whole) may not seem structurally coherent, but if we

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understand the music in the context of the rhythm, tempo, and pacing of the narrative as a whole, its logic and even a kind of subtlety become apparent.33 It is worth considering the agitato from beyond the vantage of Mickey’s pratfall, however, since the filmmakers are not done with the hose, and the reprise introduces some new aspects of tempo and pacing in the film. Following the D-major chord, the tempo slows to MM W = 90 (three-fourths of the previous speed) or a frame rate of sixteen frames per beat calculated on half notes. Over the course of bars 137 to 139, and a quarter-note ostinato pattern, Mickey struggles up through the stream of water and pushes it back into the wall; in the fourth bar, two half-note chords, he manages to hold it at bay. With the cut to Pluto, a sprightly eight-bar tune in G major commences, its organization on quarter notes inviting us to count it in four (bars 141 to 148). In the first bar Pluto hardly moves: he watches a meager waterspout, lifting and holding his paw on the third beat. In the second bar the spout expires, and Pluto finally brings his paw down. The action, which picks up at this point, is organized on quarter notes (thus on units of eight frames) and mickey moused with the melody. Pluto brings his paw down on the hose on the second half of beat 3 (D). This creates a bulge that travels along the hose and hits his behind on the second half of beat 4 (D-sharp). He leaps on the first beat of bar 143, lands on the second, hits his bottom on the ground on the second half of beat 4 (A), and spins around over the course of the eighth-note motive that begins bar 144. His front paws land after the third beat (A), and he begins to bark on the second half of beat 4 (A-sharp). He does very little after this, barking over the course of the next five beats and then turning to watch Mickey off right. In many ways the return to Pluto and the hose can be considered a moment of relaxation before the next agitato section (which begins with running triplets) gets under way. This relaxation is a product of several factors: the lazy beginning with Pluto practically immobile and the meager waterspout, the reassertion of melody as opposed to the prior emphasis on the rhythmic qualities of the score, the relative paucity of action at the end of the subsegment compared to what has gone before, and the slower frame rate (as noted above reduced to 16 fpb from 12 fpb). Nonetheless, as the mickey-moused portions of the episode indicate, the animators are not bound by the slower frame rate. By organizing the action on quarter notes, they can opt for a much quicker tempo of movement and action: bars 142 to 144 are actually organized at 8 fpb, twice as fast as an organization on half notes would imply and, indeed, slightly faster than the 12 fpb rate that has dominated to this point. The tempo change that is buried in this unassum-

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ing reprise of the hose gag is thus similar to the “wolf-trot” in Three Little Pigs. The tempo of the animation is unobtrusively speeded up, preparing the way for the faster agitato that follows (encompassing the episode with the flashlight and the ensuing race into the interior of the house). The animation does not fall back to the original tempo of MM W = 120 until the initiation of the flypaper sequence. In his essay on the Silly Symphony composers, Ross Care refers to a gag in the film Music Land in which the hero, a saxophone-prince, is locked up in a prison that takes the form of a giant metronome. He comments that the gag holds “a profusion of musical and aesthetic ramifications, particularly to the Disney composers, who were literally dominated by the metronomic precision with which these ’30’s shorts were timed.”34 The metronome prison is a wonderful image for the tyranny of the beat that held sway over the Disney animators and directors, no less than the composers. But I have tried to indicate that this tyranny was not absolute. Exploiting the precision that sound technology afforded, the earliest mickey mousers, Ub Iwerks and Carl Stalling, created variety by matching movement to different fractions of the beat and establishing differential rates of movement within the shot. By the mid-1930s, the Disney studio had institutionalized the structural importance accorded the score in part by assigning scripts to composer-director teams. The aim was no longer to create a simple match between movement and music but to integrate pacing, the timing of the animation, and the score. The synchronization between movement and music became more selective so that important moments could be accented and phrases of movement defined between prominent sync points. The distinction between songs and agitato sections allowed for mickey mousing to come to the fore as a function of diegetic performances (as in the renditions of “Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”) or tuneful interludes (as in Mickey and Pluto raking leaves), while quicker action was conceived in terms of larger musical units, with figure movement synched up with one or more rhythmically similar bars, most frequently ostinato or scale passages. Composer Frank Churchill minimized the potentially monotonous organization of movement on the beat through the use of relatively short and varied motives (a strategy that Carl Stalling would carry even further at Warners in the late 1930s). He was also adept at putting movement out of phase with melodic rhythm, a point made manifest in the case of Pluto’s hiccups in Playful Pluto but most frequently accomplished through having characters move to a highly metrical bass line while accompanied by one of his inventive syncopated melodies in the upper voices. Gillett and Churchill also experimented with varying the frame rate, speeding it up for narrative

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climaxes, slowing it down for more relaxed portions of a film, and even, as in the case of the reprise of Pluto’s battle with the hose, doing both at once. The metronome was thus not really a prison but rather, as any musician who has ever struggled to match notes with its annoyingly precise clicks will attest, a gateway to complex rhythmic patterning and to achieving control over pace.

4. Lubitsch and Mamoulian Rhythm is a “bond”—a discipline imposed on music and poetry in order to convert unshaped raw material into a well-wrought art. —curt sachs, Rhythm and Tempo

During the early sound period, filmmakers across Europe and America experimented with organizing live-action films rhythmically in relation to the music track. Perhaps the best known of such works are René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris (April 1930), Le million (April 1931), and A nous la liberté (December 1931). As I noted in chapter 1, Claudia Gorbman has described the first of these as privileging music over speech and effects. The film is thus in consonance with the early sound cartoon but at decided variance with what came to be the established hierarchy of elements in the classical Hollywood sound track, in which speech predominated.1 In a study of Le million Lucy Fischer discusses how the editing of several sequences was dictated by the score and notes Clair’s personal involvement in its preparation and timing.2 A diverse set of musical comedies from the early 1930s such as Wilhelm Thiele’s Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Three from the Filling Station, September 1930) and Grigori Alexandrov’s Vesyolye Rebyata (Jolly Fellows, December 1934) contain formal experiments similar to those essayed by Clair: cutting to the rhythm of songs or background score, coordinating musical rhythm and figure movement outside the context of dances, using song in place of dialogue, or emphasizing the metrical qualities of speech. The American filmmaker most commonly associated with this trend is Ernst Lubitsch, who directed four musical comedies for Paramount prior to 1932: Monte Carlo (September 1930), The Love Parade (November 1930), The Smiling Lieutenant (August 1931), and One Hour with You (February/March 1932).3 The set should include Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (August 1932), made for Paramount in the same span of years and utilizing the stars with whom Lubitsch typically worked: Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (October 1932) can also productively be considered one of the set.4 109

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Clair’s avowed intention in his early sound films was to escape the strictures that the direct recording of dialogue placed on camera and figure movement, editing, and pacing. This entire group of films embraced what Alberto Cavalcanti, writing in 1939, identified as a “nonsync” style in opposition to sound films that featured a high proportion of lip-synched dialogue.5 They minimized direct recording and, in the years prior to 1931, when it was still widely in use, multiple-camera shooting. They made heavy use of postsynchronized music (music recorded to picture on a scoring stage after shooting and editing has been completed). This brought some of the films closer to the music-and-effects tracks found in early sound features such as Don Juan, Sunrise, or Street Angel, as well as the background music employed in part-talkies such as Show Boat, an example that Clair himself cited.6 In addition this group of films extensively employed sync-to-playback, a process in which the music was prepared and recorded prior to shooting and the action filmed to a playback of the sound. (In the United States, even after recording to disk had been abandoned, wax recordings were usually made from the original film sound for this process, given their durability and the ease with which they could be cued up). The earliest filmed musical numbers were direct-recorded with performers and musicians in the same space. In the 1926 Vitaphone short A Plantation Act, Al Jolson finishes his introductory patter and signals the conductor of the orchestra off-camera that he is ready to begin singing by addressing him as “Professor,” much as he might have done on stage. Direct recording of musical numbers continued well into the 1930s. Writing in 1931, George Lewin of Paramount indicated that the studio still preferred to shoot and record musical numbers with the orchestra on the set, although sometimes other methods were adopted for reasons of economy and production efficiency.7 Figure 64 shows the disposition of musicians on the set during the filming and recording of Maurice Chevalier’s “The Poor Apache” number from Love Me Tonight. Similarly, the actor’s performance of “What Would You Do?” from One Hour with You was shot like a Vitaphone short, utilizing only two camera positions and lengthy takes that give immediacy and intimacy to the song’s direct address to the audience (or to the men in the audience).8 In contrast, postsynchronization and sync-to-playback separated the production and recording of the music track from the visual record of the performance.9 Sync-to-playback was utilized as early as 1929 to facilitate complicated production numbers. In Sunny Side Up Sharon Lynn’s directrecorded vocal rendition of “Turn on the Heat” leads into a dance number that required elaborate changes of costume and setting and is obviously

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figure 64. Production still of “The Poor Apache” number.

performed to a playback of her singing. In the films of Lubitsch and Mamoulian, and in the other films inspired by René Clair’s example, postsynchronization and sync-to-playback are used more extensively than in Sunny Side Up (most of Janet Gaynor’s performances in the latter film, especially her charming rendition of the title tune, retain the Vitaphone style of staging and seem to have been shot with direct sound). Moreover, sync-to-playback is used for the express purpose of breaking out of a fixed time and space of performance, which is not the case in “Turn Up the Heat,” a number presented as part of a show within the fiction and, supposedly, contained entirely within a single space.10 In Monte Carlo Jeanette MacDonald’s rendition of “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” apparently sung from a moving train, spreads to a chorus of peasants in the fields seen from the train window (the solo appears to have been “sunk-to-playback” to use the industry term; the chorus is postsynchronized). Love Me Tonight carries this device to extremes, following a song through many different performance contexts, most of which appear to have been shot sync-to-playback. Maurice Chevalier’s rendition of “Isn’t It Romantic?” inside his tailor’s shop is picked up by a customer who carries

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it into a taxi, where it is taken up by the taxi driver, who passes it on to another customer, a composer, who passes it along to a group of foot soldiers on a train, who sing it (in march time) while walking along a road, where it is picked up by a gypsy violinist and rendered with much rubato for his band gathered around a campfire, and hence conveyed to Jeanette MacDonald, who listens from the balcony of the family castle and completes the refrain. Unlike the direct-recorded songs that appear in these same films, “Beyond the Blue Horizon” and “Isn’t It Romantic?” flaunt the fact that they could not have emanated from the unified time and space of the actors’ performances. The point is emphasized by the fantastical nature of the movement from one performer (or apparent performer) to the next. In Monte Carlo it is highly implausible that the distant fields of peasants could share MacDonald’s sonic space on the train and join in. In Love Me Tonight the concatenation of coincidences that connects Chevalier and MacDonald in song is even more far-fetched and is especially notable since the music shifts in genre, orchestration, rhythm, and tempo while maintaining the continuity of the lyrics. Such flagrant violations of the spatial and temporal continuity of performance are highly salient in these films. One might be tempted to consider them “nonsync” in Cavalcanti’s sense: they are nonnaturalistic, and they depend on a very obvious separation between the music and its apparent source. The term is misleading, however, in that it confuses synchronization and direct sound. “Beyond the Blue Horizon” and “Isn’t It Romantic?” are very carefully synchronized: the music was arranged so as to facilitate the transferal of the performance from actor to chorus, or actor to actor, and in the sections taken sync-to-playback, the action was staged and shot to correspond with a fixed duration of prerecorded music. The most relevant distinction is thus not between “sync” and “nonsync” but between two different synchronization processes. At one extreme we have the Vitaphone method in use through the mid-1930s as a result of the studios’ preference for what they considered high-quality direct sound. In this case synchronization was worked out by actors and musicians listening to one another and working with the director and conductor on a set in real time (the way music used to be). At the other extreme was sync-toplayback, achieved by preproduction collaboration between composer, conductor, arranger, and director, and/or postsynchronization by this same team with the addition of picture, sound, and music editors and sound mixers (that is, the method that would eventually dominate Hollywood soundfilm production as a whole).11

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However, the Lubitsch and Mamoulian musicals are more than simply way stations on the road to classical film scoring. The films foreground the highly synthetic nature of their synchronization processes. Like the early Silly Symphonies and Mickey Mouse cartoons, these films may be seen as experiments, essaying a complex and varied palette of sound-image relationships made possible by the new technology of film-sound editing, mixing, and playback.

love me tonight Love Me Tonight provides one of the most overt examples of the rhythmic integration of sound effects, speech, and figure and camera movement. This is particularly evident in the well-known opening, which establishes a connection between the proletarian energy and urban bustle of Paris itself and the character of the tailor Maurice Courtelin (played by Chevalier). The film evokes the city with a sound-effects prelude, made up of what are supposedly noises accumulating on the street as the day commences. It should be noted that Mamoulian first did such a scene in the 1927 production of the Dorothy and DuBose Heyward play Porgy, which he directed.12 In a contemporary interview he described the scene as follows: “The curtain rises on a still stage wrapped in the early morning mists. It is the dawn. And one by one the characters appear and set about their usual tasks. Soon there is a terrific din, but all the activity, the pounding, tooting, shouting, laughing is really done to count. First I use one-two time, then faster and faster, until the whole scene is swinging. And then I bring Porgy in.”13 While the sound-effects prelude in the film was inspired by the theatrical source, it benefited from the ability to postsynchronize sound and picture. This enabled the filmmakers to create a percussion score that is longer and denser than the version in Mamoulian’s script for Porgy and would have been difficult to pull off in real time (as would have been necessary in the case of direct recording on film or live performance on the stage).14 It is hard to ascertain who should be credited for the percussion score, as it is with most of the background scoring in Love Me Tonight. The ASCAP database gives very few credits for Love Me Tonight cues, but given that source and other indications in the Paramount files, it appears that most of the background scoring was done by Richard Rodgers and Paramount staff composer John M. Leipold; the songs for the film were written by Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.15 The effects prelude begins with four shots of largely depopulated streets, typical Paris locales, each accompanied by a single toll of a bell. These give

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way to a series of shots of workers and housewives beginning the day, shots that motivate the introduction of disparate noises (see the transcription in fig. 65, and refer to clip 10). The noises may be divided into lower, middle, and upper ranges, with the lowest pitches providing the most sustained rhythmic pattern. In shot 21, at 02:16:11, the effects score is augmented by an orchestral cue, “Street Scene” (see the transcription in fig. 66), which apparently issues from a diegetic source, music playing on a gramophone. Shot 5, a high-angle view of a dead-end street, shows a single workman wheeling his barrow. He stops, throws his tools on the cobblestones (Foley sound effect), and commences work with a pick. The loud low-pitched thud of the pick, emphasized by a cut to a closer view, becomes the downbeat for the 44 bars that follow. The film cuts to a high-angle shot of a clochard asleep on the street in another part of the neighborhood. He snores on the third beat for six bars. In the next shot, bar 11, a woman sweeping comes in on beats 2 and 4. Somewhat later (bar 20), a locksmith sharpening a saw comes in on the second half of beats 1 and 3. A shot of three chimneys introduces a metallic tapping sound, pitched in a middle register above the lower-pitched ostinato bass (shot 9, bar 13). The taps are off the downbeat and assume a pattern of A EE Q EE (bar 14). Higher pitched noises are introduced: over shot 10, of opening shutters, an alarm clock and a crying baby are heard for about four bars. Over a shot of schoolboys rounding a corner there are high, rapid, ringing pitches from another offscreen source (bar 22). The bass alters with the introduction of two cobblers hammering nails into boots. The first and loudest begins in bar 29 and takes the place of the snoring formerly heard on beat 3 (the image track suggests that he also strikes on beat 1 but cannot be “heard” over the pick). The second cobbler, who begins at the end of bar 30, adds a touch of syncopation, with two taps, a sixteenth note leading to a quarter note heard on beats 2 and 4. Shot 17, another street, shows the neighborhood getting busy, with people on foot and on bicycle accompanied by faint crowd noise and bell sounds that do not fit into the rhythmic pattern but add fullness and presence. Other shots motivate additional fleeting noises—a knife sharpener, a woman beating a blanket—but these are relatively soft, and they do not fundamentally alter the rhythmic structure of the rather dense sonic texture already in place. A final noise is introduced: a taxi horn, heard on the downbeat of bar 36, over shot 20, of a vehicle passing by Maurice’s tailor’s shop. It stands out by virtue of its volume and its pitch, which is well above the other tones. The effect is repeated in the next bar over a shot of a woman opening her shutters and smiling at the street below. The woman then

figure 65. Transcription of Love Me Tonight noise prelude. Shot 5 high angle, street set workman enters

3

5

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/

figure 65 (continued)

gramophone starts on beat two

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turns from the camera and places a needle on the gramophone, motivating the initiation of the “Street Scene” music cue. An orchestral variant of the taxi horn forms part of this cue and serves as a bridge between the effects and the orchestral score, a point discussed in more detail below. Cut from the woman who starts the recording to a shot of a woman hanging out laundry on a rooftop. During this shot there is a crescendo, and the music becomes much more prominent. The film then returns to the same high-angle shot of the dead-end street on which the noises began. The once-empty street is now bustling with people and traffic. The contrast serves as a point of closure for the images (but not the music-and-effects track) associated with the Paris-at-dawn segment.

figure 66. Transcription of Love Me Tonight “Street Scene” cue. Shot 21 woman with gramophone

Shot 22 w oman hanging out laundry

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figure 66 (continued)

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This description suggests the fluidity with which the filmmakers manipulated sound in postproduction. The rhythm of the track ties together people who are otherwise not connected and creates the sense of a unified musical or performance space apart from any given actor. The kind of postsynchronization found in Love Me Tonight may be distinguished from earlier music-and-effects tracks, or from silent-film accompaniment, by the precision of the sync and the degree with which sound and image tracks are integrated. While silent-film accompaniment certainly included noises, indeed movie-palace organs were designed with a panoply of such effects, the sustained and patterned use of noise found in the opening of Love Me Tonight was enabled by the new capacity to mix and synchronize sound in postproduction. The film’s opening was shot silent, but the images were completely planned with the sound track in mind and the editing designed to meet its requirements. Most of the elements of the percussion score are introduced by a putative visual source. The timing of the shots has been arranged to lend more importance to the key percussive sounds, particularly the bass notes: thus the two shots of the man wielding the pick (16:20) establish the downbeat, and the shot of the cobblers (13:17) establishes the third beat and the syncopated elements. The noises that occupy a less important place in the rhythmic structure are given correspondingly

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less screen time—the snorer (04:12), the sweeper (09:22), the locksmith (08:25). While one might be tempted to see the noise prelude in Love Me Tonight as an anticipation of, or perhaps a possible inspiration for, musique concrète, it should be emphasized that it is very much rooted in the new techniques of reproduction that made it possible to create a rhythm out of noises and match them to a visual space within which this performance coheres. And yet, the synchronization does not quite work. The percussion score and the orchestral “Street Scene” cue were apparently recorded separately to be mixed later (on the model of mixing “sound effects” and music). They are at slightly different tempi. The percussion score is at MM Q = 79 and the orchestral score at slightly more than twice the street-sound tempo, MM Q = circa 164 (both were tested against a digital metronome). Thus once the gramophone commences, they get out of sync with one another after four or five bars (by bar 43). I find it likely that the filmmakers were trying to get the tracks in sync. The tracks are very close to conventional metronome markings (Q = 80 and Q = 160), and if the music had clocked in at precisely these tempi, the two tracks would have dovetailed perfectly (i.e., the duration of one bar of the percussion score in 44 time would have coincided with four bars of the orchestral score in 42 time). The control over tempi required to dovetail tracks in this way is most reliably achieved with a click track, and the lack of synchronization between the percussion and orchestral tracks in Love Me Tonight is very good evidence that click tracks were not being employed for live-action filmmaking at Paramount in 1932 (see chapter 6 for more on the use of click tracks in live-action filmmaking). The increasing disparity in the sync between the tracks is obviated to some extent by the volume levels established in the mix: after three seconds or about four bars of the orchestral score, music predominates on the track. The two tracks continue to run in tandem for about a minute (59:20) over the shots connecting the final shots of the Paris-at-dawn segment with the interior of Maurice’s apartment. It is worth considering in more detail how the filmmakers make the transition from the combination of the percussion track and the “Street Scene” cue to Chevalier’s first number, the “Song of Paree.” The camera moves from the street “through” the open window of Maurice’s secondstory apartment and discovers the tailor dressing for work. He closes the shutters, motivating the end of the street sounds, and begins to sing. Throughout this transition, there is close coordination between sonic rhythms and camera and figure movement. The “Street Scene” cue comprises three basic elements, a motive distinguished by repeated notes on a single pitch (fig. 66, bars 1–4), seven bars

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that anticipate the “Song of Paree” chorus (bars 43–49), and, with a nod to the opening of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” an orchestral rendering of the taxi horn (bars 14–15). The dissolve to the exterior of Maurice’s window coincides with a diminuendo in the effects score. The initiation of a tracking movement through the window is synchronized with three beats of a pronounced rising chromatic scale in the bass (bars 29–30). Over the next twelve bars, primarily variations of the repeated eighth-note figure in the upper voices with a slower-moving quarter-note melody in the bass, the camera moves past the window frame (a breakaway set was probably utilized) and toward a drawn outline of Chevalier on the back wall (supposedly a crack in the plaster). Chevalier’s signature straw boater hangs on a nail adorning the outlined head. The music shifts into the “Song of Paree” chorus, with actual horn noises heard over the repeated notes in the first two bars. As the camera comes to rest on Chevalier’s outline, the music comes to a half-cadence (bars 46–49). New phases of camera movement and melodic movement are initiated in tandem. A pan right coincides with the next three bars of the “Song of Paree” chorus, again ornamented with taxi horns. The movement picks up Chevalier in medium shot, in the act of donning a turtleneck sweater. His face emerges from the turtleneck just as the orchestral taxi-horn motive interrupts the resolution of the phrase (instead of a return to E we get E-flat, the first note of the horn, bars 57–58). The film holds on the medium shot of Chevalier over the four-bar duration of the orchestral taxi-horn motive. Cut to a long shot of Chevalier, now dressed and standing beside his bed. Four bars of the initial repeated eighth-note motive are followed by a prolonged dissonant chord, which serves as a cue for Chevalier’s line, spoken without music, and with the percussion underscore correspondingly more prominent: “Lovely morning song of Paree / You are much too loud for me.” A new music cue begins at the end of this line, four bars of the ostinato accompaniment that will continue under Chevalier’s half-spoken rendition of the “Song of Paree” verse. Over these four bars Chevalier walks right as the camera pans to follow him to the window. He closes it, and the percussion score ends on the third beat of the fourth bar. Given that the “Song of Paree” chorus has its own intricate verse introduction, the “Street Scene” cue may seem too much—an introduction to an introduction as it were. And, while this musical passage could be said to introduce the star, it hardly seems necessary to have done so twice, once in effigy and once in propria persona. But the cue actually needs its 59:20 duration: it binds the effects score to the melody of the song that follows via

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the taxi-horn motive and the narrative references to street noise (the dialogue, the closing of the window, etc.). According to Kurt London, in his 1936 study Film Music, composers of silent film music frequently lacked this kind of time for rhythmic or melodic modulations between different sections of the score: “The speed at which these pictures change is not in keeping with the character of music, which needs a certain time to develop.”16 The structural importance accorded to music in Love Me Tonight allowed the composers of the “Street Scene” cue a rare amount of elbow room. The tight links between movement and music established in the opening of Love Me Tonight are given decided thematic significance in Mamoulian’s film as a whole, which sets up an opposition between the vitality of Paris and the Parisian working class, and the repressed and enervating atmosphere of the aristocratic d’Artelines country estate, where Princess Jeanette lives with relatives. This is most evident in three distinct but parallel sequences of characters arriving at the chateau (the sequences may be compared in clip 11). In the first, Vicomte Gilbert de Vareze (Charlie Ruggles) comes from Paris by taxi, hoping to get money from his uncle. Prior to his arrival the camera tracks slowly along with servants moving at a funereal pace through a great hall where guests and relations are assembled to play bridge. The tempo of the music, a slow march at MM Q = 96, is matched by the static postures of the bridge players, one of whom slowly taps the man beside her with her lorgnette to wake him up so that play can recommence. With a cut outside to Gilbert’s taxi the tempo almost doubles to MM Q = 168, the acceleration augmented by a change in rhythm to two bars of rapidly moving sixteenth notes. Telling the driver to wait for him, he moves off, and in the next shot, accompanied by a swift eighth-note ostinato, he moves down the front hall, skipping to a halt in front of a doorway and then resuming his pace. He finds his cousin, Countess Valentine (Myrna Loy), seated near the bottom of the grand staircase, asleep. The abrupt transition from a slow to a fast tempo found in Gilbert’s arrival is reversed when Jeanette returns to the chateau. She has encountered Maurice on the road and been insulted by his suggestive rendition of the song “Mimi.” She descends from her carriage to a bouncy orchestral version of “Mimi” in cut time at MM W = 72. As she enters the front door and moves down the hall, the music continues, although reduced in volume. With a cut to the Count de Savignac (Charles Butterworth), Jeanette’s suitor and almost her aristocratic equal but in no way a good sexual match, there is a marked ritard. The film cuts back to Jeanette as the music gets

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even slower, and her forward movement is arrested. She puts her hand to her head and faints away to the accompaniment of four descending chords. Like the vicomte, Maurice arrives at the chateau in a taxi, although one driven by a copain, as befits his proletarian status. They pull up at the front door to the strains of the French-revolutionary song “Ah! ça ira,” at MM Q = 116. As Maurice enters the chateau, faint strains of a minuet are heard. He walks softly on tiptoe down the front hall and opens doors to the right and the left looking for the chateau’s occupants. The action unfolds to two repetitions of a four-bar strain. As he looks in the first room, it is heard softly at MM Q = 63; as he looks in the second room, it is a bit louder, the tempo starting at MM Q = 88 with an accelerando. As he moves further down the hall toward the room with the main staircase, the music continues to accelerate, and the four-bar strain is integrated into a loud and jazzy bigband number. The score reaches MM Q = 120 by the time he arrives at the top of the first flight of stairs. The music stops abruptly, and he pauses for four beats and looks around. The music resumes as he climbs the next flight of stairs in four bars of MM Q = 132. He pauses for a beat beside a window. There are two more flights at MM Q = 176 and Q = 200 respectively. The strain is now rendered without the dotted eighth notes and the accents that originally distinguished it. A flurry of fast eighths, it is overlaid with higher ascending eighth notes that increase the density and apparent speed of the music. In these final repetitions the actor’s movement is also speeded up by undercranking and by an editing ellipsis (there is no pause between the third and fourth flights of stairs, the film simply repeats the previous shot of him climbing with even more undercranking). Thus, Maurice is the only character to resist the somnolent effect of the chateau, a point brought home by the marked increases in the tempo of the background score and the shooting and editing of character movement. The well-known stag hunt sequence in Love Me Tonight works similarly to the chateau entrances, utilizing postsynchronization to provide highly marked contrasts in the tempo of figure movement in tandem with the score. The manipulations of tempo are made palpable, and comic, by cinematographic alternations of the speed of figure movement. Maurice, pretending to be an aristocrat so as to remain at the chateau while Gilbert tries to raise the money to pay his bill, is forced to participate in a stag hunt. Mounted on an unruly horse beyond his control, he gallops away from the stable yard in fast motion. The shots are accompanied by a cartoonlike use of effects: horses hooves and a drumroll are capped by a slide on a whistle and a cymbal crash as the horse runs out of sight. In contrast, at the end of the sequence, when the whole party returns to the castle, slow motion is

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utilized. Maurice, having first pleaded with Jeanette to save the stag, then convinces the rest of the party to depart quietly so that the animal can sleep. The riders leave as advised on “tip toe,” in slow motion and with correspondingly slow and quiet musical accompaniment. The theme, heard earlier in the hunt over shots of Jeanette riding alone on her horse, was initially played at MM W. = 84 and was slowed to MM W. = 21, one-fourth the original speed, for the slow motion. Sandwiched between fast- and slow-motion gags, the hunt proper is largely composed of crosscutting between the dogs, sometimes followed by the mounted hunters, and the stag. The editing emphasizes differences in the way the animals move within the frame, the dogs running in a pack while the stag gently bounces, all four feet leaving the ground at once. The sound track alternates with the image track, cutting between a 86 dotted rhythm punctuated by horn calls for the dogs and horses, and an even 22 rhythm in which the piccolo carries the melody for the stag. Tonal congruences occur at the points of transition, frequently with harmonic modulations. The tempo is constant across the two musical lines, with one 86 bar of dog and horse music equal to one-half of the 22 stag music. The dog-and-horse music also sounds faster because the stag music has half as many downbeats, while the dog music has denser orchestration and uneven, “galloping” rhythms. There is a pronounced acceleration across the course of the hunt until the point at which the stag cuts across the river, escaping the dogs and riders to go off on the opposite bank. This acceleration is not a function of musical rhythm but of editing. At the initiation of the crosscutting, a dissolve from the hunting party leaving the estate to the stag, there are four- to six-second alternations between stag and dogs (in one instance two shorter shots of the stag in continuity are the equivalent of a five-second shot). The shot lengths go down to the two-to-three-second range. At the fastest section there are seven shots at about 1.5 seconds each. The only shot of the set that is longer than two seconds shows the stag actually running across the river, no longer gently bouncing, and is undercranked (in fast motion). The editing thus dictates alternation between two musical “lines of action” in the hunt sequence, while the rhythmic contrasts established between the two musical lines are intensified by the quickening pace of that editing. Mamoulian’s use of sync-to-playback and postsynchronization frees his film from the continuous time and space of the actor’s performance, and allows for much more flexible and imaginative integrations of music, movement, and editing. The effects prologue unites the dispersed inhabitants of Maurice’s quartier into a coherent rhythmic design, creating a space that becomes the subject of the “Song of Paree.” In the sequence of

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Maurice’s arrival at the chateau the character’s movement through the space varies in consonance with a disparate set of musical ideas and rhythms: the brisk approach to the door synchronized with the contredanse of “Ah! ça ira”; the first tentative steps inside with the strains of a Mozart minuet; the fantastic acceleration up the stairs with Rodgers’s scherzando. A similar pattern is followed with respect to animal locomotion in the stag hunt. Much of the film’s wit lies in its background scoring. It is above all in the background scoring that we can see filmmakers and musicians playing with the sync, tailoring movement to music in innovative ways that lie beyond the capacities of direct recording.

monte carlo Although both Lubitsch and Mamoulian were influenced by Clair, and Mamoulian was himself influenced by Lubitsch, the two filmmakers take quite different approaches to the rhythmic problems posed by sound. The differences become clear if we compare the opening of Love Me Tonight with that of Monte Carlo, the first of Lubitsch’s four Paramount musicals, released in 1930. Love Me Tonight Noise prelude and “Street Scene” (Paris wakes up, Maurice is introduced) “Song of Paree” (sung by Maurice as he prepares to go out) “How Are You?” (patter song by Maurice and his neighbors as he walks to work) Dialogue scene in tailor’s shop (Maurice, a customer, Gilbert) “Isn’t It Romantic?” (passed from Maurice to various performers ending with Jeanette) Monte Carlo “Day of Days” (sung by a diegetic chorus) Dialogue scene at the palace (Otto and his father) “She’ll Love Me and Like It” (sung by Otto and wedding guests) Dialogue scene on the train (Countess Mara, her maid, and the conductor) “Beyond the Blue Horizon” (passed from Mara to the peasants in the field)

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The films are quite similar in that they mix song and dialogue scenes leading to the first big number, respectively “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Beyond the Blue Horizon.” At the conclusion of those numbers the location of the action has shifted, in one case from Paris to the d’Artelines estate, and in the other from the Ruritanian castle of Duke Otto Liebenheim (Claud Allister) to Monte Carlo, where Countess Mara (Jeanette MacDonald) hopes to win enough money to avoid having to marry the duke. One suspects that the similarity in the structure of the two openings is not coincidental and that in 1932 Mamoulian borrowed from and elaborated on Lubitsch’s example. While real-time duration is not an infallible guide to pace, it is worth noting that Mamoulian’s opening is slower: there are approximately seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds to the conclusion of Jeanette MacDonald’s rendition of “Isn’t It Romantic?” in Love Me Tonight while there are thirteen minutes and ten seconds to the conclusion of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” in Monte Carlo. More important, the beginning of Mamoulian’s story is delayed. The first three numbers of Love Me Tonight introduce Maurice and his neighborhood. The narrative conflict proper, which begins with Gilbert’s inability to pay for the clothes Maurice has made for him, is not broached until the fourth segment, after approximately ten minutes have elapsed. In contrast, from the very first image (and note), Lubitsch’s film portrays an impending wedding, and by the end of the opening number, after four minutes have elapsed, it is revealed that the bride has run off. But Monte Carlo is not simply “fast” in the sense that it avoids digressions and starts in medias res. Throughout the opening ten minutes of the film, tempi vary in subtle ways in relation to narrative development. If Mamoulian seems primarily interested in correlating music with camera and figure movement, Lubitsch seems primarily interested in creating dramatically coherent rhythms within relatively short plot segments and in avoiding musical performances that slow down the action. Love Me Tonight resembles early examples of mickey mousing in which matching the music beat by beat was the predominant structuring device (although in numbers postsynchronized without a click track the kind of precise matching achieved by the Disney animators was not possible for Mamoulian). Monte Carlo predates Love Me Tonight, but it resembles the later phase of Disney animation discussed in chapter 3, in which both movement and music were integrated into unified phrases defined by the action. In Monte Carlo these units are usually defined by editing, the primary means of articulating narrative segments and controlling their pace. In addition these units are set off by visual punctuation (fades or dissolves), as well as by compositional devices and sound effects.

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Consider, for example, the first musical number of the film, “Day of Days,” which takes place in the courtyard that connects the ducal palace with the chapel where the wedding is to take place. An ordered and highly formal procession toward the chapel is accompanied by music supposedly sung by a choir of peasants in attendance. With the sudden onset of a storm, the dignity of the procession threatens to disintegrate as people run to get out of the rain while the choir’s song is interrupted by peals of thunder. The main comic thrust of the scene derives from a double disruption of the proceedings: first, the thunderstorm, and second, the news that the bride has not shown up. “Day of Days” was written by the film’s songwriters, Leo Robin and Richard Whiting. It seems likely that it was postsynchronized, for the scoring is extremely precise, with individual words or word groups deliberately placed against brief shots or bits of action. The scoring may have been worked out by Paramount staff composer Leipold, who is credited in the ASCAP database with unidentified cues in Monte Carlo and who, as noted above, later worked on Love Me Tonight. Unfortunately, this brilliant experiment in synchronization may not have been entirely audible to audiences in 1930. As late as 1936 Kurt London cautioned that the lyrics of choral music did not reproduce well on film.17 It is possible that this technical difficulty was not yet recognized when the musicians began to work on Monte Carlo (the film premiered in August 1930; therefore, I estimate it was in postproduction in the late spring of that year). In any event the lyrics are barely audible in what seems to be a remastered sound track on the Criterion DVD of the film; they were probably not distinct in playback on the theater loudspeakers in use in 1930. Nonetheless, given that we can now hear the lyrics, it is worth considering them, since, as I hope to demonstrate, they are structured very precisely in relation to Lubitsch’s editing. “Day of Days” is divided into two-line couplets, each of four bars with a pronounced cadence or half-cadence followed by a fanfare of one or two bars. Day of days, won-der-ful day of love. [Cadence and two-bar fanfare] Mu sic plays un-der-the skies a bove. [Cadence and one-bar fanfare] Mu sic plays sing-ing-a song of praise. [Half-cadence and fanfare to end of bar following “praise”] Mu sic plays o-ver-this day of days. [Two-bar fanfare]

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There is very little musical development over the course of these lines. The melody of the first, second, and fourth couplets is identical. A new melodic line is introduced for the third couplet, leading to the half-cadence. The rhythm remains identical throughout: the beginning of the second line in each couplet consists of two eighth notes and a quarter note (e.g., “won-derful,” “un-der-the,” “o-ver-this”), but the rest of the melody proceeds by half notes, so that most of the important words of the song are held for a duration of a second. The ponderous tempo allows for the precise synchronization of words with other montage elements, as well as being humorously pretentious. In the first few shots music and mise-en-scène evoke the minutely organized and hierarchical nature of the ritual. The film opens with an insert of gloved hands opening a locked box and removing two wedding rings, then dissolves to a close-up of a wedding banner coupling Countess Mara’s name with that of the duke. Over these shots the opening bars of the “Bridal March” from Lohengrin are repeated three times. With a cut to the palace door, six bars of a brass fanfare begin at a stately tempo (MM Q = 116), which, with liberal use of rubato, will continue throughout the song. Servants unroll a red carpet, charting a path across the courtyard to the chapel. The far side of the path is lined by a crowd dressed in middleEuropean folkloric costumes. In a self-reflexive joke a tuxedoed servant looking very like a conductor enters from the palace and cues the crowd. They sing the first line: “Day of days.” The guests, couples in modern evening dress, emerge from the palace door over the words “wonderful day of love,” a fanfare, and “Mu sic plays.” A dissolve to the sky shows black clouds rolling in. The first thunderclap coincides with the words “under-the-skies a bove.” Thunder continues over the cadence at the end of this line. Cut back to the procession, the couples framed hips-to-feet to emphasize the quickening of their movement as the rain pelts down. Cut to a long shot of the door to the chapel, the couples running inside while the folkloric crowd behind them huddles in the rain holding a banner: “Happy is the bride the sun shines on.” A close-up of the banner coincides with the words “Song of.” Cut back to a very long shot of the courtyard with the guests rushing to shelter for the half-cadence on “praise.” Three more shots, including a repeated detail shot of the feet of the guests, emphasize their speed. The pace of the editing contributes to the sense of accelerating movement. The initial shot of the procession, prior to the onset of the storm, encompasses a fanfare and two lines of music and has a duration of more than ten seconds. The first shot of running feet that follows is two and a

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half seconds, and subsequent shots are briefer than two seconds, until the final shot of the series, which is 03:08. The speed of the cutting and figure movement is pitched against the unchanging ponderous rhythm and slow tempo of the music. It is an example of “counterpoint” that would have made Eisenstein proud. The repeat of the song is timed to coincide with the appearance of the duke. It is accompanied by an increase in shot length and a brief reassertion of the order of the ritual. At the palace doorway footmen emerge at regular intervals, each opening an umbrella at exactly the same point in his entrance. Cut to a long shot with a line of umbrellas now extending over the length of the carpet on the words “Day of,” the beginning of the repeat of the first line. On the words “days / Wonderful day of” cut to a close view of the palace doorway as Otto makes his entrance. Thunder resumes and begins to build as he pauses to put his monocle to his eye and examines the sky. Cut to a banner reading “Hail the groom!” as the choir sings the word “love.” This is followed by a fanfare and a simultaneous very loud clap of thunder, as if both are heralding the groom’s appearance. As Otto processes down the carpet toward the chapel, gracefully bowing to the crowd outside the protection of the umbrellas, the thunder stops and wedding bells are just audible on the track under the lines “Mu sic plays / un-der-the skies a bove.” The solution to the problem the rain poses for Otto is only a temporary reprieve before he encounters a second, and much more serious, impediment to the ceremony. The film begins to build to the revelation that the bride has run away, a process that continues beyond the end of the song and is underscored by a decided shift in rhythm and pacing. At the palace door a maid runs toward the camera and then off right, accompanied by a particularly loud clap of thunder. In long shot framing she approaches Otto at the chapel door and speaks to him over the half-cadence “sing-ing-a song of praise.” On the word “praise” he turns around to face camera and conveys surprise. At the beginning of the next strain, “Mu sic plays,” he puts his monocle to his eye and moves off left toward the palace door. The last phrase, “o-ver-this day of days,” which resonates with irony thanks to the montage, is heard over a shot of Otto exiting into the palace. At this point the volume and density of the track are pared down to a minimum with a cut to Mara’s suite. Otto enters, accompanied by a light, quick string accompaniment. He comes forward and again expresses surprise, the action accented by a brief high motive played by a solo clarinet. Cut to a shot of Mara’s wedding dress draped over a chair, with a slightly longer version of a similar motive. The music then ceases, giving way to

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silence on the track. While the first two shots inside the palace are relatively brief (02:09 and 03:04, shorter than the shots that directly precede them in the exterior), the next shot is quite long (20:16). The camera pans left as Otto walks over to the chair; he then walks away from camera to look into an open door on the right side of the back wall (slight reframe right), then left (pan left) to closed double doors on the other side of the room. He opens one door, with a Foley effect that stands out against the silence, and looks in. He turns and comes forward to medium-shot framing (slight reframe right) and calls, the first direct-recorded sound of the film: “Papa-a! Papa-a!” The film dissolves to a shot of train wheels starting up, with loud engine effects, and then to a woman framed hips to feet, like the earlier shot of the couples in the procession. She runs in the rain alongside the track and climbs on the train. The shot of the abandoned wedding dress and the shots of Mara boarding the train confirm the bride’s defection and thereby cap the narration of the aborted wedding, the bad day of bad days. Within the context of this logical progression, why place a shot of more than twenty seconds in which an actor walks around a set in virtual silence? The delay seems less a question of creating suspense than of building rhythmically to the conclusion of the segment. Otto’s reaction to the maid’s revelation takes the form of movement that is emphasized by both editing and camera work: the departure from the chapel door, the exit through the palace door, the exploration of Mara’s chambers. The long take provides the culmination of this movement and this phase of the action. Its conclusion is punctuated by the reintroduction of a high level of sound: Otto’s cry and the engine sounds consequent upon the dissolve to the train. Given a musical number like “Day of Days,” with so many repeated and identical cadences that none of them makes an effective stopping point, the film supplies a nonmusical, but rhythmically coherent, form of closure for the opening number. Monte Carlo proceeds through the accumulation of relatively selfenclosed and highly organized units similar to “Day of Days.” In the sequence that includes the patter song “She’ll Love Me and Like It,” Lubitsch creates rhythmic variety and style in a segment that might easily have become monotonous since it is restricted entirely to the time and space of Allister’s performance. The sequence begins with a long take (43:13) in which Otto is berated by his father for his lack of success with women. The pace picks up with the butler’s entrance, which precipitates shot-reverse-shot editing with much shorter shot lengths (10:01, 07:02, 04:21, 09:15). As Otto is instructed by his father to quiet the guests so that the Liebenheims do not have to return the wedding presents, there is a cut

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to a very long shot of a new space. The guests are gathered in a large and sumptuously decorated hall. Otto stands on a second-floor balcony overlooking the crowd, a spectacular set that seems to have been designed to permit the continuation of shot-reverse-shot cutting. Lubitsch introduces a subtle acceleration in this space: the one-to-two-second shots of the crowd reacting to Otto’s words are much shorter than the previous ones of the butler. The patter song, which begins with a nineteen-second shot of Otto, slips back into the editing rhythm of the dialogue portion of the scene, fiveto-ten-second shots of Otto, relieved by one-to-two-second shots of the crowd, who chant/sing in response. Although the tempo does not change substantially across the course of the number, it seems to pick up as the shot-reverse-shot structure is energized by the musical interchange between singer and chorus. The last two shots of the chorus show them turning right, then left on the beat in what feels like an extension of the back-and-forth rhythm established by the cutting and carried through the response structure of the song. At the end of the number there is a cut to a medium long shot of wedding photographers, a surprise since they have not been previously visible in the space. One of them sets off a chemical flash with an explosive pop that finishes off the musical cadence. The photographers bow, as if taking credit for the performance, and there is a fade to black. It should be clear that Lubitsch’s editing in the nonmusical segments that lead in to “She’ll Love Me and Like It” functions as rhythmic preparation for the number. The sequence as a whole accelerates into the song, beginning with the long take of Otto and his father, speeding up with the shot-reverse-shot editing of the father’s discussion with the butler, and culminating with the patter song itself. The pop of the photographer’s flash provides a sonic finish to this whole rhythmically coherent unit. “Beyond the Blue Horizon” provides an even more extreme example of Lubitsch’s tendency to create an extramusical rhythmic setting for performances. A great song and a hit for Paramount’s music subsidiary Famous Music, “Beyond the Blue Horizon” was composed by Richard Whiting and W. Franke Harling, with lyrics by Leo Robin. It is very tightly integrated within the plot. Countess Mara, traveling in the company of her maid, Bertha (Zasu Pitts), has boarded a train without tickets and without a destination in mind. The conductor lists the stops on the schedule: Vienna, which she rejects with a frown, and Monte Carlo, which she seizes upon immediately. She repeats the name: “Monte Carlo?” “Yes, madam.” “Two tickets for Monte Carlo.” A new direction and adventure is summoned up by this place-name, which raises an expectation that is reinforced by the

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title of the film itself. The import of the song is also readily established. “Beyond the Blue Horizon” promises a bright future, which is Monte Carlo, both the place and the story we are about to see.18 The problem for the filmmakers was thus not the song’s motivation but the creation and maintenance of a rhythm adequate to its promise. Having raised expectations and shifted the story into high gear, the film needed a performance that would add to the forward momentum, not slow up the pace. The potential difficulty becomes apparent from a brief consideration of shot lengths. MacDonald sings the verse while seated in a railway carriage set for the duration of a forty-six-second take. The first iteration of the refrain is divided into two shots, a frontal 19:14 long shot and a frontal 19:12 medium shot. But despite these long and static takes, in the context of the sequence “Beyond the Blue Horizon” is anything but slow. Just as musicians build big crescendos by beginning piano if they can, Lubitsch creates an acceleration by first slowing down. The discussion between Countess Mara and the conductor on the train is filmed in shot-reverse-shot (lengths vary from two to six seconds, with one shot of MacDonald at nine seconds as the offscreen conductor lists the stops). After the conductor exits, the film cuts around to a medium-long-shot framing of MacDonald from behind for a thirty-four-second take that begins with an incantation: “Monte Carlo! Monte Carlo!” The countess sits down and addresses her maid, dreaming of the fortune she will make gambling. Cut to the corridor of the train, where, in a twenty-six-second take, the conductor tells his male coworkers an off-color riddle about a woman running away from her wedding. (In a brilliant turn this joke, which takes as its punch line the sexual inadequacy of the prospective husband, is retold by Otto himself, who has presumably heard it while traveling sometime later on the same route and is slow to get the point.) Together the two long-take monologues take up a little more than a minute (01:00:08), a strong rhythmic shift and a very significant ritardando in relation to the shot-reverse-shot that has gone before. The performance commences with a cut to the exterior of the train, an increase in cutting rate, and a pronounced use of train effects (see the transcription in fig. 67). The effects are then conjoined with an ostinato accompaniment that continues through much of the number. It is important to understand the subtle shifts in the timing and pitch of this accompaniment, which does not simply evoke the train’s sound but contributes to the energy and forward momentum of the number as a whole. After the words “too old” all the conductors break into laughter that is mixed with two loud toots of a train whistle. Dissolve to a five-second lowangle shot of the locomotive moving laterally across the frame (a pan right

figure 67. Transcription of Monte Carlo’s introduction to “Beyond the Blue Horizon.” Shot 1 locomotive in movement

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figure 67 (continued)

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stresses its movement). The background sound changes at the point of the dissolve. The entirety of the dialogue scene is accompanied by a low regular clacking sound representing the wheels on the train track (probably a loop that was played back on the set and recorded with the actors). After the whistle the clacking is replaced by a chugging sound representing the engine. Unlike the previous background sound, the chugs are stressed on the downbeat, creating a much stronger rhythmic drive. The engine sounds are heard for four bars over the shot of the locomotive, while the train whistle is repeated on the beat in bars 2 and 4, and then continue as background sound. Seven more brief shots of the exterior of the locomotive follow (02:15, 02:18, 02:16, 04:05, 02:20, 02:01, 02:05). Most are lowangle detail shots—the piston turning the wheel, the smokestack, the wheels—taken from a camera position on a vehicle moving parallel to the train but more slowly. With the cut to the first of these shots the chugging of the locomotive is conjoined with an ostinato that is initially also accented on the beat (bars 5–6). In bar 9, just before a cut to a traveling shot of the train’s wheels, the ostinato shifts from four eighth notes per beat to two eighth notes followed by a quarter note. The cut to shot 5, the longest in the series (04:05), shows a long-shot framing of the locomo-

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tive that pulls off right as the ostinato returns to even eighth notes. Although the shots that follow are not any shorter than the ones that initiated the series, the effect is of an acceleration: the train “moves out.” After this point variations in pitch are instigated, initially two triads followed by two thirds (bars 15-16). The pitch of the high/low alternation climbs over the course of the following shots (bars 17–21). At the end of the series, just prior to the beginning of the verse, the speed of the change in pitch increases from a high/low alternation on every two eighth notes to a change on every eighth note (bar 19). While the actual duration of the notes does not decrease, the apparent tempo of the ostinato does seem to rise along with the pitch. The long take and the rendition of the verse are very closely integrated with the train sound effects and the ostinato accompaniment. The film cuts to a new view of the interior of the car, a medium shot of Jeanette MacDonald in profile, the window on the right revealing the apparent movement of the landscape beyond (it is back projection). The ostinato continues for four bars, although it is thinner in texture, with the pitch confined to a D-minor triad (see the transcription in fig. 68). The initial lines are sung largely on half notes, dotted half notes, or whole notes with minimal use of ostinato. The next two lines (bars 42–49) are sung with a consistent quarter-note ostinato in the lower voices. In addition, although the tempo of the music remains constant throughout (MM W = 104), the apparent pace of the vocal line picks up since there are many more words sung on quarter notes. This accelerando effectively underscores the movement that is visually depicted through the train window and is also evoked in the lyrics themselves (“From rain into the rainbow fly with me”). The lack of melodic invention in the second half of the verse is also particularly striking: the vocal line is confined to repeated pitches that parallel the ostinato motive. The song is thus assimilated to the chugging sounds and repeated musical figures associated with the fast-cut and rapidly moving shots of the train. At the chorus the song shifts from D minor to B-flat major by way of an eighth-note ostinato on F. Chimes, of the sort that used to warn passengers of the arrival of a train in a station, are heard at the end of the first bar of the ostinato and again in the second bar after a cut to a three-second shot of the landscape as seen from the train window. Like the whistles, the chimes presumably issue from the train, but they actually function to herald the beginning of the film’s first real singable tune. The refrain begins immediately after a cut to a long shot of the star in three-quarter view (the landscape is no longer visible through the window). As already noted, the refrain is divided into two shots, each of four lines duration. The tempo

figure 68. Transcription of Monte Carlo’s “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” first part of verse. Shot 9 MacDonald in railway carriage

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does not actually flag here, but it feels more relaxed as the ostinato bass gives way to a discrete oompah on half notes. In the second framing, a more intimate medium shot, even the background chugging noises drop away. The song expresses the idea of things about to happen: “Beyond the blue horizon / Waits a beautiful day.” But, as the space of the train is deemphasized and its sounds diminish, so does the rhythmic drive with which this narrative expectation was initially invested. The reason for the happy singing peasants at the close of this number now becomes clear. Lubitsch needs to pick up the pace of the editing and reinvigorate the number with the sense of the rhythm of the train’s

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movement. Following the cadence of the first refrain, the film cuts to another two-second shot of the landscape seen through the window. Mara’s hand enters and lowers the window frame. Two whole-note chords evoke the sound of train whistles and also modulate into the new key of D flat for the repetition of the refrain. Cut to a high-angle, extreme long shot of extras in a distant field taken from a moving train. Two lines of the chorus are sung in this nine-second shot. Dissolve to another moving shot of a field with the figures somewhat closer to the train track and the camera for the next two lines (also nine seconds). The last four lines are sung by MacDonald, shown in a high-angle medium shot framed from outside the train. She leans her arm on the open window, apparently looking out at the prospect. There has been no literal increase in the pace of the song, but the musical texture becomes denser as the choir doubles the vocal line: I see a blue ho-ri-zon [MacDonald lengthens the syllable -ri- and the chorus comes in echoing the words “blue horizon”] My life has only be-gun Beyond the blue ho-ri-zon [sung with chorus] Lies a rising sun [sung with chorus].

The inclusion of the singing peasants creates an acceleration in the repeat of the refrain in several ways. The approximately nine-second shots are not only shorter than any of the shots of MacDonald; they also contain movement that evokes the train, an effect seconded by the return of the rhythmic chugging sounds in the score. The cuts to the exterior allow Lubitsch to open up from the carriage and the exclusive focus on the singer to which the performance was confined for the duration of the first refrain. Although there is no increase in the tempo of the music as such, the film’s tempo as a whole picks up with this variation in mise-en-scène and the kinetic effect of the moving camera. The accelerando for the repeat of the refrain is followed by a decided ritardando, in which the music slows and thins out. Following the cadence, the film returns to the view from the window. The peasants are initially fairly close to camera, but the train moves away from them. Chugging sounds predominate on the track, accented by an ostinato heard on bars 1 and 3. After the train whistles in bar 4, the chugging begins to slow down. The eighth-note ostinato is further reduced to the downbeat only in bars 5 and 6. In bar 8 the train whistles are heard more faintly before the fade to black. The reduction in the pace and amount of the sound associated with the train thus provides the means of closing off the sequence, just as it has provided the dominant means of structuring the rhythm and pacing of the song’s performance throughout.

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Lubitsch’s early musicals, like several of his silent films, derive from operetta and are often thought of as a continuation of that tradition.19 But it seems to me that Lubitsch and the musicians working with him at Paramount—Whiting and Robin, Harling, and Leipold—were innovating strategies for interweaving music and story, given that editing and the postsynchronization of music allowed them unprecedented forms of rhythmic control. In Monte Carlo the pace and rhythm of the editing can be set against the music as in “Day of Days,” or it can extend and augment the structure of the score as in the interplay between soloist and chorus in “She’ll Love Me and Like It,” or it can establish a rhythmic background, investing song segments with energy and movement, as in “Beyond the Blue Horizon.” Throughout the film’s opening, rhythmic structures extend beyond the boundaries of the musical numbers, articulating larger narrative segments and working for more general dramatic or comedic ends.

dialogue and musical rhythm In Love Me Tonight and Monte Carlo the filmmakers break up the unified space and real time of performance in inventive ways and experiment with musical rhythm as a structuring element for live-action filmmaking. In animation a producer such as Disney could concentrate on the integration of music and movement, effectively bypassing the problem of dialogue for the first two or three years of sound production, but Lubitsch and Mamoulian had to deal immediately with the problem of how to integrate substantial amounts of speech into scenes in which music and musical rhythms predominated.20 A consideration of their strategies for combining music and speech will begin to provide a typology of dialogue underscoring options for the early 1930s. The first option is minimal integration of music and speech, that is, simply playing music very low in the mix. This kind of underscoring is not simply the refuge of incompetents and scoundrels; it is a valid method and still the basic way of handling source music. For example, suppose a music scorer has a film in which the characters walk into a café where a jazz combo is playing “Night and Day.” He finds a recording of it or has a group record the song. He calculates out how many seconds of music he needs, then the desired end point; then he counts back in the music to where he needs to begin. That is, the scorer sets the absolute length of the underscore, and the in and out points, but does not alter the music in relation to what the actors are saying or how they are saying it. The aim is precisely to produce a sonic

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background and atmosphere that is independent of the line readings. An instance of this kind of underscoring may be found in Love Me Tonight, in the scene of the fancy dress ball held by the d’Artelines in honor of Maurice, who they think is the Baron Courtelin. The dance that begins the scene is Johann Strauss’s waltz “A Thousand and One Nights.” The waltz cadences and is then lowered in the mix, just after a cut to Count de Savignac dressed as Napoleon and the Duke d’Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith) dressed as a knight in full armor. They converse briefly about the whereabouts of the baron; then random tootling is heard on bagpipes offscreen, and Gilbert enters in full Scotch regalia playing them. He bows to the “Emperor” and accompanies the count’s exit with a rude noise on the pipes. Cut away to Valentine for her entrance, wearing an elaborate white eighteenth-century wig and a very low-cut off-the-shoulder black gown. Cut back to her cousin and uncle as she approaches them: valentine. The baron will be down in a moment. He had to send to Paris for his costume and it was late getting here. I’ve been watching him put it on. duke. You’ve been what? [The visor of his costume helmet falls, obscuring his face. Valentine and Gilbert laugh. Gilbert lifts his uncle’s visor and holds it as he speaks.] gilbert. It’s all right Uncle; she has the room next to Maurice, and she has bored holes in the connecting door. [He lets the visor fall.] valentine. Yes. duke [muffled, from behind the visor]. Valentine! [He lifts the visor.] Are you aware that . . . [The visor falls and he lifts it again but cannot get a good grip.] Are you . . . [It falls.] Are you . . . [Gilbert lifts the visor and holds it.] gilbert. Now. duke. Are you aware that that door has come down to us through generations? valentine. So have my instincts! [Valentine exits as Gilbert laughs and lets the visor fall.] gilbert. She has you there, Unc. [He turns, taps on the breast plate of his uncle’s armor with the horn of his instrument, and exits playing.] duke. Will you stop blowing that infernal bladder!

Throughout this interchange the waltz assumes the role of background sound, the delicate timbre of the strings contrasting comically with the

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raucous foreground sound of the bagpipes, the clunking of the armor, and the actors’ lines. The foreground sound has its own structure and pacing. The dialogue is organized around a double punch line: Smith’s unexpectedly nonmoralistic, but nonetheless patriarchal, “Are you aware that that door’s been in our family for generations?” and Valentine’s sly reply. The preparation for the punch lines is largely timed and managed by the actors (and presumably the director). While the rhythm of dialogue scenes can also be managed in editing, in this case there is no shot-reverse-shot, and most of the important action takes place in a single take of the actors at the doorway with the dancers visible behind them. The actors build up to the punch lines by the repeated business and sound of Smith’s visor falling, the broken phrase “are you aware . . .,” and the united laughter of the profligate younger generation. Further repetitions of the sounds already heard (laughter, clunks of armor, the bagpipes) also take us out of the scene at Gilbert’s exit. While the carefully paced comedy is largely independent of the musical background, there is one important exception: the waltz reaches a cadence on Loy’s exit, just after the line “So have my instincts!” Thus music underlines the most important riposte. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the waltz scene are passages in which there is a highly structured relationship between music and speech. Obviously, just about any song would meet this condition. But the point is that Lubitsch’s and Mamoulian’s musicals, and the whole group inspired by Clair’s example, extended songlike organizations of speech beyond the usual boundaries. This is evident in a number of patter songs that break with theatrical staging precedents and employ prominent conversational structures. In Monte Carlo Lubitsch, along with music-hall veteran Jack Buchanan, pioneered the devolution of the patter song from its theatrical origins to more intimate and relaxed conversational contexts. “Trimmin’ the Women,” a charming trio with Buchanan, Tyler Brooke, and John Roche, is first performed with the three seated side by side on a park bench, making only minimal evocations of a soft-shoe routine (posture changes occur at four- or eight-bar intervals and include the men crossing and uncrossing their legs in symmetrical patterns, and lifting their hats and holding them aloft at the close). Following a dissolve, the refrain repeats with the men seated around a tea table, where their actions are even more restricted and less dance-like: they serve out cream and sugar, lift their teacups in unison, then put them down to drink from sherry glasses at the close. A later musical by Lubitsch, One Hour with You, has a dialogue sequence in rhythm that leads into Jeanette MacDonald’s reprise of “We Will Always

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Be Sweethearts.” The melodic line is more reduced than in “Trimmin’ the Women,” and there are no traces of dance. The number is spectacular for the way it flaunts the control of speech tempo and rhythm. Colette (MacDonald) and Mimi (Genevieve Tobin) meet for lunch after a separation of several years. Their reunion begins with four segments of conversation in different locations within Colette’s house. These conversational fragments are divided visually by dissolves and aurally by sound takes of very fast overlapped and indistinct dialogue and laughter (a joke on prattling women). Apart from the transitions, which were probably manipulated in postproduction, most of the number was likely done by having a pianist or other instrumentalist on the set so that the speech could be timed to the music. Then the vocals would have been rerecorded with the orchestral accompaniment drowning out the original instruments. However, given Paramount’s propensity for recording numbers live, as demonstrated in figure 64, it is just possible that this number was done with all the musicians present on the sound stage. In any case the music is crucial for the line readings. Each word is counted as it would be in a song, as the transcription in figure 69 indicates. Words or individual syllables are given rhythmic values of quarter notes, eighth notes, and quarter-note triplets, in addition to the equivalent rests in the vocal line. Lubitsch experiments with varying the tempo, as well as the timing of speech. In bars 51 through 53 the line “You’re just as smart and as lovely as then” is off the beat and spoken so quickly as to be almost indistinguishable. It occurs following the first section of rapid, indistinct, and overlapped chatter as this sound “slows down” into recognizable speech. In contrast, bars 71 through 79 show the transition in the other direction—the conversation dissolving into chattering noise. The women’s chatter is accompanied by a musical underscore that varies between MM W. = 126 to 116, with the music slowing up to MM W. = 76 to 100 for the fully audible speech. In addition there are more subtle tempo variations. For example, in bars 67 through 71 note the suggestive rest, followed by the ritard on “One night I found out what an artist he was.” This is effectively a scored conversation in rhyme and one of the clearest examples of the musical structuring of dialogue rhythm that I have found. Given Chevalier’s over-the-top performance style, many of his bestknown patter songs in Love Me Tonight, such as “The Poor Apache” and “Mimi,” remain highly theatrical, with a prominent address to the camera/ audience and mannered gestures and delivery that differentiate the song from the dialogue scenes. However, the “How Are You?” number from the opening portion of the film is quite different in style. Maurice walks from

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Lubitsch and Mamoulian

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his apartment to his shop, exchanging half-sung and half-spoken banter in rhymed couplets with tradesmen and neighbors. In the first shot (20:01) the camera tracks and pans with him laterally as he moves down the street, and characters move on and off frame to converse. Track right as Maurice walks right, revealing a man holding a broom. maurice. Bonjour Duval, how’s my old pal? duval. Bonjour, Maurice, how are you? Track and pan right as Maurice continues to walk in that direction. He approaches a young woman walking toward him. maurice. How about Friday? As the first woman gives him the cold shoulder and exits left, another woman bystander approaches from the right. second woman. Friday is my day! Pan right to reveal a hairdressing establishment. A plump, older woman sits near the open window having her hair done. third woman. Oh, what a man! Maurice doffs his hat. maurice. How are you! He moves off right.

These sorts of interchanges continue over the second shot (16:20), in which the camera swiftly tilts, pans, and zooms in on a woman in an upperstory window, while Maurice greets her and speaks to her in rhyme from a position off-camera. In the third shot (20:01) the camera crosses a street with Maurice and tracks down a lengthy block as he continues talking and flirting until he arrives at his shop door. This number was done by prerecording the patter song and then having Chevalier and his interlocutors move in sync-to-playback (you can see Chevalier rushing to make his marks in some of the later interchanges). The fact that he was taking picture wild permitted Mamoulian to move the camera with great freedom, making this number quite distinct from the other patter songs in the film. The nature and speed of the camera movement varies considerably; in and of itself it does not constitute a coherent rhythmic element in the scene. The movements, however, are cued by Maurice’s speech and action, and since these are dictated by the song, the whole appears to be entirely animated by musical rhythm.

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As it develops across the course of the 1930s, most dialogue underscoring in the classical Hollywood cinema falls between the extremes of a fairly unstructured relationship between words and music, on one hand, and a highly metrical and fundamentally musically driven treatment of speech, on the other. It is worth considering some examples from Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo that anticipate this trend. My examples derive from an extended fourteen-minute sequence that makes elaborate use of Richard Whiting and Leo Robin’s song “Always in All Ways.” In the course of it the melody is rendered as an operatic recitative, a direct-recorded song, a postsynched accompaniment to dance-like movement, a jazzy underscore to wordless action, clock chimes, and dialogue underscore in two different contexts. The music scorer, probably Leipold, not only varies his style in these segments but also contrives to introduce fragments of other songs from the film, including both partial echoes and full reprises of choruses from “Beyond the Blue Horizon” and “Give Me a Moment Please.”21 Because “Always” is both performed and used as background score across the sequence, it binds together very different strategies for the rhythmic integration of images, words, and music. Not only does the song provide a melodic and harmonic center for the segment; it also serves as the central means of timing and pacing the dialogue and action. As I argued above, Lubitsch generally sought to integrate the performance of individual songs within larger, rhythmically coherent, units defined through editing patterns. In this sequence, however, it is the background score that supplies the overarching rhythmic contour. Having arrived in Monte Carlo, Countess Mara decides to gamble with her last thousand francs in the hopes of getting enough money to pay off her debts and thus obviate the need for her marriage to the boring Duke Otto. She is aided by Count Rudolph (Buchanan), who has insinuated himself into her establishment disguised as a hairdresser to advance his own suit. Bertha, the countess’s maid, desires Rudolph in his character as a tradesman, and her bemused reaction to the romance that blossoms between Mara and the supposed hairdresser eventually embarrasses the countess. When Rudolph first enters the countess’s hotel suite, we hear an instrumental reprise of “Give Me a Moment Please,” which he had sung earlier in the courtship (see the transcription in fig. 70, bars 1–16). It is in waltz time at a lively tempo (MM W. = 60) and resolves over four bars in a ritardando (MM Q = 124) as Rudolph approaches the countess and shows off his tuxedo and top hat (she is not accustomed to seeing him dressed as a gentleman). A cut to medium shot allows for two lines of dialogue spoken with a definite pulse but without music: “You don’t look like a count. So much better!” Cut to a detail shot of her purse as she withdraws a bill. Music begins about two sec-

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151

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onds after this cut, very softly in the strings and at about the same slow rate as the previous ritard (MM Q = 120) in duple time. With a cut to medium long shot, MacDonald speaks freely over a soft chord progression: “My last thousand francs / My happiness would be at stake, Rudolph / My whole future is in your hands.” This segues into a half-spoken, half-sung sixteen-bar verse (the song follows Tin Pan Alley ballad form, a sixteen-bar verse is followed by a thirty-two-bar refrain, itself divided into four eight-bar units).22 During the verse Buchanan and MacDonald “converse” in rhyme (urgency/emergency; all/all/fall). In contrast with MacDonald’s previous speech the syllables are pitched, both singers use vibrato, and they follow a definite melodic rhythm as indicated in figure 70, despite prominent use of rubato. Following three long-held syllables (on “fall” and “e-ver”), the actors sit, and the camera reframes on their movement. Buchanan begins the first chorus of the “Always” refrain, picking up the tempo (MM W = 68). This way of timing the transition into song, with a slow and melodically undistinguished verse, and a rise in tempo at the commencement of the melody proper, would have been familiar from contemporary cabaret and musical-theater performance style.

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In addition, given its long history in opera and operetta, the recitative-like method of having the actors half-sing phrases over chords, as is done in the verse, would have been the most salient model for dialogue underscoring available. As detailed below, later instances of dialogue underscoring in the sequence depart from this model. MacDonald sings the second eight-bar section of the refrain (the B portion, sometimes known as the “release”), and the film cuts to a closer view of the couple. Buchanan sings the last sixteen bars of the refrain, followed by a second sixteen-bar verse performed as a conversation in the manner of the first. The cutting rhythm for the song thus far is astonishingly slow: shot 8, with the first verse and half of the refrain has a duration of one minute and eight seconds and shot 9, with the other half of the refrain and another verse has a duration of one minute and seven seconds. Lubitsch then picks up the pace for a repeat of the refrain by instigating figure and camera movement in a bravura take that seems to have utilized postsynchronization. With Buchanan lip-synching to the first eight bars of the refrain, the two leads walk/dance on the beat to Mara’s dressing table, where he helps her on with her wrap. As MacDonald lip-syncs to the next eight bars, Buchanan exits frame right, and the camera pans left to show his reflection in her looking glass, where he doffs top hat and scarf. They come together as he resumes the next strophe, and they dance with locked arms to the door. The song continues over a cut to the other side of the door as their forward movement proceeds. I presume the filmmakers cut in a new audio take of the last eight bars, which are sung as a duet with them standing at the threshold to the hallway.23 As the couple moves out the door, the music shifts into a considerably faster variant of “Always” (MM W = 88) that swings the eighth notes a bit and transfers certain passages, first played by the strings, to the brass. Only music is heard over the subsequent action. The film dissolves to a waiting car, a footman holding open the door. Rudolph and the countess enter and sit, chatting happily in the backseat as the footman exits. After a cut into long shot, Rudolph, having realized that he is supposed to be the servant, moves to the driver’s seat and starts the car. The next shot shows the car pulling up at the casino, with Mara sitting beside Rudolph in the front seat. A final brief shot, which shows Mara exiting from the front, drives home the joke. In addition to the increase in musical tempo, the editing tempo has picked up. The brief shots (shot 12, 11:19; shot 13, 15:23; shot 14, 11:13; shot 16, 04:11) and highly elliptical gag are in stark contrast with the real-time long takes of the song performance. Nonetheless, the up-tempo instrumental version of “Always” remains an important means of articulating the change in

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pace. Moreover, the song itself remains quite salient given that the action has been edited and timed to coincide with the full thirty-two bars of the refrain. No music is heard inside the casino, where the couple spy Duke Otto at play and decide it would be prudent to leave. As they walk off into the night, the film dissolves to a clock tower. A series of shots connected by dissolves shows the passage of time from midnight to two in the morning and reintroduces the underscore. Clockwork figures holding instruments emerge on the hour, apparently “playing” fragments of the “Always” theme as chimes. The underscore then returns full force with the countess’s return to her suite, an entrance postsynched with twelve bars of “Always” at a slow tempo (MM W = 60) with much rubato and lush orchestration. MacDonald stands silently with a dreamy look while Bertha removes her wrap. She moves languidly over to a divan, sits, then lies down as the music comes to a half-cadence. There is about one and a half seconds of silence on the track as the film cuts to a medium shot of the maid, Bertha, for the beginning of the dialogue. I assume the pause is an artifact of the transition from the postsynchronized music of the entrance to direct-recorded sound. The underscore in the first four bars after the cut consists of the opening notes of the chorus of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” (see the transcription in fig. 71, and refer to clip 12). The tempo for the underscore is quicker than the entrance (MM W = 100), but since the melody is carried by whole-note and half-note chords, the effect is actually of a reduced pace. The orchestral texture is also reduced with many fewer instruments in the lower registers and a heavy reliance on muted strings and harp. The first spoken interchange is loosely in rhythm, with each speaker allotted two bars (bars 172–75). Bertha’s lines are spoken on the first four notes of the melody, MacDonald’s on the last two. The same musical phrase is then repeated in the next four bars but raised in pitch, and in a different key, as Bertha looks up right in surprise at her mistress’s report that she dined with Rudolph. The maid then comments that her mistress has lost a buckle from her shoe over two bars of the “Always” theme played on a French horn (bars 181–82). Cut to the countess, and the musical line is picked up by a violin (bar 183), for her dreamy response (with a slight ritard): “Must have lost it when we were dancing.” The rest of the conversation is not spoken on the beat, but Leipold continues to time verbal and musical phrases so that they coincide. Cut to a medium shot of Bertha looking puzzled and chagrined as the “Always” melody continues for three bars, now picked up by an oboe (bars

figure 71. Transcription of Monte Carlo first conversation. Shot 27 MLS Bertha

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184–86). Note the modulations beginning in bar 186, as the four final notes of the phrase are raised to progressively higher pitches (C-sharp/ G-sharp/G-sharp, then D/A/A, then D/A/A raised an octave). This increase of tension coincides with a ritard and Bertha’s line over bars 187–88: “But the Countess wanted to play tonight.” Cut to a shot of the countess. On the highest note of the modulation (bar 189 on A), which is held, she speaks: “Oh yes, that’s what we wanted to do.” At the initiation of MacDonald’s next verbal phrase, “But Duke Otto was there . . .,” the rhythm shifts from cut time to 43 time, and the tempo appears to quicken in relation to the previous ritard (to MM Q = 84). While the background music as such never sounds very fast, this small increase lends itself to an acceleration of the action: the actress moves, rising from the couch to wax ecstatic, and her speaking tempo increases to its fastest point. MacDonald speaks the line “But Duke Otto was there so of course that made it impossible for us to stay,” over the descending motive defined by the upbeat chord in bar 190 through to the half-note E in bar 192. Over the repetition of this motive in bars 192 through 194 she continues: “Well, we had to do something.” As she recalls their walk outside the casino with some emotion, the underscore shifts back into melody, ten bars of “Give Me a Moment Please” (bars 194–204). The first strain of “Give Me a Moment Please” (from the high F-sharp in bar 194 to B-flat in bar 196) is heard high in the violins on the line: “So we went out and looked around.” The melody continues in the lower strings (bars 197–99) as MacDonald gets up from the divan, and the camera pans right to follow her to a position beside her maid. She delivers the line “Bertha, you have no idea how beautiful Monte Carlo is” on this movement. The violins come back in over the phrase “The parks—simply divine. And the promenades—like a walk in the clouds” (bars 199–201). She continues to speak over the melody until the cadence (bars 202–4): “And as far as you could see—not a soul. And so we sat down close.” After the cadence she repeats “Very close.” The music dies away, and MacDonald abruptly shifts out of her transported state. She informs Bertha that the sea air made her cold (although the term is emphasized enough in performance to indicate that the opposite adjective applies) and suggests that she ordered Rudolph to go to the casino to play for her. Thus, the countess’s retreat from her burgeoning romantic attachment coincides with the cessation of the background score. The underscore does not resume until Mara walks away from her maid and speaks of her longing to see Rudolph again. The timing of the line readings in this dialogue scene are looser than the patter found in the lunch scene from One Hour with You or the recitative-

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like structure of the “Always” verse at the beginning of the sequence. It strongly anticipates what would become classical background scoring (even though the use of recognizable tunes and the abrupt shifts in pitch and timbre within the cue make the music more obtrusive than would become the norm). The underscoring’s dramatic import is clear: melodic fragments give resonance to phrases such as “Must have lost it when we were dancing,” and the entire speech beginning, “Bertha, you have no idea how beautiful Monte Carlo is.” In addition the modulation of the motive from “Always” in bars 186–88 not only prepares for the reintroduction of “Give Me a Moment Please” by making the transition from the key of B-flat to D; the increase in harmonic tension also functions narratively to convey Bertha’s increasing suspicion and unease on the line “But the Countess wanted to play tonight!” This way of combining words and music depends on the precise synchronization of verbal and musical phrases, even though, after bar 183, the words are not even loosely spoken on the beat. By the end of the 1930s, that is, in classical dialogue underscoring, this sort of synchronization was routinely worked out in postproduction. After the image and dialogue tracks were synchronized and cut, music scorers would compile cue sheets with dialogue timings as an aid in composition. The composer, often working with the aid of bar sheets, would then fit the score around the words and action.24 Of course, this system was not in place when Monte Carlo was in production in 1930 (it required not only the technical capacity to rerecord dialogue without unacceptable deterioration of quality but also an expansion and reorganization of labor to support scoring within the music departments at the studios). It seems likely that the musicians who scored Monte Carlo were working out the dialogue sync live, in the same way that they direct-recorded the songs. One advantage of having actors, director, and musicians working together in the same space was that musical and speaking rhythms could mutually influence one another. At times Jeanette MacDonald seems to be regulating her pace in response to the needs of the music. For example, she rushes the delivery of “Oh, yes, that’s what we wanted to do,” to get it all in on the long-held D chord in bar 190, allowing the upbeat E-minor chord at the end of the bar to stand out cleanly. Later, she slows down and extends the short line “So we went out, and looked around” so that it stretches from bar 194 through 196, a slight verbal ritard that heightens the effect of the accelerando when she rises and begins her faster, more impassioned, description of the evening. While the actress seems to vary the tempo of line readings to accommodate the score, Leipold also obviously arranged the music to allow

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time for dialogue. This is most obvious in the case of the excerpt from “Give Me a Moment Please” (bars 194–204) in which the eight-bar-phrase structure of the song has been extended backward, two bars into the penultimate strophe, to make way for the length of MacDonald’s monologue about the beauty of Monte Carlo. The tight confluence of music and performance rhythm is also evident in the very decision to use “Give Me a Moment Please” instead of “Always” at the dramatic high point. This permits a decisive shift of the background score at bar 191—a change from duple to triple meter, further accentuated by changes in tempo and in key—that paves the way for MacDonald’s physical movement and emotional escalation in bar 197. The underscore is thus fully imbricated in the pacing of the dialogue and the way it unfolds in time. The underscore for Mara’s dialogue with Bertha is based on the coincidence of musical and verbal phrases, with only one calculated cessation of the music following a full cadence. In the subsequent conversation between the countess and Rudolph, when he brings her money supposedly “won” at the gaming tables (in fact his own money, since he is rich), the underscore becomes much more fragmented. Verbal phrases spoken without accompaniment are placed in alternation with wordless action accompanied by disconnected four- or eight-bar segments. This kind of alternation seems to have been a recognized synchronization option in the early sound period. In 1935 it was still being recommended as a way of reconciling music and dialogue rhythms by the composer Leonid Sabaneev in his book Music for the Films: In choosing the points at which to discontinue the music, it should be remembered that dialogue, as we have previously indicated, does not blend well with a musical background, and that one or other is bound to lose. In planning his music, the composer should bear in mind that it is better to dispense with it altogether in case of long dialogues on the screen, particularly when they are of an unromantic, argumentative character, and not lyrical or emotional. If a dialogue is divided into isolated phrases interrupted by silences of fairly long duration (three or four seconds), recourse may be had to the recitatival system: between the phrases little scraps of music of a similar fragmentary nature may be inserted. This gives the effect of a dialogue between music and speech, and if skilfully handled always produces a good impression.25

Thus, Sabaneev suggests that the alternation between music and speech, what he calls their “dialogue,” can become the dominant organizing device for scenic rhythm. At least in the case of Monte Carlo, however, I would argue that this kind of synchronization actually opens the way to a much more complex organization of duration.

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In response to Rudolph’s knock the countess dismisses Bertha and calls, “Come in.” The music begins as he enters (see the transcription in fig. 72, and refer to clip 13). In shot 49 the countess approaches Rudolph over three bars of the final refrain of “Always” at a fairly slow tempo (MM W = 74). The phrase does not resolve; it is suspended on a long-held note that gives way to Rudolph’s line, spoken without music: “Two hun-dred thou-sand francs!” The lovers embrace over one and a half bars of the opening of the “Always” refrain, almost twice as slow as before (MM Q = 72). Cut to shot 50, which reveals Rudolph’s money falling to the floor, then to a medium shot of the kiss. The music stops for a long-held quarter note for Mara’s line: “How dare you!” She kisses Rudolph a second time as the accompaniment shifts into eight bars of “Give Me a Moment Please” augmented by four bars of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” in the upper register (bars 256–59). Cut to shot 52, Mara at her bedroom door, just before the musical passage ends on a half-cadence. She speaks for a third time without music: “That will be all for tonight.” Cut to the other side of the door as four bars of “Always” commence. She enters, locks herself in, and sits over the course of another shot. Cut outside the door, where, after a ten-frame pause, Buchanan begins to sing a full reprise of “Give Me a Moment Please.” In musical terms the dialogue underscoring in this segment is much more incoherent than at any other point in the “Always” sequence. Although the musical passages are divided into four- and eight-bar units, there is no attempt to replicate the phrase structure of the original songs. The first two motives are taken from “Always” out of order. With little modulation, and only a brief pause, the underscoring shifts from the second “Always” motive to “Give Me a Moment Please,” itself admixed with a few bars of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” for the duration of the kiss in shot 51. Most important, the scene is not organized around the flow of the music but around the kiss as it is initiated, interrupted, resumed, and interrupted again. The longest takes, shots 49 and 51, are the ones that carry this alternating action. The alternation is accented by individual lines—or in one case a close-up—that punctuate the action at regular intervals. The pattern might be notated like this: “Come in!” (Before music starts.) Mara approaches Rudolph. “Two-hundred-thousand francs!” (Slightly longer than one bar rest.) Kiss.

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Bills fall to ground (Shot 50, slightly longer than one bar, over music.) Kiss continues. “How dare you!” (Quarter-note rest.) Kiss resumes. “That will be all for tonight.” (Slightly longer than one bar rest.) Mara retreats from Rudolph. I have italicized the elements I regard as important accents that define the rhythm of the scene. The cessation of the music contributes to this pattern by bringing out the lines of dialogue. The music, like the kiss, is there to be

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interrupted. But this rhythm is, precisely, extramusical, defined by the pacing of the lines and by the contrast between the longer takes, shots 49 and 51, and the short (two-second) shot 50. Unlike the continuous underscoring found in the previous scene with Bertha, the fragmentation here frees the director (and, to an extent, the actors) to produce a temporally structured mix of visual and sonic elements apart from musical rhythm, tempo, and phrasing. When Sabaneev recommended that composers alternate music and lines of dialogue, he was looking for a strategy of dialogue underscoring that would preserve the integrity of music as opposed to turning it into wallpaper, the kind of low-volume background sound that I analyzed in the waltz scene in Love Me Tonight. But when considered in the context of Lubitsch’s career, this synchronization strategy functions slightly differently than Sabaneev had intended. Lubitsch almost immediately began to use the capacity to alternate music and speech to move away from a dependence on musical rhythm as the sole or principal structuring element of dialogue scenes. For example, we find the alternation between music and lines of dialogue operating to a much greater extent in a later film, Trouble in Paradise (October 1932). As one of many possible examples from this film, consider the following scene (refer to clip 14). The wealthy Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), unaware that the man she has hired as her personal secretary as Monsieur Laval is actually the well-known crook Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall), prepares to go out for the evening. Gaston is planning to empty her safe in her absence and skip town with his lover and partner in crime, Lily, until the flirtation with his boss upsets his plans. Shot 1. LS At the top of the stairs, hallway receding from front left to rear right, door to Mariette’s bedroom center. Over four bars based on the opening of the “Trouble in Paradise” theme song, Mariette enters the hall from her bedroom, pan left with her as she goes to the top of the stairway, hesitates, turns. She walks toward Gaston’s office door to the right. The camera pans right and tracks in to follow her and ends on a medium-shot framing. She knocks (two beats, no music). Brief continuation of the theme (three beats) followed by a soft harp glissando as Gaston opens the door. The music ceases. As Gaston comes forward, both actors turn into profile. gaston. Yes, madame. mariette. What are you going to do with my day tomorrow, Monsieur Laval? gaston [Pause]. Well, we’ll have breakfast in the garden, together.

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mariette. Um-hum. gaston [Pause]. Then horseback riding together. mariette. Um-hum. gaston. Then lunch in the Bois . . . mariette. Together. gaston [Pause]. Then I would say a little nap. mariette. To— [She laughs softly. She gestures, showing off her costume.] How do you like my new dress? gaston [Pause, looks, inclines his head]. Beautiful. mariette [Primps]. Hair? gaston. Marvelous. mariette [Pause, juts her chin toward him]. Lipstick? gaston [Longer pause, leans toward her]. Crimson. mariette [Pause]. Correct. [Hold on the pose with them both leaning toward each other. Then, she pulls out of the inclined position and offers him her hand.] Goodnight. gaston [Pause, takes her hand and puts it to his lips]. Good-night. [He kisses her hand over three beats of the “Trouble in Paradise” opening played by a solo cello followed by harp glissando.] mariette. Good-night. gaston. Good-bye. She takes her hand away, turns, and walks left toward the top of the stairs. The camera tracks back with her and pans left to follow as she begins to descend the stairs. This entire action is accompanied by the “Trouble in Paradise” motive, which picks up where it has been left off. It continues for two bars in a fuller orchestration, with lush strings, again ending in a glissando. The music stops. gaston (off) [Pause]. Madame! mariette [Turns]. Yes? Shot 2. MS of Gaston, now full face, in front of office door. gaston. Are you staying out late? Shot 3. MCU of Mariette. mariette [Pause]. Why do you ask? Shot 4. As 2. gaston [Pause]. Do I have to answer? [Pause before cut]

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Shot 5. As 3. mariette [Pause before replying, then shakes her head]. No. Shot 6. As 2. Over two bars Gaston exits to his office, closing the door. We hear ascending chords building up to a second bar of a long-held chord. Shot 7. MLS of Mariette, shot perpendicular to the back wall of the staircase with the handrail in front of her. She turns left and descends the stairs for two and a half bars over a slow descending motive in the strings. The camera, apparently on a crane, follows her downward movement. She turns around with a very fast rising glissando in the strings. As the “Trouble in Paradise” motive returns, she ascends the stairs much more quickly than she had descended them, the camera rising with her and panning right as she goes to Gaston’s door, opens and enters. The music reaches a cadence.

Although the scene is very similar to the one in Monte Carlo, and it has the same basic strategy of interweaving speech and music, it goes much further in abandoning the musical through line. The musical motive is much shorter and more fragmented than in Monte Carlo. And the actors’ pauses, the “rests” between the lines of dialogue if you will, are timed independently of cessations in the music. Trouble in Paradise may have been dubbed a “musical without songs” in the trade press, but by this date the dependence on music for dialogue timing had begun to wane, and Lubitsch himself was in the conductor’s seat. The interest in exploiting music and musical rhythm in Love Me Tonight and Monte Carlo led the filmmakers in many instances to experiment with integrating speech much more closely with the score than was typical for the early sound period. Borrowing from traditions of operetta and musical theater, they emphasized meter and rhyme and essayed new cinematic variants of the patter song and recitative. But also, working in brief segments, with live collaboration between musicians and actors, Lubitsch and Leipold were able to achieve relatively precise synchronizations of music and ordinary speech, anticipating what would later be done by music scorers and editors in postproduction. As the example of the kissing scene from Monte Carlo makes clear, however, Lubitsch almost immediately began to use the capacity to place music and other sounds precisely to move away from a dependence on musical rhythm as the sole or principal structuring element of dialogue scenes. This example is borne out by his subsequent career trajectory. Trouble in Paradise makes prominent use of the underscore but tends to utilize brief musical phrases as part of a mix that is generally dominated by the pace established through editing and line delivery. By the

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time of Design for Living (December 1933), Lubitsch abandons dialogue underscoring entirely while maintaining a very tight control on the rhythm of speech (see, for example, the scene after Gilda abandons both of the men courting her, in which they get drunk together). The next chapter will be concerned with other efforts to define a coherent rhythm for dialogue scenes in extramusical terms.

5. Dialogue Timing and Performance in Hawks The difficulty is, I feel, that the two rhythms are entirely different things; I mean the rhythm and pace of action and the rhythm and pace of dialogue. The problem is to try and blend these two things together. I am still trying it, and I have not entirely solved the problem, but eventually, I imagine, it will be solved. —alfred hitchcock, March 1939

By 1932, considered by most historians the “end” of the transition to sound in the United States, many of the most crippling technological problems of shooting synchronized dialogue had been solved. The camera was out of the booth, multiple-camera shooting was no longer necessary to maintain the fluidity of editing, and noiseless recording had increased the usable volume range. Even as late as 1939, however, Alfred Hitchcock thought dialogue posed problems for film rhythm and pacing.1 Contemporary observations by film editors second Hitchcock’s observations. In a talk delivered in 1937, Maurice Pivar, of Universal, complained: “With the introduction of sound, the latitude of the editorial department has been lessened to the extent that where originally the possibilities of realigning and recutting silent pictures were unlimited, today we are confined more or less within the limits of dialog.”2 Writing in 1953, Karel Reisz saw more possibilities for the manipulation of dialogue scenes in postproduction; however, he continued to make a distinction between dialogue and action scenes, and he considered the editor’s ability to control pace limited in the former: In assembling an action sequence the editor works with a much greater degree of freedom than in more static scenes where dialogue plays the predominant role. In a dialogue scene most of the visuals form an essential and unavoidable counterpart to the words and the editor is constantly tied down by the continuity of the words when cutting the picture. The visuals are anchored from the moment they are shot: the editor is merely able to choose between alternative shots and to time the cuts to the greatest dramatic effect. He remains the interpreter of the small details rather than the prime creator of the continuity. In action sequences, on the other hand, it is the pictures which tell the story, and the editor is free to arrange them in any order he thinks most

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telling. Here he has the major creative responsibility, for it is only in the process of editing that the shots acquire their significance. Unhampered by the restrictions imposed by synchronized dialogue, the editor is able to work with much the same freedom as he enjoyed in the silent cinema. Even to-day, however good the director’s raw material, it is the editor who makes or mars a sequence of action.3

In the earliest sound films the problem of pacing dialogue scenes, like the underscoring I discussed in chapter 4, was largely the province of directors and actors working live in real time. Advances in sound editing and rerecording capacity in the early 1930s made it possible to combine portions of different takes and overlap sound at the cuts. As late as 1937, however, Pivar stressed the importance of timing dialogue on the sound stage, since pacing could not be easily manipulated in postproduction.4 Even once advances in rerecording and postdubbing had made the manipulation of dialogue scenes more feasible, Reisz cautioned the editor against tampering too much with the timings established on the sound stage: Omissions and adjustments of parts of an actor’s performance are often necessary if it is felt that its pace is for some reason not exactly right. The lengthening of a pause or sharpening of a cue may make all the difference between a sloppy and a dramatically taut effect. The problem is not confined to dialogue scenes—precision of technique is always desirable—but here an additional difficulty is involved: the editor must respect the actor’s performance. In an action scene, the exact timing of shots is very often left open to the editor and he can impose a pace on the sequence which he considers most fitting. In a passage of dialogue his problem is more complex because an actor sets his pace in the playing. If the editor wishes to speed up the continuity, he can shorten the pauses between sentences, use cheat cuts and generally cut down all the footage not “anchored” by the dialogue. This is done very frequently, especially if the director has been uncertain in getting a suitable pace of performance from his actors on the floor. But interfering in an actor’s performance can sometimes cause more harm than good. An experienced actor with a developed sense of timing may set his own pace during a scene which it is best to leave alone. To sharpen a cut here and there, in order to improve the overall pace of the sequence, may throw the natural rhythm of the playing out of gear. The moments preceding and following the actor’s words are an integral part of his interpretation of the line, and to eliminate them may reduce the effect of the rendering.5

Reisz’s caution gives a good indication of the precision with which editors considered the timing of speech—down to the breaths between the phrases. The evidence suggests that actors also felt the management of

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duration within the confines of the shot involved very close tolerances. Movements, the handling of props, and the delivery of lines had to be timed to the second and, when necessary, coordinated with the cameraman and boom operator. Edward Arnold provides a very vivid account of his experience in making a long take (which, following industry practice, he refers to as a “scene”) in Josef von Sternberg’s 1935 production of Crime and Punishment: There was one scene in Crime and Punishment where I (as the Inspector-General) had to enter Lorre’s apartment, and discuss the crime with him. I picked up a poker while I was talking. Lorre had very few lines in this scene. It was a long one for me, and had to be timed in such a way that I grasped the poker on a certain word, took out a cigarette and lit it on another word or phrase, lifted a book from the table and opened it casually on still another sentence, all the while holding the poker under my arm. I kept moving about the room, and then as the scene ended, I had to put the poker back where I got it from—talking continuously, with only an occasional interruption from Lorre. I rehearsed the scene several times and then told von Sternberg I was ready to “shoot.” I hadn’t spoken five words when I stopped and said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve missed the timing on this.” Whereupon, von Sternberg, who was looking through the camera, inquired: “Eddie, how many years did you say you were on the stage?” “About thirty,” I replied. “Not long enough, not long enough,” he repeated in a dolorous tone.6

Interviewed in 1947, Eric Portman similarly concluded that the problem of the cinema actor was the precision of the timing required: There is the necessity of remembering the action exactly. You must undo your coat at precisely one minute, pick up a brief-case at precisely another, etc. The scene is planned, with full consideration for the microphone and camera, to happen one way; and that is the way it must happen. On the stage, a good actor can get away with murder. If he forgets to pick up the brief-case on the right line, he can go back for it. A good stage actor can always catch up with himself again. But if the screen actor forgets the brief-case at the right moment, and if he attempts to go back for it, he will probably find that he is now cutting between another artiste and the lens, or interfering with some intricate camera movement.7

While Portman poses the problem of the film actor specifically in relation to his colleagues on the stage, I am more interested in a comparison with silent-film acting technique. While most silent-film acting, and especially

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slapstick, required precise timing of movement and gesture, it did not require the careful integration of words and movement of the sort described by Arnold. Thus, in my view the problem of handling dialogue scenes after the transition to sound was not simply one of picking up the pace, although that was clearly an issue for many critics and directors, but of creating rhythmically compelling articulations of movement and speech. Scenes organized around prose dialogue without music do not have the advantage of the metrical organization that it provides, as discussed in the examples by Eisenstein, Lubitsch, and Mamoulian. Nonetheless, they engage rhythm in the sense proposed by Eisenstein, and perhaps also entertained by Hitchcock, a matter of the synchronization of various lines of temporal development—the coordination of line readings, blocking, camera work, and editing to manage the flow of the scene by creating punctual moments of emphasis and stress. I will utilize Howard Hawks’s films of the 1930s to examine the development of strategies for handling dialogue scenes. There are several reasons why this director is a particularly felicitous choice. First, Hawks was a dialogue purist. He only rarely utilized dialogue underscoring and preferred to limit music to the performance of songs within the diegesis.8 Second, as Todd McCarthy’s account of Hawks’s production practices makes clear, Hawks worked particularly intensively with actors and screenwriters to refine line delivery, blocking, and pacing. He established close working relationships with his writers, most notably Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and also with lead actors such as James Cagney and Cary Grant. He spent a long time in rehearsal, allowing for extensive improvisation on the set and frequently incurring the wrath of studio brass for running behind schedule. In a discussion of the production history of Ceiling Zero McCarthy refers to Hawks’s methods of “slowly working out the mechanics and timing of a scene, of honing character interplay, of rewriting on the set, of giving his leads a long leash to pursue flights of fancy of their own, of calling impromptu cast-and-crew conferences to see if anyone had any better ideas of how to play a scene.”9 Finally, the evidence of the films themselves, as well as the interviews, shows how assiduously and inventively Hawks tackled the problem of draggy dialogue scenes.

multiple-camera shooting in the dawn patrol It is worth summarizing the technical constraints faced by Hawks in the course of making The Dawn Patrol, his first sound feature, which began production in February 1930.10 While sound editing was certainly technically

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possible by 1930, it seems likely that the sync-sound conversation segments of the film were recorded in unbroken takes. I conclude this on the basis of Hawks’s decision to utilize multiple-camera shooting, which was expensive because of the amount of negative required, as well as visually inelegant, but permitted continuous sound capture (multiple-camera shooting would be phased out by the end of the 1930–31 season). In addition rerecording was minimal if it occurred at all. For example, in the scenes in the bar at the air base, background sounds seem to have been mixed with dialogue on the set, perhaps with a playback of prerecorded music for the gramophone and offscreen extras supplying the murmur of voices in conversation (typically referred to as “wallah wallah”). The conversation of the principals would have been brought to the sonic foreground by some combination of mic placement and volume adjustment in the mix on the sound stage. With the picture edited to a more or less complete sound take, it would have been possible to have dialogue slightly overlapping the cuts in shot-reverse-shot interchanges throughout (the norm of dialogue editing in later sound cinema). Hawks, however, largely restricts the use of this device to certain moments, a point that I will discuss in detail below. Overlapping dialogue, a device he also uses selectively, would have been done live, by having the actors speak at the same time or step on one another’s lines. Although Hitchcock saw the strict division between dialogue and action scenes as a problem to be overcome in 1939, it was one of the basic strategies for breaking up the monotony of dialogue scenes in the early period. Action scenes shot wild with postsynchronized effects and/or voice-over escaped the restrictions of multiple-camera shooting and could approximate the fluidity of silent-film editing. When made without music, such scenes also allowed sound effects to come to the fore. Hawks clearly adopted this strategy in The Dawn Patrol, one of a series of films in the period that made extensive use of battle sounds. The trend began even before the transition was fully institutionalized with the road-show release of Wings in August 1927. Aerial footage of dogfights between American and German pilots was not only augmented by the orchestra’s percussionists but by machines behind the screen that “recreated machine-gun fire and the takeoff noises of aircraft, the latter with different sound effects to distinguish between the American and German planes.”11 So important was sound for the genre after the success of Wings that in 1929 Howard Hughes scrapped the completed silent version of Hell’s Angels, his film about World War I flying aces, to remake it with sound.12 The trend continued in the early 1930s with the pronounced use of effects in scenes of trench warfare in the Academy Award–winning All Quiet on the Western Front (April 1930). It

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reached a sort of apogee in Hell Divers (January 1932), described by Variety as “one of the noisiest features ever presented. This comes from the continuous flying and bombing of targets. . . . The continuous droning of the motors plus the explosions is deafening.”13 The Dawn Patrol juxtaposes dialogue and action scenes with a very deliberate logic. The first two of the film’s four acts have very little action aside from the opening, a dogfight in which Courtney leads A-flight on patrol and downs a German Fokker.14 These two acts, nearly 45 of the total 107 minutes running time, are restricted to the air base and the adjacent field and are nearly continuous. In act 1, A-flight returns from a patrol after having lost two men and planes. The men of the squadron drink and talk late into the night and get orders from Commander Brand to go on patrol at dawn. Act 2 begins the next morning after a brief ellipsis. New recruits arrive during breakfast, and Courtney chooses two to take the place of the men who died. A-flight takes off and then returns after having apparently lost three men, including Scott. Again the men gather in the bar to drink and talk in a lengthy scene that is broken by the entrance of a captured German, the flier who shot Scott down, and then later by Scott himself, who had managed to land his damaged plane behind the French lines. This section of the film concludes with a brief episode of exterior action, akin to slapstick: Courtney and Scott embark on a wild motorcycle ride, sharing a sidecar and singing “Apples and Plums” in harmony with the drunken chauffeur. They speed and nearly collide with a passing battalion. The ride has no consequence for subsequent events and seems to have been devised largely to provide a brief respite from the confinement to a single set. By restricting action during the first half of the film, Hawks allows the subsequent scenes of aerial combat to stand out. The dialogue scenes of the first two acts show the painful waiting at the base for the decimated patrols that return and demonstrate the hopelessness of the military situation in which both Commander Brand and his men are enmeshed. In contrast, in the action scenes Courtney and Scott take control of their situation, and space opens out with spectacular footage of flight and of battles taken from open-air planes. In act 3 Courtney and Scott respond to a dare and insult delivered by the enemy pilot von Richter. Executing an “unscheduled patrol” against Brand’s orders, they take off at night, fly over the German air base, and commence an attack. Footage as if from Courtney’s point of view shows the enemy airfield and the effects of his fire on German aircraft as the planes attempt to take off, are strafed, and burst into flames.

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Act 4 begins with Brand having been promoted and Courtney assigned to take his place. Forced inaction and despair weigh heavily on the new commander. No longer allowed to fly, he must take orders from officials behind the lines, send up young recruits with little training, and withstand the constant loss of both men and planes. Scott, now second-in-command, is initially sympathetic. But when Scott’s younger brother, Donny, joins the squadron, and Courtney orders him, along with other young recruits, to fly on patrol, Scott quarrels with his friend. The sequence in which Donny, flying in a patrol led by Scott, is shot down by von Richter is relatively brief (04:33:10). It motivates a complete break between the friends, as well as Courtney’s decision to undertake a suicide mission proposed by Brand and initially claimed by Scott. The much longer action sequence of the suicide raid (08:27:22) caps the act and the film, as Courtney flies low deep into enemy territory, destroys a railway depot and munitions dump, and engages in an air battle with three German fliers. While the action scenes are certainly the centerpiece of the film—indeed, were considered so good by the studio that it reused the aerial footage in the 1938 remake—the dialogue scenes are not without interest. Take, for example, the nine-minute sequence in act 1 in which the men of the squadron receive their orders. It is scored by actions that, by their repetition over the course of the narrative, evoke the futility and tedium of the military enterprise: Brand receives orders by telephone from the high command that he knows will result in the further loss of life and equipment (as will Courtney in act 4); he is promised new recruits to take the place of the dead (a similar infusion of recruits introduces Scott’s brother, Donny, in act 4); Brand reluctantly passes on the orders to the squadron (as Courtney will do in act 4 and as Scott will do at the end of the film); Courtney makes his resentment of Brand’s orders clear (as will Scott in act 4, with the stakes raised by the fact that his brother is being used as cannon fodder). In addition, like all of the lengthy sequences at the air base, the action is distributed over adjacent spaces, in this case the bar where the men are gathered and Brand’s office next door. The nine-minute sequence breaks down into the subsegments defined by movement between spaces as follows: 1a. Bar, 03:32:04, shots 1–23 1b. Office, 02:41:21, shots 24–40 1c. Bar, 01:26:04, shots 41–52 1d. Office, 00:35:15, shots 53–58 1e. Bar, 00:43:12, shots 59–66

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It should be noted that subsegment 1d, the second interchange between Brand and Phipps, does not have decisive narrative import. Phipps points out that Brand’s prediction about how Courtney would react to orders has come true (in 1b Brand predicted that Courtney would resent the orders but would respond only by saying “Right,” a response we see enacted in 1c). While it is possible that this redundancy was considered necessary to cement spectator comprehension of the ironic use of the word right, in my view the function of segment 1d is primarily structural: it has been devised to create a coherent pattern of alternation between bar and office, one in which the subsegments gradually shorten over the course of the sequence. That is, the filmmakers inserted an additional subsegment to facilitate alternation in an attempt to enliven a potentially monotonous dialogue-heavy sequence. In addition to creating spatial differentiation within the sequence, Hawks varies the background sound and shifts audio elements from background to foreground to create dramatic sonic contrasts as summarized below: 1a. Interior bar Beginning shot 1, gramophone and conversation as background Within shot 10, at 01:39:12, gramophone ceases Within shot 13, at 02:00:11, guitar commences Within shot 14, at 02:05:18, song commences as foreground sound Within shot 14, at 02:06:00, conversation as background drops out 1b. Interior office Beginning shot 24, song continues as background sound Within shot 27, at 04:43:01, song concludes, silence as background 1c. Interior bar Beginning shot 41, gramophone and conversation as background Within shot 42, at 06:43:07, gramophone ceases in response to Phipps Within shot 43, at 06:47:20, conversation as background drops out in response to Phipps Within shot 48, at 07:38:10, conversation as background resumes 1d. Interior office Within shot 53, at 08:14:11, conversation as background drops out 1e. Interior bar Beginning shot 60, conversational fragments as foreground sound Subsegment 1a begins with a lively background of diegetic gramophone music and background chatter (significant phrases emerge from the normally indistinguishable wallah wallah, as will be discussed below). The

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gramophone runs down in shot 10, whereupon one of the pilots is asked to sing. He cues a comrade, “Tommy,” who begins to strum a guitar in shot 13. In shot 14, as the singer commences “Stand to Your Glasses,” the background conversation subsides. Shots 15 through 23 are only accompanied by foreground sound, as the pilots turn their attention to the singer, and the whole group eventually joins in the chorus. With the cut to the office in 1b, however, the song becomes background sound: it plays under the beginning of the conversation between Phipps and Brand. When the music concludes, the rest of the conversation in the office takes place without a pronounced sonic background. This sets up a contrast with the noisy bar that Phipps encounters in 1c when he enters to prepare the men for orders. Hawks devotes three shots (41–43) to Phipps’s attempts to enforce quiet, as he asks Scott to turn off the gramophone and then hushes the men. Later, after conveying orders, Brand cues the resumption of general conversation with the line “You’ll take up the details among yourselves later on. That’s all.” The conversational murmur underscores Courtney’s confrontation with Brand, and it continues after Brand returns to the office in 1d, remaining audible until Phipps closes the office door. Subsegment 1e uses fragments of general conversation reminiscent of the first and third subsegments, but without any of the extraneous background chatter, so that these bits of dialogue are brought even more forcefully into the sonic foreground. In addition to reinforcing the spatial separation between bar and office, and the attendant social differences between the pilots and their commanding officers, Hawks’s use of background sound creates a parallel between the cessation of the gramophone and the chatter in subsegments 1a and 1c. The performance of the song and the delivery of the orders are both highlighted by the silence they command. In the first case the men give their attention to a song toasting the dead; in the second they get the orders that spell doom for many. The timing and performance of the dialogue interchanges in the bar are much more dynamic than those in the office. A comparison between the two reveals how Hawks began to work around the limitations of early sound technology and to experiment with different styles of writing and delivering dialogue. One difficulty with subsegment 1b is simply bad dialogue writing (by Hawks, Dan Totheroh, and Seton I. Miller). For example, 1b begins with Brand referring to the men’s drinking song, with a rather unhappy accumulation of gerund phrases: “Listen to them out there. Bluffing themselves. Pretending that death doesn’t mean a thing to them. Trying to live for just the minute. The hour. Pretending they don’t care if they go up tomorrow and never come back.” The tendency to be overly

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explicit, and to utilize fairly formal phrase structures, slows down the pace of the conversation considerably. In addition, both the spatial construction of the shot-reverse-shot setups and the organization of the sound track are constrained by multiple-camera shooting. The subsegment is shot with four cameras: one for a long-shot framing that shows Phipps in an awkward rear-view profile at his desk and Brand full-face at his, a second for medium long shots of Brand standing, a third for medium shots of him seated, and a fourth showing Phipps seated more or less full face. This permits a modified form of shot-reverse-shot, although the characters are almost at ninety degrees to one another rather than looking at each other face-to-face. Presumably, the advantage of multiple-camera shooting in this context was that it permitted the recording of the sound in a single take. But the picture track has been edited simply to follow the train of the conversation, typically showing each speaker for the entirety of his lines. There are only two instances of dialogue off: shot 32 shows Phipps over Brand’s line “You’ll break her heart no matter how it’s spelled,” and shot 34 is a three-second take of Phipps as Brand speaks on the phone. There are also only two occasions when dialogue overlaps a cut: at the beginning of shot 38, when Phipps starts speaking four frames before the cut to his face, and again in shot 40, when Brand’s line, begun in medium shot, overlaps the cut to long shot by three frames. The subsegments in the bar have a more densely layered sound track, and the sound flows more freely across cuts. As might be expected, this fluidity is very pronounced during the interval of the song (shots 13–23), when the sync-sound record of the performance is augmented with cuts away to the other members of the group taken wild. For seven of the ten shots of the performance the singer is offscreen, and we see other pilots in the room abandoning their activities to listen or joining in the chorus. But even before the performance commences, Hawks uses background sound— the mix of gramophone music and chatter, which, as I have noted, were probably recorded together live—as he does the song. The sound flows across shots irrespective of the source. And, as the fragments of conversation become distinguishable out of the background wallah wallah, they are rendered very differently from the more formal and rhetorically complex lines of foreground speech. In the background, lines overlap with each other, or with the sound of laughter, and conversations are reduced to fragmentary phrases. This strategy is apparent from the first shot of the sequence, a 27:06 long take (in the shot descriptions throughout this chapter, underlined words indicate that the dialogue overlaps a cut; boldface indicates overlapping lines of dialogue):

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Fade in to an extreme long shot of the main dining room. Pilots 1, 2, and 3 are seated at a table in the foreground. More men, some seated, some standing, seem to be playing craps at a table in the background. Gramophone music and general background chatter is heard. The conversation at the foreground table is not fully comprehensible over the din, but some phrases stand out. pilot 1 (on). [inaudible] three times, and we weren’t exactly standing still either. Camera pans right, loses the pilots, and shows the gramophone beside a pillar midground center and the staircase at the back right. The pilots remain audible off. pilot 2 (off). I saw you. You were not getting away either. Pan right continues, reveals the bar in the background and, in the right foreground, a table where Hollister sits by himself. Courtney and Scott, in very-long-shot framing, stand at the center of the bar with another pilot sitting on the counter to the right. pilot 1 (off). No, and what would you have done? [Camera begins to track in on the bar as Pilot 4 approaches the bar and stands left.] pilot 2 (off). [inaudible] I probably would have done. [Indistinct chatter continues, but Pilot 4’s voice emerges from the mix at the same level as those of Pilots 1 and 2.] pilot 4 (on). I’ll have a whiskey. [Courtney and Scott are now in long-shot framing, fully centered.] scott (on). Drink hardy, old son. It may be the last. courtney (on). Go to the devil with a full belly, say I. scott (on). Righto!

When Scott begins to speak, his voice is somewhat louder than Pilot 4’s, but the din does not abate (which it presumably would have done if the sound had been mixed in postproduction); thus, his line is not immediately distinguishable as foreground sound. With the camera’s continued track-in, however, visual cues call more attention to the conversation between the principals. As the segment unfolds, Hawks continues to blend foreground and background conversation and to utilize sound off extensively. In this way he juxtaposes the reactions of the seasoned pilots with those of Hollister, a raw recruit who has just seen his best friend go down on patrol. In shot 3 Scott and Courtney are informed of the death of Griggs, a pilot whose plane lost its wings during flight. Shots 4 through 6 consist of an interchange between Scott and Courtney as they reminisce about Griggs’s comic misadventures

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while learning to fly. Their laughter overlaps a cut to Hollister in shot 7. From offscreen, fragments of another conversation are heard, as Pilots 1, 2, and 3 chime in with a parallel story about planes losing their wings: Shot 7. MS, Hollister at table. Agitated, he grimaces in reaction to Courtney and Scott’s laughter about Griggs. He lifts a clenched fist to his face, rubs it against his face while Pilots 1–3 speak. pilot ? (off). [Dialogue overlap with laughter, eighteen frames] Dave, you heard of the new motors the French are using? pilot ? (off). No, I haven’t. pilot ? (off). [Dialogue overlap, four frames, –n’t in “haven’t” and I thin– in “I think”] I think I have heard. [inaudible phrase] pilot ? (off). They have a wonderful climb. pilot ? (off). They’re very fast. pilot 1 (off). And very fast. Yes, they are. There’s— [shot overlap, five frames, “There’s”] Shot 8. ELS, similar to beginning of shot 1. Table of Pilots 1, 2, and 3 in the foreground. pilot 1. —one thing against them. They’re bad in the power dive. pilot 2. What’s that? [Dialogue overlap, nine frames, “They’re bad” and “What’s that?”] pilot 2. [in response to the end of Pilot 1’s line] Ah. pilot 3. I hear they ripped the wings off [end of phrase inaudible]. [Dialogue overlap, seventeen frames, “Ah” and “I hear they ripped the wings”] pilot 1. Yeah, well, I shouldn’t care to have one of them fold up on me! Shot 9. MCU, Hollister, he looks around wildly. pilots (off). [Laugh] pilot ? (off). I don’t suppose you would! [Dialogue overlap with laughter, thirteen frames] Cadence on the gramophone commences. scott (off). [Laughs]

By subsegment 1e, Hawks brings the conversation among the pilots to the sonic foreground but daringly keeps them almost entirely off frame: the pilots are only visible in the background of the final shot of the

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segment, and even then, their backs are to camera. We never really see them talking. Their technical discussion of how to implement Brand’s orders becomes the accompaniment for a wordless, emotional interchange between Courtney and Hollister. In shot 59 Courtney talks briefly with Pilot 1 about the possibility of the Germans eventually getting their range. The pilot exits off left, and Courtney turns to the blackboard hanging above the bar that carries the names of the men that had been assigned to duty that day, including the friend Hollister lost, Madchen. Shot 60. MS, Hollister, looking off left at Courtney. pilot (off). Holly, you and Suffolks fly a– [shot overlap, four frames, –bove in “above”] Shot 61. MS, Courtney, back to camera, wipes out the names of Madchen and Blane. pilot (off). –bove us. pilot (off). You fly in fifth position and you take six– [shot overlap, three frames, –th in “sixth”] Shot 62. As 60. Hollister reaches toward Courtney in a gesture of protest or appeal. pilot (off). –th. We’ll be watching tho– [shot overlap, two frames, –se in “those”] Shot 63. As 59. Courtney looks right, toward Hollister. pilot (off). –se observation ships pilot (off). Yes, we better keep our eye on ’em. [shot overlap and dialogue overlap, eleven frames, “on ’em” and “You and I know”] Shot 64. As 60. Hollister’s face breaks up, and he passes his hand over it. He rises with bowed head. pilot (off). You and I know very well what happened last time we went [audio break] job like this. pilot (off). That’s why you look out up above. Check your ammunition. Shot 65. LS, the bar area and the stairs to the left in the background. Courtney is still at the blackboard. The pilots in conversation are gathered at the other end of the bar, backs to camera. Hollister exits up the stairs. Courtney turns around to watch him go. pilot. We’ve been having trouble with those belts lately. pilot. Yes, I remember last time I was out. I couldn’t get a burst out of either of them.

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pilot. You rendezvous at Marycott. Five thousan– [shot overlap, two frames, –d in “thousand”] Shot 66. MS, Courtney from a new angle facing the bar (only the edge of the blackboard is visible). pilot. –d feet. pilot. Five thousand, Marycott. Courtney looks down at the towel he used to erase the names.

pilot. I can see Old Man Death riding in a chariot of fire. Courtney turns back to the right and hangs up the towel near the board. pilot. He must have— pilot. [Laughs] [Dialogue overlap with laughter, ten frames.] pilot. —taken sides now. pilot. [indistinct chatter] Courtney leans in at the bar, back to camera. He addresses the bartender. courtney. One more, Bott.

With this use of offscreen sound Hawks approaches the “tough stories in a tough manner” of his later films. Unlike the office segment, where Brand bemoans the unfortunate fate of his men, and voices his concern for and irritation with his junior officer, Courtney’s concern for Hollister is only implicitly expressed in their exchange of looks. And, whereas Hollister acts out his grief very broadly in facial expressions and gesture in shots 60, 62, and 64 (and elsewhere in the sequence), the sound track sets the pathos of his emotion against the more seasoned pilots’ stoical attitude toward battle and death. For them the war is a matter of rendezvous points, figuring out how to avoid “what happened last time,” belts that malfunction. Even the somewhat forced reference to “Old Man Death riding in a chariot of fire” is turned into a joke. A number of factors contribute to the sense that the segments in the bar are faster than those in the office. The office segments are almost entirely shot-reverse-shot conversations taken with multiple cameras. In contrast, the only sync-sound shot-reverse-shots in the bar are shots 3 through 6, when Courtney and Scott discuss Griggs, and shots 49 through 52, when Courtney confronts Brand after getting orders. Hawks’s basic strategy for dealing with sound in the bar is to intercut sync-sound shots with others taken wild. In the case of both the song and Brand’s presentation of orders, Hawks cuts away from sync-sound shots of the performer/speaker to shots of the listening pilots. This permits him to set up his reverse angles freely

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and cut around the space at will. In addition, as described above, the offscreen conversation of the pilots permits him to escape the restrictions of multiple-camera shooting and has the extra benefit of setting up the difference between Hollister’s attitude and that of the rest of the group. The treatment of performance is another factor contributing to the contrast between office and bar. Neil Hamilton as Brand puts every word over, carefully enunciating rhetorically complex lines. He competently executes business, as in shot 37, a lengthy take of more than twenty seconds in which the action of putting on his jacket and adjusting his belt is paced to coincide with the duration of his lines about Courtney’s impending reaction to orders. But the pacing of the actor’s performance in this, as in other instances, is largely held within the confines of the shot; it has little forward momentum. The pilots’ dialogue functions much more effectively as accompaniment to the edited sequence of shots, perhaps because it was conceived as emerging from the background sound. In the bar one has a sense of a constant stream of sound, in which multiple conversations are ongoing and talk blends with other aural elements in the environment, such as laughter and the gramophone. The tendency to have the pilots speak in sentence fragments and to step on each other’s lines gives their line delivery a sense of ease and quickness and helps to merge individual performances into the continuity of the mix. The devices of continuing words across cuts and of utilizing offscreen sound break up the real-time continuity of the actor’s performance within each take, allowing the dialogue to flow over cuts and to merge with the pacing of the sequence as a whole. Clearly, the Hawksian dialogue scene has not yet developed its full potential in The Dawn Patrol. Hawks experiments with bringing the dialogue to a halt—for the song, for the orders—but there are not yet modulations of tempo or more subtle ways of producing sonic accents. Moreover, Hawks has not yet even broached the problem of character movement. Courtney does not stir from his corner of the bar. Hollister remains seated until the end of the sequence. We do not see the pilots move around the bar. Not only does The Dawn Patrol rigorously divide aerial battle and dialogue scenes, but action in the sense of extended physical movement is not yet really coordinated with speech. It would take Hawks the better part of the 1930s to get full control of these rhythmic elements and require collaboration with actors who were as fast on their feet as they were with their speech.

short scenes in scarface Sometime in the 1930–31 season, Hollywood producers, writers, and directors began to experiment with shortening scene length as a means of

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handling film dialogue. The change was noted in Tamar Lane’s New Technique of Screen Writing of 1936: “Another of the most important changes in writing technique brought on by the talking picture has been the gradual speeding up and breaking up demanded of scenarists in their treatment of the script. The writing and preparation of a scenario for shooting is today quite different in both form and treatment than it was formerly.”15 Lane referred to two specific methods of changing the pace of the sound script. The first was the montage sequence, what he referred to as the “lapdissolve sequence,” in which a long stretch of story time was summarized by very brief segments each of one or two shots connected by dissolves. The second method was to tell the story through a large number of very short scenes or sequences, which he saw as a change from silent-film writing technique: Almost from the very first days of the photoplay, it had been laid down as a fundamental rule in good scenario presentation that the story be arranged in a small group of sequences, the fewer the better. Writers were called upon to tax their ingenuity in an effort to arrange and compress the actions and backgrounds of the plot into the minimum number of settings and sequences possible. . . . In an effort to enliven the talking picture, which was becoming tedious and losing its popularity, this former rule of the writing craft is being discarded by many producers. Leaders in this movement have been such producers as the alert and progressive Darryl Zanuck and Carl Laemmle, Jr., who have given a new pace and tempo to many of their films by presenting them in a series of fast incidents. As a result, not only do most producers today have a tendency to disregard the number of sequences in a photoplay, but some of them actually favor a script composed of a number of short snappy sequences rather than one of more simplified construction. Adherents of this school of scenario technique contend that the brief, speedy sequence gives the film more movement, more sweep, and the illusion of more action.16

Lane attributed the experimentation with short scenes to Darryl F. Zanuck, then a producer at Warners, and to Carl Laemmle Jr., at Universal. Certainly, in retrospect it seems clear that Warners took the vogue for montage sequences and short scenes to the point where they became identified with that studio’s style. But Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s analysis of scene lengths in their random sample of one hundred Hollywood films suggests that across the studios the sound film tended to be broken down into more segments than its silent counterpart. Bordwell notes that between 1917 and 1928 the ordinary Hollywood film contained between nine and eighteen

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sequences, the typical segment running from four to eight minutes. In contrast, in the period from 1928 to 1960, sound films commonly contained between fourteen and thirty-five sequences, the typical segment running from two to five minutes. Bordwell concludes: “Thus while shot lengths increased with the introduction of sound, the number of sequences in a Hollywood film almost doubled and the duration of those sequences roughly halved. (It can be argued that the dynamic rhythm of editing in the silent film was, after 1933, regained to some degree by a swift succession of short scenes.)”17 It should be noted that the earliest sync-sound features and shorts tended to have relatively long scenes. Lane attributes this tendency to the fact that before the innovation of the microphone boom (in 1930), the fixed mics were hidden around the set, with the actors clustered around them, making both movement within the scene and frequent scene changes difficult.18 Multiple-camera shooting was another factor that militated against short scenes and sequences. While it permitted directors to get changes of angle while recording the sound in an unbroken take, it was cumbersome to arrange the cameras so that they were not in each other’s sightlines, as well as to light scenes for shooting in this manner, thus making each new scene setup time-consuming and expensive. Finally, given the large number of theatrical adaptations made in the early sound years, filmmakers were frequently directly adapting sources that utilized the temporally and spatially continuous acts and scenes typical of stage plays. (Recall Variety’s complaint about the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Sally, cited in chapter 1, “Like putting a pony in a corral when it has the whole pasture to romp in.”) Both The Dawn Patrol, taken from an original story by John Monk Saunders, and Hawks’s next feature, The Criminal Code, based on the play by Martin Flavin, have relatively long scenes. As I noted above, the first segment in the bar/office area in The Dawn Patrol has a duration exceeding nine minutes, which is long even for a silent-film sequence according to Bordwell’s statistics. In the next act the duration of the sequence in which the German flier and then Scott are brought into the bar area is eleven and a half minutes. Although the second half of act 3 is enlivened by the first aerial onslaught against von Richter, the first half, in which characters move between the exterior of the landing field and the interior of the bar, is just short of eight minutes. Act 4 has two extremely long continuous sequences set in the base: the first, which deals with the arrival of Donny, is eleven minutes, and the second, when Brand returns to the base, is eight minutes.

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The Criminal Code (in production from September to November 1930) opens with a sequence in the new style, made up of very brief subsegments. In three and a half minutes it moves from the interior of a police station, where two detectives get word of a fight in a nightclub, to the exterior of the station as the detectives continue to talk and enter a squad car, to a later time when the detectives talk in the interior of the car, to the exterior and then interior of the nightclub where the detectives confront the suspect. Most of the sequences are much longer, however. For example, the questioning of suspects by the district attorney in the first act, a sequence divided into subsegments as a play would be by entrances and exits into his office, is 10:57:02. The terrific sequence of the murder of the squealer Runch in prison is divided into two temporally continuous segments that together account for twenty minutes of screen time. Hawks builds this sequence much like a silent film, by cutting between simultaneous actions in adjacent spaces, as the prisoners work together to distract officials so that one of their number can commit the crime, and then the authorities react and begin their investigation. Hawks’s next film, Scarface (in production from June to October 1931), made for Howard Hughes’s Caddo Company, shows the full influence of the experimentation with short scenes. Because the gangster films of the early 1930s did not typically derive from theatrical sources (unlike The Criminal Code), and because they tended to be highly episodic narratives of the central character’s life in crime, they shifted to the short-scene style very early and employed it extensively. In Archie Mayo’s The Doorway to Hell (October 1930), supervised by Zanuck at Warners, the opening section, where Louis Ricardo unites the gangs, and the second section, where he marries and leaves for Florida, are almost too truncated: the short scenes do not allow for suspense to build or for character development. Little Caesar (released January 1931), another Zanuck production directed by Mervyn LeRoy, is more deliberate in the way that it traces out Rico’s arrival in the big city, his rise in criminal circles, and his abrupt demise, in a series of short punchy episodes. William Wellman’s The Public Enemy, also for Warners, was released in May 1931, just before Hawks began production on Scarface in late June. The film seems to have been an important model for Hawks. Both the screenwriters, Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, and the star, James Cagney, would later work with him at Warners on The Crowd Roars (released April 1932). Wellman’s film is very self-consciously built out of discrete episodes enlivened by montage sequences. Consider the beginning of the film. It fades in on the title “1909,” briefly evokes the bar scene and ready

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distribution of beer in that era, shows the childish pranks of Tom Powers and Matt Doyle, and introduces their budding relationship with the Faginlike criminal Putty Nose. The film then fades in on the same characters in 1915, when Putty Nose involves the boys, now young men, in a heist that goes bad and results in the killing of a cop. Fade in on the boys in 1917 as war is declared. They make the acquaintance of another criminal character, Paddy Ryan. Tom quarrels with his “good” brother, who has enlisted. Fade in on 1920 and a swift and funny montage of people buying liquor on the eve of Prohibition. Paddy Ryan and the boys close a deal to distribute beer illegally. This introductory section is actually quite long, and it takes a relatively long stretch of screen time (23:49:06) to get the boys in the business that is the gangster’s typical stock in trade. The pace feels fast, however, because of the number and variety of incidents and the historical sweep evoked. Scarface, from a story by Ben Hecht, with dialogue and continuity by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, and W. R. Burnett, is based on the conflict between the Chicago gangs of Al Capone and Bugs Moran and in particular the so-called Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, in which Capone murdered seven of Moran’s associates. The film’s conclusion, in which Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) is trapped in his steel-shuttered apartment and killed by police, reworks a similar scene in Joseph von Sternberg’s 1927 silent film Underworld, also scripted by Hecht. Hawks also borrows and improves on two scenes from The Public Enemy: one in which Tom employs scare tactics to force bar owners to sign up for regular deliveries of the beer distributed by his own mob and another in which Tom and Matt kill Putty Nose (as Tony and Guino kill Lovo). More important, however, Hawks assimilates the montage-sequence and short-scene structure found in Wellman’s film and in the other gangster pictures produced by Zanuck at Warners. Aside from the ending, with a duration of 10:47:15, which cuts between Tony’s flat and the police in the exterior, sequences in Scarface tend to run from four to six minutes.19 The film has three montage-like sequences: at the end of the first act when Tony forces the Lovo mob’s beer on bar owners (03:19:05); in act 2, when Tony’s attack on the North Side mob culminates in the Valentine’s Day massacre (03:34:10); and in act 3, when Tony fends off an attempted assassination in a car chase (01:08:09). Some of these, such as the chase, are completely without dialogue, while others, such as the first, utilize brief interchanges. In the case of Tony’s assault on the bar owners the terseness of the lines and the ellipses between the subsegments reinforce the summary effect and the sense of a fast, and highly controlled, pace:

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10a Fade in. Interior bar 1. Tony enters the bar, pushes the owner to the back. They discuss the owner’s previous order with another mob, and Tony dictates the increase in the amount of beer and the price that he will have to take from Lovo (00:51:10). Dissolve. 10b Interior bar 2. We see beer flowing out of the taps, being wasted, while Tony, off, discusses the new order. Cut back to reveal the bar owner, held up at gunpoint, with an injured eye. Tony dictates his order (00:16:06). Dissolve. 10c Exterior street. Tony throws an explosive from the car and blows up a bar owned by Zeigler, one of the South Side holdouts in conflict with Lovo (00:14:10). Dissolve. 10d Exterior street. Tony and his confederates enter the Shamrock bar. Hold on the window as a gun fight is heard in the interior. They exit (00:35:11). Dissolve. 10e Interior Italian restaurant. Tony enters, samples the pasta being served to Lovo, and places an order. He reports that the South Side is tied up, but a glance at a newspaper reveals that Meehan, of the Shamrock, is expected to survive and aid the police. Tony tells the waiter to hold his pasta (00:56:06). Dissolve. 10f Interior hospital hallway. While Guino holds the attendants at gunpoint, Tony and Angelo, carrying floral bouquets, work their way down the hall, opening doors. Cut to a view inside Meehan’s room as they shoot the bandaged figure from offscreen and throw flowers on the bed (00:25:10). Fade to black. While it might be argued that this is an action as opposed to a dialogue scene, the distinction between the two actually begins to blur here: one could not imagine this sequence shot silent or restricted to effects alone. The unfair terms of the contract are established through Tony’s conversation in subsegments 10a and 10b. The dialogue and business about the pasta in 10e deepens the ethnic contrast, with the Irish mob established as owning the Shamrock, and adds a comic note that is carried over to the next subsegment in the business about the flowers. Dialogue also works rhythmically in tandem with the sound effects, as in the urgently whispered direction to the driver, “Step on it,” just prior to the explosion in 10c. Moreover, subsegments 10c and 10d, with only minimal dialogue, gain by contrast with the first two: one has a sense that the sequence “speeds up” as the violence escalates across the first four sections. This example makes clear that the use of short sequences, divided into even shorter

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subsegments, provided a crucial means of regaining the fluidity of movement through time and space that commentators found lacking in early sound cinema. In addition it allowed directors and editors to tailor the rhythmic flow of the sequence independently of the time it took the actors to speak their lines. Although montage sequences are relatively rare in Scarface, the construction of sequences out of short distinct episodes may be found in other sections of the film. Take, for example, the transition between Tony and Guino’s assassination of their boss, Lovo, in sequence 24 and Tony’s murder of Guino, who he thinks has seduced his sister, at the end of sequence 25. Following Lovo’s death, Tony goes to claim his boss’s mistress, Poppy, whom he has been courting in his own fashion: 24e Fade in. Interior Lovo’s apartment. Poppy is awakened by the buzzer. Tony enters and tells her to pack her things. He shows her the blinking neon sign outside her window, an advertisement for Cook’s Tours, which reads “The World Is Yours” (01:48:11). Fade to black. 25a Fade in. Interior Social Club. Cesca enters Camonte’s office looking for Guino. She propositions him, assuring him Tony will be away for a month (01:23:08). Fade to black. 25b Fade in. Interior newspaper office. The editor gets word that Camonte is returning from Florida. He mentions that there is a new crowd in City Hall who are out to get him (00:22:16). Fade to black. 25c Fade in. Exterior street. Tony and his entourage arrive in several cars. Tony enters his mother’s flat and gets word that Cesca has moved out and is living with a man. His mother gives him the address. Tony returns to the exterior and enters his car (01:27:20). Fade to black. Segment 24e quickly establishes Tony and Poppy as a couple; 25a both explains Tony’s absence and cements the relationship between Cesca and Guino; 25b prepares for Tony’s return and the change in police policy that will lead to the film’s final standoff; and 25c sets up Guino’s murder. A great deal of story time is thus summarized, and both the second murder and the showdown with the police are prepared for within five minutes of screen time, divided into brief scenes of one to two minutes. The rapidity with which events move in this section is very typical of the gangster film and more generally of the type of screenplay construction that Lane associates with Zanuck and Laemmle. “Speed” here is a matter of the narration, the efficiency with which information about the shifting relationships between the characters is parceled out. The pacing, however, is not particularly

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dependent on how the actors and director have handled the dialogue; indeed, in the small scene between Cesca and Guino their sexual banter is spoken rather slowly. Nonetheless, there are sections of Scarface in which the rhythmic control over the pace extends to direction and performance. That is, Hawks does not simply cut down on scene length and on dialogue in order to move the plot along more quickly; he uses dialogue as a rhythmic element within the structure of the scene. Todd McCarthy has described Hawks’s and Hecht’s joint trip to New York City to cast Scarface. In addition to stage veteran Paul Muni, whom they convinced to take the title role, they selected Osgood Perkins for the role of Lovo.20 As well as appearing in many other Broadway productions, Perkins had originated the role of Walter Burns in The Front Page in 1928, and as evidenced by his performance in Scarface, he was adept at handling the fast, voluminous dialogue congenial to both Hecht and Hawks. Much of the rapid-fire dialogue in the film is handled by Perkins with some also given to Edwin Maxwell in the role of the chief police inspector. Across the film Hawks experiments fairly consistently with two basic strategies for the rhythmic control of dialogue. First, he frequently establishes a contrast in speaking rhythm. Paul Muni tends to speak much more slowly and deliberately than either Perkins or Maxwell. He often responds to them with a shrug or a gesture or with very few words. Some of his best lines are condensed epigrams. For example, when the police push him for information about the murder of Big Louie: “What kind of mug do you think I am? I don’t know nothin’ [pause], I don’t see nothin’ [pause], and I don’t hear nothin’ [pause]. And when I do [pause], I don’t tell the cops.” A second method of rhythmic control is derived from the way speech and movement are distributed across subsegments. As I have already noted with regard to the montage subsegments in sequence 10, Hawks can vary the amount of dialogue across units. Not only does this allow him to break up dialogue blocks, but it also permits him to shift sonic registers within a sequence. A blast of gunfire, a rapid escalation of movement, or a flurry of faster shots in one subsegment can extend or contrast with the rhythm and tempo of speech in another. Both of these strategies are evident in Tony’s first confrontation with Lovo about taking on the North Side mob. The conversation with Lovo is bookended by tracking shots that follow characters moving across the lounge of the “Athletic Club” that serves as mob headquarters. It concludes with a short subsegment on the street outside. In the dialogue portion of the scene Perkins consistently has more to say than Muni, and he speaks more quickly, at rates ranging from 5.3 to 6.6 words per second. Muni says

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less and utilizes pauses significantly, giving him a wider spread of speaking tempi from 1.3 to 4.0 words per second: Shot 2. Cut around the door. LS, Lovo seated at his desk in right foreground and Tony in doorway center background. tony [holds up a hand in greeting]. Hi, boss. [He turns back to camera to shut the door.] lovo [5.3 words/sec]. When are you going to learn that I am the boss? [Tony comes forward to midground on this line.] tony [4.0 words/sec]. Sure you’re the boss. [shot overlap, one frame past cut] Shot 3. MS, slight low angle with camera just above desk height, showing Lovo full face. lovo [6.6 words/sec.]. And what do you mean by breaking up that Lakeview joint last night? Didn’t I tell you to stay out of the North Side? tony. Now— [shot overlap, one frame past the cut] Shot 4. MLS, with Tony standing left and Lovo seated right. tony [3.6 words/sec]. —listen, Johnnie, it was easy. [Dialogue overlap, one frame, –y in “easy” and Lovo’s N– in “Now”] lovo [5.1 words/sec]. Now you listen to me, stupid. [Perkins starts to stand up and camera to track in.] That was one of O’Hara’s places and you know it. [He is standing.] Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t ready for O’Hara yet? [Track-in complete] tony [4.0 words/sec]. It was a nice little order. Fifty barrels a week. lovo [5.4 words/sec]. I don’t care if it’s fifty a day. What do you use to think with, an empty beer keg? Just when we get this territory lined up and runnin’ smooth, you step out and gum up the parade. tony [3.9 words/sec]. How do you mean, Johnnie? I just sell a little more beer. Ah, don’t worry. [Dialogue overlap, one frame, –y in “worry” and D– in “Don’t”] lovo [5.3 words/sec]. Don’t worry? You know what O’Hara’s liable to do now? He’ll send his guns down here on the South Side, they’ll move around like hummingbirds. You’re liable to get it, and I’m liable to get it. I know that hop, he’s tough, see [shot overlap, one frame past cut].

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Shot 5. MCU, Tony, full face. tony [2.4 words/sec]. Ahhhh, he ain’t so tough. Hanging out in a flower shop. You afraid of a guy like— Shot 6. MLS, back of Tony, favoring Lovo. tony. —that? [Cut divides the words: “like” / cut / “that?”] lovo. I ain’t afraid of anybody. [Pause for 01:20] Shot 7. MCU, Tony, as 5. tony [1.3 words/sec]. Sure not. [Words slurred. Second pause.] That’s a crazy question, eh, Johnnie? Shot 8. MLS of the two men standing, facing one another as at end of 4. Lovo already has his hat on. [Lines are not timed because they are brief, interspersed with the actors’ movements.] lovo. Come on, don’t argue. [He starts to move toward the door initiating pan left.] tony. Where you goin’? [Perkins crosses in front of Muni, leftward movement of actor and camera.] lovo. To clean up after you, you mug, unless it’s too late. [Sound of door opening at end of line, the two men are both at the door.]

Shots 2 through 4 “belong” to Perkins. His relatively long lines, peppered with colorful metaphors, are interrupted by his interlocutor’s brief interjections. Perkins just rides over these interruptions. Cuts 2 to 3 and 3 to 4 are overlapped on Muni’s lines, so that Perkins’s dialogue can build in speed and intensity over the course of these shots. Dialogue overlaps and camera movement also favor his speech. Shot 4 is the longest in the sequence, 27:18, while most of the others range from three to seven seconds. As Muni finishes his short line, Perkins steps on it very briefly (on “Now”) and stands up as the camera moves in: “Now you listen to me, stupid. That was one of O’Hara’s places and you know it.” Even after he has completed the action of standing, the track-in continues, accenting the phrase: “Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t ready for O’Hara yet?” As the conversation continues, he again steps on Muni’s line “Ah, don’t worry,” leading up to his longest (and arguably best) speech, delivered with lightning speed and a distinct internal rhythmic structure based on the repetition of questions: “Don’t worry? You know what O’Hara’s liable to do now?” and the repetition of phrases: “You’re liable to get it, and I’m liable to get it,” as well as the comparison, which the stressed syllables emphasize, between “guns” and “hummingbirds.”

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In contrast to the first three shots, shots 5 through 7 “belong” to Muni. Perkins’s dialogue in shot 4 ends on the word see, and for the first time the cut is overlapped on his line. The overlap allows Muni time to react to the speech in the close-up. His subsequent challenge, “Ahhhh, he ain’t so tough. . . . You afraid of a guy like that?” is edited to put the word that after the cut to shot 6, so that we can see Lovo’s quick reaction to it. The whole pace of the scene then slows, for a double pause. Following Perkins’s denial “I ain’t afraid of anybody,” there are almost two seconds of silence that overlap the cut back to Muni’s close-up. His ironic response is divided by another break between the slurred phrase “Surenot” and “That’s a crazy question, eh, Johnnie?” The cut to shot 8 entails a slight prolepsis. Hatless when the scene began, now Lovo already has his hat on. This prolepsis, like everything in the shot, emphasizes the action of leaving, and the initiative returns to Lovo (who moves partly because he needs to deal with things on the North Side and partly because he wants to get away from Tony’s challenge). His movement to the door initiates a leftward pan, and he crosses in front of his interlocutor, who steps back. He is given the tagline that closes off the scene, in response to Tony’s query about where they are going: “To clean up after you, you mug, unless it’s too late.” This response is capped by the Foley effect of the door opening. The rhythm and pacing of the subsegment inside Lovo’s office is very coherent and works across several elements of film style. In shots 2 through 4 the cutting of sound and image, the structure and performance of the dialogue, and the movement of standing and the track-in all emphasize the continuity, tempo, and stresses of Perkins’s speech. In the following shots the pace slows, and the use of the close-up and the structure and delivery of dialogue emphasize Muni’s short lines and pauses. Finally, when the scene picks up in shot 8, this change in tempo involves a shift from a rhythm based on speech to one based on figure and camera movement. The reliance on figure and camera movement as rhythmic elements extends to the shots that bookend the scene. In shot 1 Tony enters the lounge from the hall (throughout the shot the sound of pool balls clicking against one another is heard off in preparation for a later scene to be discussed below). He salutes Angelo in the background and moves right as the camera tracks right, revealing men seated at tables against the back wall and Guino in the foreground, leaning against a pillar and tossing a coin up and down. Tony crosses behind the pillar and walks forward to address Guino as the camera movement pauses: tony. Johnny in? guino. Yeah. tony. He’s mad, huh?

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Guino nods very slightly in response; Tony smirks, and the rightward movement of character and camera resumes until he reaches Lovo’s office door. The relaxed pacing of the rightward movement in shot 1 contrasts with the brisk pacing of the leftward movement in shot 9. Following a straight cut around the office door, Lovo and Tony move through the space, silently signaling to the men previously seen seated at tables, who all file out of the door after them. Shot 1 has a duration of 22:19 (timed from the middle of the dissolve into the scene), whereas shot 9 at 09:14 is less than half the time. While it might be argued that shot 1 has several narrational functions—setting up the confrontation to come and establishing the presence of the other gangsters in the space, as well as the pool table for later reference—in addition it sets up a contrast between shots 1 and 9 that has rhythmic value. The men’s exit is faster and more heavily stressed than Tony’s entrance, picking up the energy and drive of Lovo’s movement and his determination to patch things up with the North Side mob that begins in shot 8. In the final subsegment on the street below, the rhythmic organization of the sequence shifts yet again. An elliptical and fast-cut segment articulates the response to Tony’s assault. Shot 10, 14:03, shows Lovo and his gang duck into an exterior stairwell as a car approaches their headquarters and, without stopping, dumps a body curbside. In shot 11, 02:18, the men emerge from hiding. Shot 12, 07:01, begins with an overhead view of the body bearing a note on its chest. The men run on frame and cluster around the corpse as one of the group identifies the victim as their colleague, Keach. Tilt up as the note is passed up to Lovo and Tony. Shot 13, 03:22, is the centerpiece of the group, an insert of the note, “Keep out of the North Side,” with a rosebud inserted into the paper as a signature. Shot 14, 04:18, returns to the framing of the group seen at the end of shot 12 for the fade to black. The subsegment is “fast” in narrational terms: the body and the message sum up the North Side response with great economy and force. In addition, the tempo of events—the unexpected arrival and swift departure of the car—as well as the pace of the editing, with three shots at four seconds or less, continue the accelerando that began in shot 8. This analysis reveals that Hawks began using the structure of short scenes broken up into very short subsegments to instigate controlled changes in tempo from one subsegment to the next. Thus, the relaxed pace of figure and camera movement at the beginning of the sequence gives way to a conversation scene in the inner office that starts with fast talk and slows down for dramatic effect. Figure and camera movement then pick up the pace markedly in shots 8 and 9, leading into the fast-cut conclusion on

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the street. Rhythm and pacing are not confined to a single stylistic register but rather work across different elements—cutting, speech, and movement. This is akin to something I noted in chapter 2: that Eisenstein usually marked changes in plot or the escalation of the dramatic situation by shifting from one mode of rhythmic organization to another. But unlike Eisenstein working in the mid-1940s, who was able to orchestrate marked changes in rhythmic design within the boundaries of a very long, temporally continuous scene, Hawks’s experiments with such changes in 1931 depended on segmental breaks, in this case movement through adjacent spaces. Throughout Scarface, Hawks utilizes short segments marked off with transitional devices such as dissolves, fades, or tracking shots that bring characters into or take characters out of a scene not only to rev up the pace but also to shift from one rhythmic register to another. Take, for example, the brief scene in the newspaper office that serves as a transition between the bravura opening (what is apparently a single four-minute take of the assassination of Big Louie after hours in a nightclub) and the barber shop in which Tony and Guino are arrested for the murder: Shot 1. Dissolve from the nightclub to the subeditor’s office. Windows at the back of the set open onto the main newsroom, where extras talk and move. Track left with a man in an apron and visor who enters at the back of the set and delivers a folded sheet to the subeditor seated at a desk in the middle ground. The subeditor rises and comes forward, studying the paper. Track left with him as he walks past a bank of telephones in the foreground, exits his office, and enters the managing editor’s. The managing editor glances briefly at the paper, crumples it up, and tosses it. managing editor. That’s rotten. Costillo Slaying Starts Gang War. [He gestures on each word of the proposed headline.] That’s what I want. subeditor. I’m working on that angle now. I’ve got four— [shot overlap, one frame] Shot 2. MS, managing editor. subeditor (off). —men out. [Dialogue overlap, one frame, –t in “out” and Managing Editor’s F– in “Four!” The Foley sound is lowered after the cut.] managing editor. Four! You’ll need forty men on this story for the next five years. You know what’s happening? This town is up for the grabs, get me? You know Costillo was the last of the old-fashioned gang leaders. There’s a new crew coming out. And every guy

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that’s got money enough to buy a gun is going to try to step into his place. You see? They’ll be shooting each other like rabbits. For the control of the booze business. You get it? It’ll be just like war! That’s it, war. You put that in the lead. War! Gang war! The dissolve to the barber shop starts noticeably between “lead” and “War!” The managing editor’s –ar in “war” extends across the end of the dissolve to a paper with his headline resting open on a chair in the shop.

The speed of this flashy transition is largely a matter of narrative economy. We follow the headline from the typesetter’s hands into the subeditor’s and then to the managing editor, whereupon, after an ellipsis, it appears in print on the front lines of the action. Sound bridges the shot transitions: the subeditor’s “four” is echoed by the managing editor’s “four” with a slight overlap, and the managing editor’s prophetic words overlap the dissolve into the new space. But this transition also picks up the pace through a shift, over the course of two shots, into the verbal register. The opening take is rather slow and quiet, as the camera moves through the space of the nightclub, holds on Big Louie as he converses with the last of his guests, and then moves to the back of the set to reveal the assassin’s shadow creeping down the hall. After the gun goes off there is more than thirty seconds in which the dominant sound is the murderer, off, whistling the theme of “Chi mi frena in tal momento?” from Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor while the janitor discovers the body, takes off his uniform, and hightails it from the scene. With the dissolve to the newspaper office the volume and sonic density of the track increase considerably. We hear phones ringing, typing, and fragments of the conversations of the reporters visible through the windows at the rear of the set. These sounds build to the monologue of the managing editor (Tully Marshall), which is emphasized in the close framing of the second shot, held for almost thirty-four seconds. Although Marshall does not speak particularly quickly (three words per second), the volley of words, spoken at high volume and with great urgency, creates a sense of speed that spills over into the next shot, when the sound overlap is further echoed visually by the insert of the headline. Speech functions here much as nondiegetic music might, to make the transition by breaking the mood of the opening scene and establishing a new tempo for what is to come. Hawks similarly builds up to the great 02:45:00 montage that shows Tony’s attack on the North Side and the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre, with a dialogue scene. While out at a restaurant, Tony, Guino, Angelo, and

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Poppy have been attacked in retaliation for Tony and Guino’s murder of O’Hara, head of the North Side mob. Guino bags one of the attackers’ machine guns for Tony. They retreat to the Athletic Club where they find evidence of another attack in the stairwell. A tracking shot, this time from “outside” the lounge looking through the exterior windows, follows the group into the space. Tony places the machine gun on a table and all gather round. Cut to an interior view of Lovo, who has been wounded, emerging from his inner office. In stark contrast with the first confrontation between the men, in this case they both speak in short phrases, at high speed, their interchange complicated by Tony’s address to other gangsters off-frame and by Guino’s action of reloading the magazine of the machine gun. The scene builds to the point when Tony directly defies Lovo’s orders, a moment accentuated by a track-in: Shot 10. MLS, new angle on table, unnamed gangster left, Tony center, and Poppy right. Lovo crosses the frame, moving to left of Tony, back to camera, on his line. Movement ends on “here.” lovo. Daffney. He’s running it now. He’ll give it to you here. A pound of hot lead in the belly. tony. Make sure it’s him, Johnnie. [Track-in on Tony begins.] gangster (off). Cars are here, boss! [Dialogue overlap, one frame, –s in “boss” and O– in “Okay”] tony. Okay. Hey, Little Boy, business. You fix who goes in each car, understand? lovo. Hey, where do you think you’re going? [Dialogue overlap, six frames, –oing in “going” and “To the N–”] tony. To the North Side like I always knew someday. [Dialogue overlap, one frame, –y in “someday” and Y– in “You”] lovo. You can’t do that! tony. What do you mean, can’t? Who’s stopping me? [Dialogue overlap, one frame, –e in “me” and “I.” Track in concludes here on an MS framing centered on Tony with Lovo’s back prominent on the left side of the frame.] lovo. I am! I’m giving you orders for the last time! [Dialogue overlap, six frames, “time” and “There’s only”] tony. There’s only one thing that gets orders and gives orders!

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Shot 11. Insert of the gun held in Tony’s right hand; he gestures to it with his left. tony. And this is it! That’s how I got the South Side for you and— [shot overlap, one frame] Shot 12. MS as end of 10. tony. —that’s how I’m gonna get the North Side for you. Some little typewriter, huh? I’m going to write my name all over town with it, in big letters! [He looks up and makes sweeping hand gesture on “big letters.”] lovo. Hey, stop him, somebody! [Dialogue overlap, one frame, –y in “somebody” and G– in “Get”] tony. Get out of my way, Johnnie! I’m going to spit! Lovo moves off left and the gunfire is directed toward camera. The next shot shows a wall of the lounge with pool cues lined up in a rack on the left, and a shelf with beer mugs on the right. The mugs are shattered by the gunfire. No dialogue, only gun effects for the next three shots that alternate between Tony shooting and the destruction of the pool cues, as well as the beer mugs.

In this scene verbal banter accelerates into machine-gun fire, which, along with car noises, will predominate in the following montage scene. Hawks makes the transition from talk to gunplay through several devices. First, the conversation is made denser than a straightforward verbal contest between Lovo and Tony because it is interrupted by remarks from the offscreen gangster and to Little Boy about the impending attack. Second, with the line beginning “There’s only one thing . . .,” Muni reaches his fastest rate in the film, 5.2 words per second. Third, almost every line is slightly overlapped; the actors consistently step on each other’s lines to increase the speed of the interchange. Finally, Tony’s metaphor of spit for gunfire explicitly calls attention to the change from speech to sound effects, underlining its role in ramping up the sequence. When compared to The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code, Scarface represents a real shift in the way Hawks approached the problem of dialogue scenes. Using short sequences and multiple subsegments enabled him not only to break up continuous blocks of dialogue but to fine-tune his control of the rhythm and pacing of speech and to begin to articulate it with other sounds and with camera and figure movement. His next two films The Crowd Roars and Tiger Shark, both released in 1932, were made at Warners. Although production credit was assigned to Bryan Foy, Todd McCarthy’s account of the production history of the films indicates the involvement of Zanuck in the preparation of the scripts.21 The films retain

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the sort of narrative structure that Lane associated with Zanuck in 1936 and that we have also observed in Scarface. In addition, like The Dawn Patrol, they consistently alternate between dialogue and action scenes (of car racing and tuna fishing, respectively). Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it does seem as if Hawks was beginning to move back in the direction of long, temporally continuous dialogue scenes in the Warners films. For example, in the second act of The Crowd Roars there are two relatively long sequences in which Joe orders Ann and Lee to stay away from his younger brother. Both sequences are “theatrical” in the sense that they are confined to a single room and subsegmented by characters’ entrances and exits. The first is 07:22:19 and the second 06:58:23. The first meeting between Quita and Mike in Tiger Shark occurs in two sections, a night and the following day, separated by a dissolve. The sequence as a whole runs 07:20:06. In these scenes Hawks seems to be working toward new methods of rhythmic control, rooted more firmly in performance and elaborated on the sound stage. The parameters of this style do not become fully apparent, however, until his first great adaptation of a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

twentieth century The action of Hecht and MacArthur’s play is restricted to the time of the 20th Century Limited’s trip from Chicago to New York (actually eighteen hours according to the New York Times). The play is in two acts with an epilogue at Grand Central Station as the characters emerge from the platform.22 When Hawks rewrote the play with the authors,23 they added a first act that takes place in New York at the point when producer Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) makes Lily Garland née Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard) a star. Together the two have many successes, but they quarrel as a result of his possessiveness, sexual jealousy, and controlling nature. At the end of act 1 Lily leaves Jaffe and New York for Hollywood. Act 2 begins with the commercial failure of Jaffe’s pretentious Joan of Arc and the stratagems by which he eludes the Chicago sheriff, who is seeking payment of debts, and boards the train for New York. The film then largely follows the play (although with some changes in the ancillary characters and a different act structure, described below). Jaffe’s business manager, the long-suffering Oliver Webb, warns that he is threatened with bankruptcy and the consequent loss of his theater. When Lily, now a famous movie star, boards the train, Webb and Jaffe’s press agent, Owen O’Malley, begin to work on her, seeking to persuade her to sign a contract with their boss. The act ends when Jaffe, preparing to approach her in person, sees her

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kissing her boyfriend, George (Ralph Forbes), and throws a tantrum in the lounge car. A fade to black and an exterior view of the train traveling at night covers the passage of time. Act 3 deals with Jaffe’s successful plot to “eliminate” Lily’s boyfriend and his less than successful attempt to get her name on a contract to produce the Passion Play in New York. Apparently outmaneuvered by his rival, the producer Max Jacobs, who boards the train at the last minute with another contract for Lily, Jaffe prepares a mock suicide attempt, mirroring a similar ploy in act 1. Accidentally grazed by a bullet, he conspires with Webb and O’Malley to stage a death scene in order to get Lily’s signature. This gives rise to Hecht and MacArthur’s great line (in the context of a film in which the main characters are almost always over the top): “Go tell her I am dying. And don’t overact.” In the epilogue Jaffe and Lily are back in his theater on Broadway, quarreling in rehearsal. The first act shies away from the episodic method of plot construction favored in the early 1930s Warners films and in Scarface. Although it does not derive from the original theatrical source, it typically has relatively lengthy and temporally continuous sequences of seven or seven and a half minutes; the brilliant opening sequence of the rehearsal in the theater even clocks in at 15:14:02. Act 2 begins with two brief episodic sequences, in the Zanuck manner, which establish the failure of Jaffe’s new production and his escape from Chicago. But once Jaffe and his minions are settled on the train, the film shifts into a recognizable theatrical mode. Narrative time is more or less continuous within each act. Most sequences are long, about seven minutes, with the complications following Lily’s entrance onto the train at the end of act 2 taking eleven minutes and the verbal duel between the principals in act 3 taking thirteen minutes. As in the stage version, characters move between Jaffe’s compartment, Lily’s (which is adjacent to his with a connecting door), and the lounge car nearby. The action is subsegmented by movement between these spaces or, more rarely, by intercutting between them. While some sequences are distinguished by wipes or cuts to exterior views of the 20th Century speeding along, there is a twenty-two-minute stretch at the beginning of act 3 in which there are only straight cuts between sequences: sequence 12, which introduces the two Oberammergau players (henceforth “the Beards,” from their most prominent feature) and the possibility of producing the Passion Play; sequence 13, in which Jaffe splits up Lily and George and then quarrels with the star; and the beginning of sequence 14, in which Webb introduces Jaffe to Clark, the crazed pharmaceutical king, who promises them financing (a wipe and an insert to Clark’s check marks a temporal break in

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the midst of sequence 14).24 Thus, not only are the most important scenes— the rehearsal in act 1, and the interactions with Lily in acts 2 and 3—more than ten minutes each, but the first two-thirds of act 3 abjure the dissolves and fades used so frequently in 1930s episodic plot construction. The lack of closure in these uninterrupted stretches of story time gives Hawks and his collaborators a chance to structure the film’s tempo at the level of performance and to create an unrelenting manic pace. Consider the sequence in which Lily and Jaffe quarrel in act 3: 13a Lily’s compartment. She fingers the pin that Oscar had stuck into her in an effort to elicit a scream onstage. She proposes to George (00:20:23). 13b Exterior/interior Jaffe’s compartment. Jaffe runs on through the corridor entrance, urging O’Malley, who follows him, to hurry. He prepares to confront Lily and dons a sling as protection against the boyfriend (00:45:13). 13c Lily’s compartment. Jaffe enters through the connecting door interrupting Lily’s discussion of marriage. His revelation of their past relationship elicits a three-way quarrel. George exits through the corridor entrance. Jaffe returns to his compartment (02:20:01). 13d Jaffe’s compartment. He takes off the sling and brags to O’Malley about his performance. He demands Webb and the contract Webb has been charged with drafting (00:19:10). 13e Lily’s compartment. George comes back for his hat. She confesses that all the other men she told him about were lies. The only man in her life was Jaffe. George walks out before she can finish her speech dismissing him (01:23:06). 13f Lounge car. As Jaffe and O’Malley walk toward the door to the corridor, they pass George on his way in. Jaffe has reacquired the sling, which he points to for protection. George exits, glaring. They move into the train corridor where O’Malley is sent off to find Webb, and Jaffe prepares to reenter Lily’s compartment (00:17:23). 13g Lily’s compartment. Jaffe enters. He speaks with her dresser, Sadie, until Lily enters and dismisses her. They quarrel, and he admits that he was egotistical and unfair. Then he pitches the Passion Play. She eggs him on, then laughs at him. She reveals that Webb told her Jaffe was bankrupt and on the verge of suicide. She is planning to sign a contract with Max Jacobs. Jaffe’s insults drive her into a screaming rage, and she kicks at him, then chases him back into his own compartment (07:44:13).

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14a Jaffe’s compartment. Jaffe enters, furious with Webb. Webb enters, announces he has found a backer for the Passion Play, and introduces Clark (01:05:01). Wipe. 14b Insert of check (00:05:15). Wipe. Subsegments with Lily and George and/or Jaffe (13a, 13c, 13e, 13g) alternate with very short subsegments between Jaffe and O’Malley (13b, 13d, 13f) in which the producer plots his next move and brags about his successes as an actor and a strategist with Lily (“I have played a scene, Sardou could have written it!”; “That eliminates the boyfriend!”). In addition, in each of the segments with O’Malley, Jaffe calls for Webb, who then appears in sequence 14, just at the moment when Jaffe has received new information that makes him particularly angry with his business manager. The alternation allows for a great deal of physical movement on the part of Jaffe and his confederate as they charge around the train, their pace emphasized by Jaffe’s demands that O’Malley move more quickly, hurry up. In addition the alternation between subsegments sets up a theatrical framework of entrances and exits that institute a fast pace at the level of the narrative action: the situation changes with each movement on or off. While theatrical farce has traditionally used multiple entrances and exits as a means of creating and maintaining up-tempo comic complications, it should be noted that Hawks and his collaborators adopt a distinctly cinematic treatment of them. They use camera movements or close framings to lead into entrances, cut around doors, and show Jaffe circulating around Lily’s drawing room in his movement around the train. There is thus a great deal of variety in how entrances and exits are staged and prepared for. In subsegment 13b Jaffe and O’Malley rapidly charge into his compartment via the corridor door, but then Jaffe slowly prepares himself for the exit into Lily’s compartment through the connecting door. In 13c Jaffe’s entrance interrupts Lily’s proposal to George, and the quarrel he precipitates leads to George’s exit through the corridor door, as well as his own through the connecting door. George repeats his wordless exit in 13e, perhaps yet another sign of his lack of imagination. In 13g Lily is lying down for a nap offcamera and gets to make her own entrance to confront Jaffe through the door that leads from her sleeping berth. Segment 13g ends in physical violence and an almost cartoonlike exit in which Lily pursues Jaffe to the connecting door as he leaps through it, followed by the offscreen sound of her screams. The exit that ends 13g leads directly into the next sequence. A cut around the door shows Jaffe in his own compartment, reacting to Lily’s screams off,

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and hurling his own insults at Webb. The entrance of the business manager, followed shortly thereafter by the supposed angel for the show, necessitates the character’s (and the actor’s) rapid shift into a stately demeanor and a soft and slow manner of speech. The lack of any punctuation in the transition between sequence 13 and 14, and the about-face that Barrymore pulls off in this scene, reveal an important aspect of Hawks’s pacing. While 14a is certainly “slow” at the level of line delivery and movement, especially in relation to the knockabout comedy found at the end of 13g, the narrative action has not slowed; quite the reverse: we are thrown into a new situation and an entirely new mood with minimal transition. Specific strategies of dialogue timing and performance in Twentieth Century may be situated in relation to Today We Live, the World War I picture that Hawks had directed at MGM the previous year. William Faulkner’s script for that film, based on his short story “Turn About,” consisted almost entirely of extremely terse lines, many of them one- or twoword fragments with the subject of the sentence suppressed. As Todd McCarthy describes it: “Hawks pushes the stylized, repressed line readings of The Dawn Patrol into the realm of parody, with Franchot Tone, cast as Crawford’s brother, Ronnie, almost never uttering a first-person pronoun and delivering stiff-upper-lip dialogue such as, ‘Glad. Been waiting,’ and, to his sister, ‘Stout fella’ and ‘Can’t help feelings.’ ”25 In contrast, Hecht and MacArthur’s play is exuberantly rhetorical. Characters act out their emotions, or put them on, through elaborate verbal subterfuges. An interchange from the original play (but not the film) between Lily and George even refers to speaking rhythm: george. I can always tell when you’re acting. You repeat things. “Empty words, empty gestures.” “Those baubles, those symbols.” It sets up a kind of rhythm. lily. How dare you second guess me! How dare you! george. See what I mean? “How dare you, how dare you—”26

With Twentieth Century Hawks definitively abandoned the industry wisdom of the early 1930s, as evidenced in the screenwriting manuals and Variety articles and reviews cited above, which called for the reduction of dialogue as a way of improving the tempo and pacing of the sound film. Instead, he figured out how to mobilize scenes that have a lot of talk. It is usually argued that the fast pace that Hawks achieved in Twentieth Century and his subsequent screwball comedies Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday was made possible by the use of overlapping dialogue. For example, noting that the interplay of the rapid-fire drawing-room scenes

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between the two leads in Twentieth Century “required so much rehearsal and refinement that filming fell five and a half days behind,” McCarthy attributes the need for extensive rehearsal to Hawks’s innovation of the device of dialogue overlaps. Although interviews with the director support this claim, it presents a couple of difficulties.27 First, Hawks’s claims to originality in this regard are overstated. Second, the technical constraints on sound recording and reproduction necessitated a relatively conservative employment of overlaps in the early and middle 1930s. Swift line delivery and overlapping dialogue were part of a stage tradition for comedic performance that films almost immediately tried to adopt. Alfred Lunt’s and Lynn Fontanne’s performances in Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman (produced by the Theatre Guild, opening October 13, 1924) provide a well-documented use of this technique in the theater.28 According to their biographer, Margot Peters, “In The Guardsman Alfred and Lynn perfected a technique of ‘overlapping’ that became their trademark. For instance, the Actress says ‘Then the honor of this visit is due entirely to me. You don’t care for music at all. I thought this afternoon you were fond of Chopin.’ Instead of waiting for ‘fond of Chopin,’ Alfred took his cue at ‘this afternoon.’ While Lynn raised her voice to project the rest of her line, Alfred broke in with his reply.”29 Richard Boeth described the method of rehearsal that supported such careful timing in an article in Newsweek in 1977: “They sat facing each other on two hard-backed chairs, their legs interlocked, and played their lines back and forth with eyes fixed on each other’s face. When one of them hit a line just a trifle off, the knees of the other would bang together—and the Lunts would start over. The result was an intimacy and shading and timing of performance beyond anything that audiences or critics or other actors could quite credit.”30 Dialogue overlapping on the stage depended on many aspects of the actor’s vocal technique: crystal clear enunciation, subtle decisions about how loudly to project specific words and word parts, the ability to manipulate the stresses to ensure audibility of the most important phrase parts. But when these carefully nuanced line readings were recorded with early sound-on-film systems, with restricted volume and frequency ranges, they risked inaudibility. The New York Times complained that in MGM’s The Idle Rich (June 1929), based on the play White Collars by Edith Ellis and directed by William de Mille, “when a whole family engages in a lively verbal tilt, several of them talking simultaneously, the result is pandemonium.”31 Margot Peters also notes that the Lunts were advised not to use overlapping dialogue in the film version of The Guardsman

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(November 1931) because the mics could not handle it.32 Apparently, they tried it anyway, and the results can be heard in two early scenes: in the three-way argument between the Actor, the Actress, and her dresser that follows the performance of Elizabeth the Queen within the film, and the following scene between the Actor and the Critic. One can make out the dialogue in a DVD recorded off-air, from what may be a remastered print, using modern playback equipment, but it is questionable whether the dialogue would have been audible over the loudspeaker systems available in the early 1930s. The rest of the film does not employ dialogue overlapping, which suggests that the director and the studio decided to restrict its use. Private Lives (December 1931), directed immediately after The Guardsman by the same director at MGM, Sidney Franklin, employed dialogue overlapping much more extensively. A prerelease news item in the Hollywood Reporter suggests that the performances by Robert Montgomery and Norma Shearer were strongly influenced by those of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, who originated the stage roles. A large portion of the film’s budget was attributed to the time it took the director and cast to consult Sidney Franklin’s film of the Times Square Theatre production: whenever a question arose about how a particular scene should be done, filming would stop so that they could review the relevant footage of the stage play.33 Although Variety praised director Sidney Franklin’s pacing and the “staccato deliveries” of the principals, the New York Times noted: “In one hectic scene it seems as though the powers of the microphone were taxed either by the speed of utterances or through the loud tones.”34 The overlaps that occur at the height of the couple’s squabbles on the hotel balcony in act 1 and during their fight in the chalet in act 3 are inaudible in parts even on modern playback equipment (the DVD derives from the Warners archive). Thus, one of the problems Hawks faced in utilizing overlapped dialogue in Twentieth Century was how to preserve audibility in recording. He describes one solution in a discussion of His Girl Friday: “You put a few words in front of somebody’s speech and put a few words at the end, and they can overlap it.”35 While this is certainly the case in some scenes, my analysis of Twentieth Century does not reveal extensive use of this method. Instead, as in Scarface before it, Twentieth Century typically makes subtle and strategic use of dialogue overlaps, with one actor stepping on a syllable or sometimes only the final phoneme of the other’s word. Consider this shot from segment 13c, after Jaffe has entered Lily’s compartment seeking to break up her relationship with George:

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Shot 12. MLS, over Barrymore’s shoulder at the couple. lily. I don’t want to talk to you, Oscar. Please go. I have nothing to say to you, and I don’t want to hear anything you have to say to me. george. [Dialogue overlap, two frames, –e in “me” and I– in “I’m”; Forbes addresses Barrymore.] I’m warning you [Lombard turns to face Forbes] about bothering Miss Garland, and I mean it. lily. [Dialogue overlap, one frame, “—it” and “No—”] No violence, George. He’ll go. george. [Dialogue overlap, four frames, –o in “go” and “Listen”] Listen, Lily, let me attend to this. lily. [Dialogue overlap, eight frames, –tend to this in “attend to this” and No! Si– in “No! Sit”] No! Sit down! george. [Very loud. Dialogue overlap, one frame, –n in “down” and H– in “He’s”] He’s got to get out! lily. That would finish me, a public fight! He’d like nothing better [she turns to face Barrymore] than splashing our names on the front pages. [shot overlap, two frames]

This is one of the more heavily overlapped conversations in the film, and at 4.9 words per second it is faster than the subsequent shot, which, with only one overlap and several pauses, is 2.9 words per second. Nonetheless, even in shot 12 the overlaps are restricted to parts of words and sometimes single phonemes. Moreover, the most important speech, beginning “That would finish me, a public fight . . .,” in which Lily explains her understanding of Oscar’s motivations, is not overlapped at all, to make sure it stands out. In addition, while the line readings are motivated by the fact that the couple is supposed to be quarreling, the high volume and careful enunciation of their speech is also a good way to put over their lines. Later in the segment, when Lily resumes arguing with George while sobbing repeatedly, only one line is completely overlapped with the sound, George’s loud and angry “Lying to me! Every minute with every breath, lying to me!” The high volume and the repetition of his delivery ensures audibility. Barrymore’s subsequent aside, “What an exit! Not a word. That’s what we should have had in The Heart of Kentucky when Michael leaves Mary Jo in the first act,” has been much more carefully modulated. The sobbing is much softer and has been limited to the interstices between words: –t and a– in “What an”; N– in “Not”; –d in “word”; –ould h– in “should have”; –ky wh– in “Kentucky when”; and –t in “act.” It is possible that this was managed by a mixer raising and lowering a recording of the sobbing either in the final

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mix or as Barrymore spoke his line on the sound stage, but I do not have definitive proof of this. Most of the other overlaps in the scene could certainly have been done live. While the importance of Hawks’s experimentation with dialogue overlaps cannot be denied, it should be stressed that he was not the only film director to essay this technique in the early sound period and that the system of recording and reproduction available placed limits on his utilization of the device. Thus, we need to explore the strategic placement of Hawks’s dialogue overlaps and their relationship to other methods of controlling the timing and rhythm of dialogue scenes. One of the characteristics that distinguishes Hawks’s work in Twentieth Century and the films made after is the fluid integration of gesture, blocking, and speech. In interviews Hawks always insisted on the importance of reworking dialogue on the set: They talk about “improvisation.” That’s one of the silliest words that’s used in the motion picture industry. What the hell do they think a director does? How do you expect that we can go out with a story that’s written up in a room, go out to the location, and do it verbatim? I have never found a writer who could imagine a thing so that you can do it like that. . . . We have a scene that we’re going to do: I’m interested first in the action and next in the words they speak. If I can’t make the action good, I don’t use the words. If I want something to happen in a hurry, I can’t have a man stop and read a line coming in. I let him run on through yelling something. I must change to fit the action because, after all, it’s a motion picture. Some of the stuff that’s handed to you on paper is perfectly good to read, but it isn’t any good on the set.36

My analysis of the opening office scene in His Girl Friday has demonstrated the physical nature of Hawks’s later direction of dialogue: the actors have a lot of business, such as throwing things or fiddling with their clothes or makeup, and use many gestures both for expressive purposes and to call for attention.37 Many scenes in Twentieth Century are similar to His Girl Friday in this intricate foot and hand work. Close analysis of the film reveals the careful mutual adjustment of the line readings and gestures with camera work and blocking, a process that needed to be worked out line by line on the sound stage and that caused him to fall behind schedule during shooting, as Todd McCarthy has noted. This aspect of performance sharply distinguishes the film from The Dawn Patrol, Scarface, The Crowd Roars, and Tiger Shark, which depend largely on an alternation between action and dialogue scenes (even if, as noted above, there are several scenes in the latter two films that anticipate the “improvisatory” direction in Hawks’s work). By Twentieth Century, dialogue and action are one.

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Paradoxically, one of the things that helped the director to focus on the close integration of dialogue and gesture was the confinement of much of the story to the drawing-room cars on the train, necessitating sets with a limited playing area. It was simply not possible for Hawks to employ the extensive figure and camera movement that some of his contemporaries had been using in an attempt to energize long verbal interchanges. For example, in one of the many quarrels between Walter and Hildy in Milestone’s The Front Page, the camera repeatedly circles a table as the two walk around it arguing. In the final act of Private Lives the quarrel between the principals is staged in deep space, with characters periodically stalking off into the recesses of the set. In contrast, Twentieth Century has many shots staged primarily in medium or medium long shot, with the actors very close together. Hawks frequently holds on a shot (lengths of more than twenty and even thirty seconds are not uncommon) with many small reframings on the actors’ movements. In this context even small gestures or facial expressions assume prominence. In addition changes in blocking tend to be restricted in scope, and thus appropriately scaled to the conversational context, and readily varied in time with the verbal repartee. Consider sequence 12, the first appearance of the Beards, which takes place in Jaffe’s drawing-room compartment. The set has an upholstered bench straight across the back wall and similar benches facing each other on the left and right. The connecting door to Lily’s drawing-room is on the rear left wall, and the door to the train corridor is rear right. The scene begins with Barrymore pacing back and forth at the rear of the set while Walter Connolly, playing Webb, sits on the bench foreground right. Cut into a medium-shot framing as Oscar demands that Webb draw up a contract for Lily Garland: Shot 2. MS, low angle, camera at waist height. Barrymore leans over Connolly who is only visible from head up because he is sitting down. Tilt down as Barrymore grabs him by the shoulder on “get out your pencil.” jaffe. . . . get out your pencil. We’re going to draw up a contract between Oscar Jaffe and Lily Garland. webb. [Dialogue overlap, three frames, –rland in “Garland” and O– in “O. J.”] O. J., stop chasing rainbows. [slight reframing to follow Barrymore’s movement as he stands to glance back at Lily’s door] jaffe. [Dialogue overlap, six frames, –nbows in “rainbows” and Make i– in “Make it.”] Make it out in legal form. She’s going to sign a contract with me before she leaves this train. So he—

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webb. [Dialogue overlap, nine frames, So he— and Listen, O. J., which interrupts.] Listen, O. J. [Connolly rises on his line, grabs Barrymore’s left arm with his right, holding his hat in his left; he follows Barrymore leftward a couple of steps, as Barrymore turns to face him; pan left], if you’ll allow me to presume. jaffe. What now? webb. [Dialogue overlap, four frames, Barrymore’s –ow in “now” and Connolly’s “Now.”] Now I know this may cost me my job, but if you ask me [leftward camera movement finishes; the actors are now centered in the frame in a low-angle MLS], we’re not getting anywhere. jaffe. What? webb. What we need is a play—something she can read, see herself walking up and down the stage in. [Connolly makes a back-andforth gesture with the hand holding the hat.] jaffe. I’ll find a play. [Barrymore turns left, runs his fingers through his hair.] webb. Yeah, where? [Sits down on the bench against the back wall on “where.”] You can’t pull one out of a hat. [Barrymore turns to face him on “can’t pull one.”] jaffe. I was born under the sign of Sagittarius. Shot 3 (beginning of shot only). LS of the compartment, Barrymore standing and Connolly sitting. jaffe. That’s the archer! [He makes the archer pose raising his right leg and miming the action of drawing a bow with his arms. He comes out of it quickly and leans down over Connolly, pointing at him.] You draw up that contract.

The speed of word delivery over the thirty-two-second duration of shot 2 is a brisk 3.5 words per second. But this number does not begin to account for the impression of speed at the beginning of this scene, which is a function of action as well as speech, with Jaffe barking orders, Webb struggling to make himself heard over the flood of Jaffe’s words, rising from the bench to arrest his boss’s attention, and Jaffe then posing in response. The overlapping is strong at the beginning of shot 2, with Connolly actually cutting off the end of Barrymore’s line on “so help me” and raising the volume of his voice to be heard on “if you’ll allow me to presume.” Their interchange is given added energy by the blocking. It begins with Barrymore punctuating his

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directions to his manager with glances off left at Lily’s door. When Connolly stands and follows Barrymore to the left, the movement stands out in the tight low-angle framing and is further accentuated by the camera movement. Finally, Barrymore’s line “I was born under the sign of Sagittarius” is capped by the cut to the wider framing that allows for the “Archer” pose. The scene slows down when the Beards (Herman Bing and Lee Kohlmar) enter, Bing kneeling to kiss Barrymore’s hand and drawing out the syllables of his term of address: “Maes-tro; Ma-es-tro.” Bing begins speaking slowly in heavily accented English, with Kohlmar interrupting and the two dropping into overlapped German phrases as they argue about who is to speak. The discovery that the Beards are actors in the Oberammergau Passion Play stuns Oscar, and he exits the frame temporarily, leaving Webb to determine that their manager has run off and they need to borrow money to return home. webb. Oh, moochers? beard 2. Ja. webb. Ja.

At this point the speed of the scene drastically increases. Webb seeks to separate Jaffe from his interlocutors physically against Jaffe’s resistance, and dialogue and shot overlaps markedly increase. Jaffe insists that the Beards sit down on the right bench, graciously instructing his manager to lend them money. When Webb objects, he explains his idea, framed in a tight two-shot: Shot 15 (near end). jaffe. [Barrymore turns right to face Connolly. Grabs him by the lapels.] While you were chatting over here, my mind was active. The Passion Play! [Barrymore turns to look off left.] The greatest drama of the ages. At last I’ve found something that is worthy of me. webb. [Dialogue overlap, six frames, –f me in “of me” and “O. J.”] O. J. [Connolly grabs Barrymore’s right arm with his left hand.], can I speak to you a moment? [Connolly moves off frame right.] Come on [Cut divides repeated phrase: “Come on” / cut / “Come on”] Shot 16. LS, Barrymore stands left, Connolly center, keeps his right hand on Barrymore’s right shoulder while pulling up on Kohlmar’s jacket with his left. webb. Come on, boys. Get out. O. J. [Connolly grabs Barrymore around the middle and thrusts him onto left bench as Kohlmar rises

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from the right bench.], I’ve got to speak to you alone. [Connolly turns and moves to the right, lifts Bing by the right shoulder and pushes him after Kohlmar.] Now, come on boys, get— jaffe. Are you cra– [shot overlap (eight frames) and dialogue overlap (twenty-three frames), Barrymore’s “cra” / cut / “zy”, and Connelly’s “ge” / cut / “t out.”] Shot 17. MLS, over Barrymore’s shoulder from his position on the bench. Webb, midground center, pushes the Beards toward the door rear right. webb. —out! jaffe. –zy? webb. [Turns around to face Barrymore] Never mind who’s crazy. jaffe. [Dialogue overlap, one frame, –nd in “mind” and “I.”] I— [As the Beards exit in the background, Barrymore rises in the foreground and Connolly pushes him back onto the bench on “crazy.”] webb. [Connolly turns his back to camera to push the last Beard out the door.] Go on, boys,— jaffe. [Dialogue overlap, six frames, “Go on, boys” and “Wait.” The latter is almost inaudible.] Wait! webb. —I’ll attend [Barrymore rises and advances to midground center] to you later. [Connolly closes the door, a pronounced “slam.” He turns and takes off his hat, blocking the door with his body. To Barrymore.] I thought you were going to sign ’em up. jaffe. Of course [he jumps on “course” and stamps his feet] I’m going to sign them up. webb. [Dialogue overlap, four frames, “up” and “Now”; Connolly begins pushing Barrymore back toward the camera and the bench.] Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait . . . wait . . . wait a minute, O. J. Wait a minute. jaffe. [Dialogue overlap, seventeen frames, Connolly’s “a minute. Wait a minute. Wait . . .” and Barrymore’s “Call them back!”] Call them back!

webb. Now, O. J. [Barrymore is settled on the bench, and Connolly, midground, is on his knees facing him.], I’m going to undertake a terrible responsibility. Now, I . . . I . . . I . . . I know you won’t believe me, but I’m more than just an employee. I’m the best friend you’ve got on Earth. jaffe. Now, go easy, Oliver. Remember your heart.

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webb. I’m not going to let you do it. You’ve done enough. I’m not going to let you get mixed up with any phony art. jaffe. Now the trouble with you is, you don’t know what’s happened [Barrymore stands and grabs Connolly by the lapels on “you don’t know what’s happened”] to the public in the last three years. [Barrymore pushes Connolly backward to sit on the bench on the right. Camera reframes on the movement.] Well, I’ll tell you, I know. I’ve had my ear to the ground like an Indian. This is what they want and [end of shot, scene continues]

This segment almost defies linear description in the section in which two characters are speaking and four characters are moving at once. In this section, from Connolly’s “Come on,” at the end of shot 15 to the slamming of the door after the exit of the Beards in shot 17, thirty-one words are spoken over 10:18, leading to a speaking speed of 2.9 words per second, noticeably slower than the 3.5 rate of the opening. Nevertheless, it is not the number of words per second, but the sense of simultaneous action over several registers, that makes the exit of the Beards seem so fast. Connolly addresses speech and action alternately to Oscar on the left and the Beards on the right. It may be schematized as follows: “O. J., can I speak to you a moment?” “Come on, boys. Get out.” [Pulls up Kohlmar by jacket] “O. J. [tackles him onto bench], I’ve got to speak to you alone.” [Lifts Bing and pushes him after Kohlmar] “Now, come on boys, get” / cut / “out.” [Pushes Beards out door rear right, turns around] “Never mind who’s crazy.” [Pushes Barrymore back onto bench] [Turns and follows Beards to rear door] “Go on boys, I’ll attend to you later.” [Slam of door, turns and blocks it, takes off hat] “I thought you were going to sign ’em up.” [Pushes Oscar back to bench] “Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait . . . wait . . . wait a minute, O. J. During this alternation Barrymore puts pressure on the proceedings by repeatedly getting up from his seat and interrupting Connolly’s lines with shouted interjections: “Are you crazy?”; “I . . .”; “Wait!” When Oscar finally gets out a whole line, Barrymore emphasizes it by stamping his feet:

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“Of course I’m going to sign them up!” The pace of the exit is not one that could be sustained over an entire scene; indeed, as noted, Hawks slows things up when Bing and Kohlmar come into the compartment in preparation for it. But it indicates how the director had begun to block and stage shots in ways that were integral to verbal repartee. He is no longer alternating between talk and action but conceptualizing one as the extension of the other and planning them both within the confines of tight, long-held, carefully considered framings. The extension of dialogue into the palpable register of gesture and movement is apparent even in scenes that do not rely on knockabout comedy and spectacular blocking to the same extent as the scene with the Beards. Subsegment 13g, a seven-and-a-half-minute scene between Barrymore and Lombard buried within the larger sequence, is more slowly paced and permits us to examine the relationship between gesture and line delivery in more detail. Only six shots out of the twenty-six that make up the scene fall in shot-reverse-shot patterns. The vast majority show the principals together in wider or narrower framings, interspersed with singles that emphasize an aspect of performance: a close-up of Lombard raising a skeptical eyebrow as Barrymore describes the Magdalene’s snake dance; a closer view of Barrymore, thumb and forefingers together, as he chastises his star for her love of money. Many of the edits are action cuts placed at the beginning or end of a movement, such as Lombard standing up as if in indignation or Barrymore pushing her back onto her seat. Cuts ride on smaller gestures as well, such as Lombard snapping her wrist or Barrymore raising a hand. The prevalence of cuts on action is crucial to a scene that relies on gesture as much as speech. In the following interchange Lombard and Barrymore shift away from a relatively slow portion of the scene in which Lily has softened in her attitude to Oscar based on their shared status as inveterate hams, incapable of real emotion. The dialogue has been analyzed for both gesture and the strongest linguistic stresses: Shot 40. MLS, Lombard walks toward the cornice of the closet on the back wall and leans against it, back to camera, sobbing. jaffe [2.7 words/sec]. [Barrymore enters from right and stands behind her. Very mellifluous.] Why Lily, you’re crying. lily [2.9 words/sec]. Sure [she begins to turn to face camera]. Sure I turn on a faucet. [facing camera, hand on hip] It’s that sort [left hand to face] of scene. That’s the devil of it. jaffe [3.2 words/sec]. That’s the pity of it, you mean. Those movies [stresses “MO-vies”] you were in—it’s sacrilege [stresses

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SAC-rilege] throwing you away on things like that. When I left that movie house [left hand to chest, he turns slightly to the left, so not looking at her directly], I felt that some magnificent ruby [holds up hand] had been thrown [points with index finger] into a platter of lard [stress on a in “lard”]. [Looking at her directly] You put yourself back ten years. But we can mend [pats her left shoulder with his right hand] all that. You’ll be greater than ever [gestures with both hands upraised], Lily Garland. [She puts both hands on his chest as if to push him away.] lily [3.7 words/sec]. Listen, Oscar, if all this adagio is— Shot 41. LS, match on action of Lombard pushing Barrymore back and turning to walk forward toward the bench front left. lily. —by any chance preliminary to a contract [stresses “CON-tract”], you can save [she sits down on “save”] your breath [stress on “breath”; gesture with right hand in air]. jaffe [4.0 words/sec]. [Raises his voice, makes fists of his hands and stands abruptly more upright in indignation.] What do you mean contract? [He comes forward after “contract.”] lily [5.0 words/sec]. [She sits upright to face him.] What are you talking about? You’d give anything to get my name on a contract. [She smooths her hair, sits back.]

Barrymore’s line readings help to construct Oscar’s highly theatrical persona: he overdoes the elongation of vowels and gives added stress to strong syllables. Because of this, in the long speech that begins “That’s the pity of it,” it becomes easier to notice how gesture functions in tandem with the line readings to stress words and word parts. In addition we can see how Barrymore’s manipulation of the eyeline helps to shape the phrase. He looks away from Lombard on “when I left that movie house”; holds up an outstretched hand on “magnificent ruby” and pauses slightly after “ruby”; points and stresses the a in “lard”; looks back directly at her with the reproach “You put yourself back ten years.” The tempo of this interchange is a function of many variables, including line delivery, gesture and movement, and editing. Speaking tempo accelerates as they resume quarreling, an effect strengthened by a brief dialogue overlap of –land in “Garland” and Lombard’s long L at the beginning of “Listen.” This acceleration is bolstered by the change in blocking that begins when Lombard pushes off against Barrymore’s chest and turns to approach the bench, an action stressed by the cut. Lombard’s line flows over the cut, giving a rhythm of “Listen, Oscar”—push off—turn / cut /

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move forward—“by any chance preliminary to a contract . . . save”—sit— “your breath.” The lines that follow this push-off benefit from the momentum thus generated: they are short and very fast at 4.0 and 5.0 words per second. It may seem improbable that actors could or would control the timing of their speech and gesture to this degree, but the comments by other film actors adduced above, such as Edward Arnold’s recollection of his difficulties with the long take in Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment, suggest the degree to which gesture and line delivery are planned to the word in making sound films. Timing must be equally precise when dialogue laps over an action cut, although in such cases some of the decisions are out of the hands of the actors (and perhaps the director as well). In such a cut, action and dialogue are taken from both of the requisite angles, the actor trying to match intonation and gesture as precisely as possible in each take. The editor is then responsible for selecting the best point to cut picture and sound. As the quote from Karel Reisz at the beginning of this chapter has indicated, the challenge for the editor in such a context is to create smooth and visually compelling matches that respect the timing of the actor’s performance. But the editor’s decisions, like the actor’s, will involve very small durations: cutting on discrete phonemes or on the time of the actor’s breath and placing the picture edit precisely in relation to changes in gesture and facial expression. Given the level of control exercised over the coordination of speech and gesture, the seven-and-a-half-minute duration of segment 13g must be broken down into smaller units for the timing and pacing of the performance. And given the prevalence of action matching in this scene, these units are frequently defined by small-scale shifts in blocking that extend over the cut. Consider the staging of Oscar’s pitch to Lily about Mary Magdalene. It begins in shot 41, with Barrymore standing to the right of the bench where Lombard is seated. In shot 42 he kneels beside her. In shot 43 Lombard raises herself up on the side of the bench, facing camera, as she begins to talk about the role, pretending to be interested. In shot 44 Barrymore resumes a standing position, which he holds talking for several shots (interrupted by a brief cutaway to a close-up of Lombard). She finally brings his monologue to a close in shot 48 by falling off her perch and back onto the bench, laughing. The pacing of line delivery and gesture is orchestrated in relation to these small-scale changes in the disposition of the actors in the frame, as in this passage beginning in the middle of shot 41: jaffe [1.9 words/sec]. [Very slow] No, Lily. This happens to be about the greatest woman of all time [pause]. Just her memory [pause]

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has kept the world weeping [stresses WEE-ping] for centuries [stresses “CEN-tur-ies”; a train whistle, off, comes in on –turies]. [Pause while whistle dies away. Then he starts, looks up, raises his right hand off-frame above his head, and suddenly raises his voice.] The Magdalene! lily [2.5 words/sec]. [At high volume] You mean that play by Sudermann? [She raises her right hand above her head as well. They both hold this extreme pose.] jaffe [1.0 word/sec up to “hack”]. [He glares down at her, hand still upheld.] Sudermann! [very slowly and with drawn-out syllables] That German hack! [Lombard brings her hand down to rest on the back of the bench. He suddenly brings his arm down and kneels, picking up speaking tempo.] Listen to me, Lily. I’m going to put [speeds up at “Listen”; shot overlap “put,” p / cut / ut]— Shot 42. MS, cut is after the completion of the kneeling motion and is slightly mismatched with the end of 41. Barrymore’s hands are raised, in the beginning of a folding gesture. jaffe [2.9 words/sec]. —on the Passion Play in New York [with his hands folded as if in prayer] with Lily Garland as the Magdalene [with his hands open, almost touching her chest, she is backed up against the bench]. I’ve had it up my sleeve [points to the cuff of his sleeve] all this time waiting for the right moment. [Points at her with right index finger.] The wickedest woman of her age— sensual, heartless, but beautiful [slows down to emphasize “sensual” “heartless” “beautiful”], corrupting [rolls the -rr- in “corrupting” and briefly makes fists] everything she touches [opens hands], running the gamut from gutter to glory. Can you see her, Lily? [on “see” goes upright on his knees and turns from Lombard to look just slightly above the camera] This little wanton [slowly moves his left arm to point at the camera]— Shot 43. MS, cut after the pointing gesture is completed. Camera has moved about twenty degrees to the left, so that Barrymore is now in three-quarter view instead of full face, and he is pointing off right. jaffe [2.4 words/sec]. —ending up in tears at the foot of the cross.

This parody of overacting has been worked out by the careful timing of every syllable and every pause, building up to the “big” gestures of Barrymore pointing above his head, kneeling, and pointing rightward. The dialogue is very slow at first, giving Barrymore the time to rest on the stresses in “weeping” and “centuries.” Following the train whistle that serves as an introductory flourish, he moves into the corny pose of upraised hand and eyes on the line “The Magdalene!” uttered at raised volume. He

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stays in the pose with right arm raised for seven and a half seconds, allowing time for Lombard to echo the gesture and for him to snap his head down at the end of her line, “Sudermann.” Then the whole conversational configuration is transformed. He brings down his arm, picks up the speed of delivery with “Listen to me, Lily,” and kneels before her in the last second and a half of the shot. His movement is emphasized with a slight tilt down and by the word lapped over the edit. The mismatched position of his hands (he is already folding them in a pleading gesture at the beginning of shot 43) also pushes the movement forward, increasing the apparent speed of the phrase that might be summarized: hand down—“Listen to me”— kneel / cut / fold hands—“the Passion Play in New York.” In absolute terms the speech beginning “Listen to me, Lily” is not very fast; recall that in Scarface, for example, Osgood Perkins delivers some lines at rates well above five words per second. But absolute speed is not so important as the contrast between the slow line delivery in shot 41 and the quicker pace that begins just before the cut to shot 42. This contrast is effectively increased by Barrymore’s collapse from a fully upraised to a kneeling posture, the movement that revs up his pitch. It is seconded by the introduction of a much lighter and quicker sequence of gestures that “keep up” with the words after the cut: open hands almost touching Lombard on “Lily Garland as the Magdalene”; pointing to the cuff of his sleeve on “had it up my sleeve”; pointing directly at her on “the wickedest woman of her age”; making fists on “corrupting” so that he can open them on “touches.” There is much more preparation for the final pointing gesture, as he clasps Lombard briefly by the arms on “Can you see,” then turns to face camera with his left hand upheld, in position for the pointing gesture that begins on “This little wanton . . .” The pacing of the performance slows down as he holds on this gesture, which is extended in time because the cut to shot 43 occurs after Barrymore’s gesture is complete, sustaining it over the angle change. When Barrymore finishes the line after the cut, the phrase “ending up in tears at the foot of the cross” (probably a different audio take) is also slower and softer. This brief relaxation of the pace is preparation for a more drastic escalation, as he utters a scream and begins to imitate Judas strangling himself with Mary Magdalene’s hair. Despite the fact that Barrymore’s performance as Oscar is meant to look overplayed, the scene actually builds in a fluid and highly controlled way, the blocking shifting in small increments, the tempo building up, then slowing down, then accelerating again, as the scale of Oscar’s proposed production gets more and more improbable and the actor’s gestures more outrageous (by the end he is imitating camels walking in the desert and

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screeching with the cackle of an old soothsayer) until Lombard’s laughter brings him down. Barrymore’s delivery is not very fast on the whole, relying more on alterations of intonation and volume used in tandem with a panoply of extravagant and varied gestures. But his performance reveals the extent to which the control of dialogue is a matter of accents as well as timing, the precise coordination of gesture with specific words and stressed syllables. Hawks’s scene works by tailoring shot scales and blocking to the stresses of these line readings, thereby underscoring the most important words or phrases: “The Magdalene!” “That German hack!” “the Passion Play in New York.” The analysis also suggests that control of tempo matters more than a simple calculus of words per second. A scene where the actors talked as fast as they could and with as much figure movement as they could manage would be as monotonous as the slow and deliberate line readings that actors felt forced to adopt in the earliest years of sync-sound recording. What makes the Hawksian dialogue scene dynamic is not simply speed but variety and precision: the interpenetration of speech and gesture to bring certain words forward, subtle modulations of the pace of line delivery and movement, the fluid rearrangement of blocking in tandem with new turns of phrase or mood.

We are now in a position to trace out the evolution of Hawks’s strategies for dealing with the problem of draggy dialogue scenes. Faced with multiplecamera shooting in The Dawn Patrol, he broke up the necessarily long and static verbal interchanges with movement across adjacent spaces and creatively shifted fragmentary, sometimes overlapped, offscreen dialogue from background to foreground sound. He also structured his narrative around an alternation between dialogue scenes and extremely dynamic action scenes shot wild. This proclivity would persist throughout the films of the early 1930s (and, indeed, may still be found in later features such as Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo). Scarface, and the action films made at Warners in its wake, began to experiment with the industry trend of reducing the duration of dialogue blocks by employing short scenes divided into shorter subsegments unified with dissolves, wipes, and fades. This permitted much more efficient exposition and allowed the action to range more freely through space and time, approximating silent-film narration in this regard. Restricting the duration of dialogue scenes also promoted a punchier, more rapid-paced, style of writing and line delivery. Moreover, it facilitated some interpenetration of speech and action, as in the scene from

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Scarface in which the conversation between Tony and Lovo is capped by the delivery of a corpse courtesy of the North Side mob. With Twentieth Century, however, Hawks largely abandoned the short-scene method, returning to lengthy, temporally continuous sequences (although, of course, without the constraints of multiple-camera shooting). While such narrative construction carried the risk of potentially tedious verbal interchanges, it also gave the director, working closely with writers and actors, the chance to manage duration at the level of the performance—to build gradually to the biggest effects or fastest interchanges as well as to create lightning-quick changes of mood or tempo without the relaxation created by a wipe or a dissolve. Hawks’s directorial style in Twentieth Century and after is best distinguished by an exuberant use of language that has been very carefully articulated with blocking and gesture. His scenes might be said to be organized around a “word score,” as opposed to the organization around the musical score found in Disney cartoons and in the film operettas by Lubitsch and Mamoulian. Every cut, every camera movement, every reconfiguration of the blocking can be delimited in relation to the actors’ words or the pauses between those words. In revenge, the lines themselves, as Hawks suggests in the interview quoted above, were doctored on the set to give the actor time to execute business and, I would add, to reach the stressed word or phrase at the right point in the trajectory of his or her movement. Although the structure of dialogue that I have tried to elucidate here does not partake of the strict meter found in poetry or the inevitable, steady pulse that underlies musical rhythm, it nonetheless fulfills several rhythmic functions without the benefit of a beat. Speech allows control of duration at a very refined level—to fractions of a second. It therefore permits synchronization of time-based events on the set (the movements of multiple actors and of the camera) and in postproduction (in dialogue editing). It is also a primary means of articulating changes of tempo, sometimes working in tandem with other devices such as sound effects and/or movement. If we examine the evolution of his style across the early 1930s, it seems clear that Hawks really gained rhythmic control of his medium when he jettisoned the industry-mandated attempt to reduce or contain dialogue and instead made dialogue itself the alpha and omega of timing.

6. Afterword Music is by nature continuous, organised rhythmically in time. If you compel it to follow slavishly events or gestures which are themselves discontinuous, not rhythmically ordered but the outcome simply of physiological or psychological reactions, you destroy in it the very quality by virtue of which it is music, reducing it to its primary condition of crude sound. —maurice jaubert, “Music on the Screen”

Since Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry the distinction between static forms such as painting or sculpture and temporal forms in which a narrative unfolds has been crucial to the humanistic disciplines. But Lessing’s distinction between picture and narrative, space and time, does not account for the affinities among arts such as music, theater, dance, and cinema. While not necessarily narrative, the performing arts do necessarily unfold in real time and therefore pose special problems in the handling of duration. In music or dance the time of the performance is obviously structured from beginning to end by a unified yet highly differentiated rhythmic design. But pace Maurice Jaubert, rhythmic organization in the looser sense of timing and pacing, a careful if less formalized articulation of duration, exists in theater and film as well.1 The speech and action on the image track must be considered as much more than “the outcome simply of physiological or psychological reactions”—they have their own carefully articulated temporal logic. In this study I have tried to assert the centrality of rhythm for cinema as a time-based medium and to show how it operates at multiple levels. To a great extent the large-scale units of temporal organization are coextensive with narrative structure: the division of plot into acts, scenes, and subsegments. These divisions have implications for narrative pacing as well as structure, and we have seen how producers, directors, and screenwriters tried to deal with the problem of draggy dialogue scenes in the early sound cinema by manipulating segmentation at this level. But cinematic rhythm is also structured moment-to-moment, in relatively small durations best measured in minutes, seconds, and frames. It is here that the rhythmic role of the elements of style—editing, camera movement and figure movement, speech, and music—becomes most apparent. 217

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I have tried to emphasize the partial and ad hoc nature of cinematic rhythm at the stylistic level. Directors, writers, and actors working on the sound stage, and directors, editors, and composers working largely in postproduction, must find ways to create rhythmically coherent scenes and subsegments. This coherence may be produced through emphasis on a single stylistic element, such as music or speech, or by movement across multiple elements. For an example of the latter, take the scene between Lovo and Tony in Scarface that begins with talk and devolves into machine-gun fire, creating a pulse that is then picked up in the following segment by the rapid editing of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre montage. The shifting terrain of filmic rhythm is, as Eisenstein’s argument about vertical montage proposes, fundamental to the medium. Sound cinema is about the sync, about harnessing diverse components of sound and picture to form a rhythmically compelling whole. Given the restrictions attendant upon shooting dialogue in sync before 1932, as well as uncertainties about how to write and direct dialogue scenes for the camera, it is not surprising that many of the earliest examples of precise and well-defined cinematic rhythm were primarily unified around music. Working from bar sheets permitted Disney’s animators and directors to fit movement to the beat and the bar, and later, as I have tried to show in the discussion of Playful Pluto, to create longer and more complex musical-kinetic phrases. The operetta films similarly exploited the consistent and precise timings that mechanical sync made possible to meld sonic and visual rhythms. Mamoulian structured the opening of Love Me Tonight through the timings provided by the percussion score, and he coordinated camera and figure movement with music in the “Street Scene” cue and the entrances into the chateau (and in many other portions of the film as well). In Monte Carlo, Lubitsch and Leipold sustained a thoroughgoing musicalverbal-kinetic match for fourteen minutes in which “Always in All Ways” is both performed and utilized as underscore (capped by the performance of “Give Me a Moment Please”). We can now see that Ivan the Terrible stands at the limit of these experiments, a monumental effort to create a synthesis of image, speech, and music as a single rhythmic entity. Influential as the Disney cartoons and the operetta films may have been, to some extent they represent the path not taken, at least by most narrative filmmakers. The strategy of piggybacking performance rhythm on musical rhythm was eventually denigrated: mickey mousing fell into disrepute. Today, even in the realm of animation, it is rare to find a match at this level. In the Hollywood cinema of the early 1930s the demands of storytelling, and of performance, quickly became dominant and intervened to superim-

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pose their own logic on duration and pace. The example of Monte Carlo is as instructive for the moments when filmic rhythm begins to break away from its musical underpinnings as it is for the points where film and music converge. Consider the silent twenty-second long take—followed by Otto’s cry of “Papa-a!”—that provides a nonmusical close to the “Day of Days” number, or the way in which the relatively brief moving shots of the train inflect the performance of “Beyond the Blue Horizon.” I have also described how the timing and pacing of dialogue is freed from that of the underscore in the “Always in All Ways” sequence at the point of the kiss, as a result of the fragmentation of the song’s phrase structure, and an even more extensive departure from musical rhythm in a similar scene in Trouble in Paradise. In my view the trend away from using music as the primary (or one of the primary) way(s) of organizing duration stems from the fact that the powerful and highly organized structure of musical rhythm has the potential to swamp the more irregular rhythms of speech and performance (or perhaps alternatively to “save” badly timed dialogue scenes). Just as Karel Reisz advised editors to respect the actor’s pacing of a scene when they cut dialogue, in an interview published in 1971 Alfred Newman cautioned composers: “I have strong feelings about too much motion and elaborate counterpoint under dialogue. It seems to me that dialogue furnishes rhythm, thus a minimum of orchestral motion is desirable. I think dialogue contributes its own counterpoint, hence the danger of complex contrapuntal usage in the accompanying musical score.”2 Howard Hawks was not alone among directors in eschewing dialogue underscoring (as noted, it was relatively rare for technical reasons prior to 1932), but his very restricted use of the device throughout his career is part and parcel of his interest in bringing speaking rhythm to the fore as the principal means of organizing the time of performance. Many other actors, directors, and screenwriters in addition to those already mentioned were clearly working along similar lines to create compelling articulations of speaking rhythm with minimal use of underscore. Other prominent examples include Frank Capra’s and Robert Riskin’s fast overlapped dialogue in American Madness (August 1932), Josef von Sternberg and Jules Furthman’s reduced dialogue in Morocco (December 1930), and the many dialect comedies with actors ranging from the Marx Brothers to Will Rogers and Stepin Fetchit. The interviews with actors cited, as well as the close analysis of Hawks’s films, suggest the attention given to speaking tempo, which varies across scenes in extremely coherent ways, and to the precise integration of line readings, gesture, and staging. As James Stewart (the

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actor, not the sound editor) noted in an interview in 1983, the cinema is constructed of “tiny bits of time,”3 and within the delimited span of the shot, performance and movement are coordinated to very fine tolerances, fractions of a second. This kind of fine-grained control ultimately enabled Hawks to abandon his reliance on short scenes: his relatively long scenes and sequences appear “fast” thanks to his control of performance rhythm.

The arguments I have advanced about the development of strategies of rhythmic organization in the early sound cinema have some implications for our understanding of the relationship between music and performance rhythm after 1935. Technical improvements in recording and rerecording quality greatly reduced the need for musicians and actors to perform together in real time in the same space, a trend already apparent to some extent in the work of Mamoulian and Lubitsch. Following RCA’s innovation of the push-pull track in 1935, it became much easier to record and combine separate music tracks (Max Steiner likened the improvement this invention made in music reproduction to that produced by the innovation of stereophonic sound).4 Thus, it became increasingly rare for vocalists and the orchestral accompaniment to be recorded at the same time. (Moreover, sometimes even the orchestral track itself was the product of different recording sessions, as was the case with “sweeteners,” in which an extra track of one instrument or section of the orchestra was added to the final mix.) While Paramount preferred to have orchestras on the set for big musical numbers in the early 1930s, this practice had been entirely reversed by the end of the decade. For example, in Road to Singapore, the first of the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby road pictures in 1940, the orchestral tracks for the “Sweet Potato” and “Captain Vanka” numbers were completed prior to having the vocalists perform on the set, this routine production practice making it easier to accommodate the schedule of Crosby’s radio broadcasts.5 The musicals Fred Astaire made at RKO in the mid-1930s indicate just how complicated it became for the performer to coordinate actively with the orchestra, and they provide a decided contrast to the ways that dancers and musicians had traditionally worked out their sync. Part of Astaire’s style was to calibrate taps incredibly precisely to fall on or before or after the beat.6 John Mueller has described Astaire’s working methods: after laboriously working out the choreography (and rearranging the musical score to suit it), Astaire would make the orchestral track by dancing in his ballet slippers while the orchestra rehearsed and recorded.7 This ensured that the tempo would vary precisely in accordance with his needs without

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introducing any tapping sound. The orchestral track would then be played back on the sound stage to photograph the dance number (it is my sense that songs were also prerecorded and lip-synched). Finally, he would redo the dance in postproduction to record the taps. Although Fred Astaire’s dancing might seem the epitome of the natural and easy integration of movement and musical rhythm, this work flow, which required the coordination of three separate stages of recording, is indicative of the growing disjuncture between performance on the sound stage and on the scoring stage. Outside the confines of the musical, the development of classical orchestral underscoring in the hands of composers such as Max Steiner, Herbert Stothart, and Alfred Newman also placed music at a considerable remove from the work of actors on the sound stage. As the studio music departments expanded, composers, scorers, and music mixers increasingly constituted one of the teams that handled film in postproduction. Of course, through-composed silent-film scores, as well as improvised live accompaniment, were “added to” a completed film as well. But the precision of the timings that mechanical sync both enabled and required engendered a qualitative shift in the relationship between music and performance rhythm. Max Steiner has given an account of his timing method in an interview with Tony Thomas: The [music] editor takes the print of the film and times it; he breaks it down into minutes and seconds. The cues are numbered on sheets and on the opposite side, on the right hand side, the editor marks the timing in minutes. For instance, let’s say the actor walks into a scene; this is marked as “00.” He sits down in 6 seconds, starts to talk at 10 seconds, gets up at 23 seconds, walks out of the house at 40 seconds, comes back in 50 seconds, and so on. Against this timing of minutes and seconds, I also have the footage indicated. . . . I use a numbered click sheet, which is my own invention. On this my editor indicates the cues I want to catch. . . . For instance, let’s say the click track starts at number 1 and the first cue hits at 12, which will give me three bars at 44 or four bars at 43, whatever the case may be. Sometimes these cues hit at 12½ or 15½. Then I write my music against this track.8

These comments may be clarified by Irene Kahn Atkins’s oral history with Warners music mixer George Groves.9 Groves discussed and documented Steiner’s scoring process for Raoul Walsh’s Cheyenne (1947). The first of these documents is the cue sheet10 for a two-and-a-half-minute segment. It contains sixty-two distinct cues, the first forty-nine to be done to a click track and the rest “free timing” (at the discretion of the conductor, usually

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by working from visual cues drawn or punched on the print). Each cue is numbered, described (either bits of action or fragments of lines), and timed to the fraction of a second from the start (e.g., 1:17¼), a duration also measured in feet and frames. Further, each cue is assigned a beat out of the total number allotted for the segment (e.g., 155½ out of the total of 224). Atkins’s oral history also contains an example of the click sheet that Steiner refers to above. The beats are laid out in sequence, without any bar lines, and aligned with the relevant cues. A click tempo is also assigned (in this case twelve frames per beat). The final document is Steiner’s handwritten score, with the usual bar lines and time signatures. However, the beats are still numbered consecutively from 1 to 224. The related cues are positioned above the lines of the staff, now precisely located in relation to his music. There are frequent changes of time signature (e.g., from duple to triple meter at bar 8, from 42 to 45 at bar 41), which, as Steiner explains, permitted him to distribute the total number of beats relatively freely across bars. Effectively, the bars are there to organize the musical phrases and rhythms, but the beats and cues are there to permit synchronization with the film as a whole. This account of Steiner’s scoring methods jives in many particulars with those described by Earle Hagen as standard industry practice as late as the 1970s. In both cases we find the use of a music editor to prepare cue sheets with timings measured both in seconds and in feet; the tendency, born of having to write music to fixed, arbitrary, and very tight durations, to begin with a succession of beats that were then distributed across bars; and the use of click tracks at points that called for precise and continuous synchronization. While many composer-conductors preferred not to use the click track, and Steiner himself chose not to employ it at all points, as suggested by the reversion to “free timing” in the segment from Cheyenne, they necessarily evolved methods of marking up film prints with some kind of countdown to the cues. Hugo Friedhofer, who worked as an orchestrator at Warners from 1935 through 1947 with both Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, contrasted their working methods in an interview with Irene Kahn Atkins. While Steiner “would depend entirely on the cue sheets,” Korngold would improvise to the film in the projection room, then make sketches, then return to the projection room multiple times to perform his music and improve his timings: Never any marks on the film until he was about ready to record. Then he would go in and sit with the film editor and have the punches and what-not put on the film, the warning signals and so on, and also

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certain interior cues, to indicate changes of tempo. And his scores were always marked sort of in synchronization with the marks on the film itself. He had a way always of indicating changes of tempo or changes of meter, if he were moving from four to three or what-not. Korngold had a way of writing, you might call it a sort of written-out rubato. It all sounded very free and relaxed, but it was all metronomically on paper that way. So that called for innumerable changes of time signature. It was always indicated.11

The system of postscoring in place after 1935 thus established a very different temporal regime from that of the traditional performing arts. It is notable that even in films that were very heavily scored, such as Steiner’s, the actors’ performance rhythms on the sound stage were typically articulated without any reference to the music. This is in contrast to the whole history of opera, musical theater, and dance, as well as to the early sound musicals discussed here and the many silent film productions that utilized musicians on the set. Kathryn Kalinak describes one illuminating throwback to earlier practices. In John Ford’s 1935 production of The Informer, actor, director, and composer worked together while the film was in production. Steiner began composing during shooting, enabling Victor McLaglen, playing Gypo, to synchronize his walk to a playback of the “Informer” theme in the opening scene.12 This effort seems to have been a product both of Steiner’s well-known predilection for matching physical movement and musical rhythm and of Ford’s own predilection for making musical rhythms predominant (evident throughout his career in the use of Danny Borzage to play accordion on set, enabling the presynchronization of certain scenes and sequences).13 The postscoring practices adopted in the mid-1930s removed the traditional give-and-take (not to mention the battles) between performers and conductors over tempi. Actors and directors were free to time scenes as they saw fit while composer-conductors, like picture editors, were endowed with the power of revision. The classical orchestral underscore may be thought of as a reaction to or reworking of performance (and editing) rhythms. These claims about music’s larger rhythmic function may be illustrated by a recapitulation of the evolution of dialogue underscoring across the period I have been considering. In chapter 4 I contrasted two options for dialogue underscore: a more or less unstructured relationship between music and speech, as in the waltz scene in Love Me Tonight, and one in which the rhythm and tempo of the actor’s speech was coterminous with the music, as in the lunch scene in One Hour with You. Postscoring practices after 1935 enlarged these options considerably, permitting the composer to tailor

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the duration and structure of music to fit the nuances of line delivery, blocking, and gesture that had become part and parcel of the handling of dialogue scenes on the sound stage. Max Steiner, ever in love with splitsecond timings and multiple sonic streams, noted that the click track made his orchestra “foolproof” during love scenes (the music presumably timed to protect the audibility of the dialogue while allowing the melody to come through).14 In a bravura scene in Now, Voyager (1942), when Jerry and Charlotte meet up for a second time in Boston, Bette Davis and Paul Henreid conduct a dual conversation delivered at two volumes: normal voice for their public, polite dialogue and sotto voce for their interpolated private, tender words. Steiner inserts a third sonic level in the mix: the chorus of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” supposedly being played at the party, its phrase structure distended to allow for a half-cadence, emphasized by a very slight ritardando, when Henreid lights two cigarettes for them both. David Neumeyer’s analysis of Franz Waxman’s underscoring of a conversation between Max and the nameless heroine in the Monte Carlo terrace scene in Rebecca provides another example of the way that music began to shadow performance in dialogue scenes. The light, pastoral background score heard at the beginning of the scene gathers melodic momentum when the love theme enters at the point of a blocking change: Laurence Olivier turns away from Joan Fontaine and approaches the camera to look out at the sea, mentioning the coastline at his home in Cornwall. As Fontaine moves to his side and begins to speak, the film cuts to a medium shot of her. The introduction of what Neumeyer calls a “mild stinger” chord in midshot accents her mention of Max’s ancestral home, Manderley, a point also emphasized by the actress’s hesitation in her line delivery: “and the old lady said [pause] that’s Manderley.” A second “stinger gesture” accents Olivier’s action of turning away in response to Fontaine’s line about the fear of drowning, this augmented by a cut-in to her looking worried about his abrupt change of mood.15 Although divergent in many respects—the conversation in Now, Voyager using source music and unified by a recognizable melody, the one in Rebecca more varied in its compositional structure and rhythmic design—both of these examples demonstrate how classical scoring practices made it possible for the composer to engage with performance at the most subtle levels of line delivery and blocking and to augment and extend the stresses put in place by the director and actors on the sound stage. The powerful dramatic logic of the classical background score has tended to blind us to its crucial rhythmic dimensions. Both the great film composers and later commentators on their work have typically emphasized the narrative

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connotations of the score. Ideally, music is thought to create emotion or to comment on the action. Friedhofer, for example, explains: “The primary function of music scoring is to give the pictures another dimension and to do it not by duplicating the action. Music can hint at something not seen; it can give the audience ideas of the motivations of the characters.”16 The disparagement of mickey mousing, in my view unfairly stigmatized as a crude and musically constricting form of synchronization from the first decade of sound,17 has contributed to this tendency to downplay the many ways that the background score actually engages with movement on the screen, second by second and frame by frame. I have tried to argue that mickey mousing does not represent a simple imitation but rather a potentially complex articulation of the timing of movement, capable of subdividing it along one of several temporal axes (as in the walk and the dance in Hell’s Bells). In addition music does not have to follow action closely in order to engage with its quality and tempo: common tropes such as a stinger chord at an actress’s entrance or an ostinato bass placed against wildly irregular running movements also provide powerful ways of articulating the timing of the two elements. Moreover, as I have tried to show, narrative progression itself has a pronounced rhythmic component. Scenes build in intensity, then relax to a close or give way to yet another escalation of tension and pulse. Pacing in this sense has ramifications for the actor’s performance, the picture editor’s decisions about the placing of cuts, and the composer’s musical response to the segment. If orchestral underscore “interprets” the narrative, it is often through the way it engages with performance and timing to help create coherent segments and subsegments. Friedhofer also hints at this dimension of underscoring in a story about Korngold: “I know Korngold had this sense of theater and of timing, and of stagecraft that began in his childhood. . . . I can recall many instances when Korngold would go to the producer and say, ‘Look can you give me a little more footage at the end of—’ whatever scene it was. ‘I feel that as the end of an act. I feel that there’s a first act curtain there.’ And he would always get his way.”18 Quite apart from the specific musical rhythm employed in a given cue—a waltz, a march, a mazurka—classical background scoring also entered into complex rhythmic relationships with many other dimensions of film form and narrative. It was particularly prominent by virtue of its creation at the end of the postproduction process and by virtue of the extent and precision of its sync. I believe there is much fruitful research still to be done on the problems of film scoring and the ways in which classical orchestral underscore interacted with performance and editing to organize filmic time.

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Notes

chapter 1. introduction 1. Dorothy Richardson, “Continuous Performance: A Tear for Lycidas,” Close Up 7, no. 3 (1930): 199. 2. Alexandre Arnoux, “J’ai vu, enfin, à Londres, un film parlant,” Pour vous, Nov. 22, 1928, 3; cited in Martin Barnier, En route vers le parlant: Histoire d’une évolution technologique, économique et esthétique du cinéma (1926– 1934) (Liège, Belgium: Éditions du Céfal, 2002). See also René Clair, Réflexion faite: Notes pour servir à l’histoire de l’art cinématographique de 1920 à 1950, 8th ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 141; and Arnoux, Du muet au parlant: Mémoires d’un témoin (Paris: La Nouvelle Édition, 1946), 85–87. 3. Rudolf Arnheim, “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film,” in Film as Art (London: Faber, 1958), 187. The essay was first published in Bianco e nero in 1938. 4. Rick Altman, “Sound Space,” in Sound Theory / Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992); Rick Altman, “The Technology of the Voice, Part I,” Iris 3, no. 1 (1985): 3–20; Rick Altman, “The Technology of the Voice, Part II,” Iris 4, no. 1 (1986): 107–18; Rick Altman, McGraw Jones, and Sonia Tatroe, “Inventing the Cinema Sound Track: Hollywood’s Multiplane Sound System,” in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000); James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 3rd ed. (London: Starword, 2009); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). 5. See, e.g., the memo from Darryl Zanuck used as the epigraph for this chapter; cited in Rudy Behlmer, Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth Century-Fox (New York: Grove, 1993), 54–56.

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6. “Varied Views on Talkers; Title Writing Very Important,” Variety, May 9, 1928, 9. 7. Roy Pomeroy, “The Smothering Talker,” Variety, Jan. 2, 1929, 17. 8. Review of Harmony at Home, Variety, Jan. 29, 1930, 60. 9. William Everson, American Silent Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 341–42. 10. Pomeroy, “The Smothering Talker,” 17. 11. “Too Much Vocal Attention,” Variety, Sept. 19, 1928, 7. 12. James Wilkinson (Technical Supervisor, Paramount) and E. W. Reis (Release Supervisor, MGM), “Editing and Assembling the Sound Picture,” in Recording Sound for Motion Pictures, ed. Lester Cowan (Los Angeles: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1931), 197. 13. Joseph Dubray, “Technical Editor’s Angle,” American Cinematographer 9, no. 4 (1928): 17–18. 14. William de Mille, “The Screen Speaks,” Scribner’s Magazine, April 1929, 371–72. 15. See the reviews of Raffles, Variety, July 30, 1930, 17; Madame X, Variety, May 1, 1929, 17; East Lynne, Variety, Feb. 25, 1931, 12; and The Trial of Mary Dugan, Variety, April 3, 1929, 11. 16. See the reviews of Disraeli, Variety, Oct. 9, 1929, 46; Lightnin’, Variety, Dec. 3, 1930, 14; and Coquette, Variety, Oct. 4, 1929, 25. 17. Review of Sally, Variety, Dec. 25, 1929, 20. 18. Review of The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, Variety, August 14, 1929, 18. 19. See the reviews of Animal Crackers, Variety, Sept. 3, 1930, 19; Whoopee!, Variety, Oct. 8, 1930, 22; Hold Everything, Variety, March 26, 1930, 25; and Manhattan Parade, Variety, Dec. 29, 1931, 167. 20. Review of The Masquerade, Variety, March 4, 1931, 14. 21. Review of The Racketeer, Variety, Jan. 8, 1930, 89. 22. Review of Tol’able David, Variety, Nov. 19, 1930, 21. 23. Review of In Old Arizona, Variety, Jan. 23, 1929, 18. 24. René Clair, “Trois lettres de Londres,” in Réflexion faite, 145, from Letter 1, London, May 1929 (my translation). 25. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 141–42. 26. “33 or 50%,” Variety, Dec. 18, 1928, 41; see also “Warners Cut from 100% to 75% on Dialog,” Variety, Dec. 19, 1928, 5; and “Directors and Talkers: Coast Discussion Held by Meg Men,” Variety, May 16, 1928, 9. 27. “Film Actors’ New Chance: Talkers Make Talent Better,” Variety, Jan. 16, 1929, 1. 28. “Disputes over Dialog: Too Much—W. E.; Execs Disagree,” Variety, March 12, 1930, 7. 29. “Less Talk and More Action Kent’s Proposed Remedy for Films,” Variety, Nov. 19, 1930, 4. 30. “Less Talk Is Bringing Back Vet Film Writers,” Variety, July 14, 1931, 4.

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31. Walter B. Pitkin and William M. Marston, The Art of Sound Pictures (New York: D. Appleton, 1930), 114. 32. Ibid., 125. 33. Tamar Lane, The New Technique of Screen Writing: A Practical Guide to the Writing and Marketing of Photoplays (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936), 4. 34. Ibid., 65–71. 35. For more on how multiple-camera shooting affected the construction of space in the early sound film, see David Bordwell’s account in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 304–8. 36. Throughout this study I will use timecode to represent duration. “02:58:12” is 2 minutes, 58 seconds, 12 frames; if only two numbers separated by a colon are shown, this represents seconds and frames. 37. Lea Jacobs, “The Innovation of Re-recording in the Hollywood Studios,” Film History 24, no. 1 (2012): 5–34. 38. See Salt, Film Style and Technology, 235–36. “Moviolas Now Available for Editing Sound Pictures,” American Cinematographer, Feb. 1930, 33, describes a Moviola with sound heads that allowed editors to work on picture and sound in sync. W. Palmer, “Film Numbering Device for Cameras and Recorders,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 14, no. 3 (1930): 327–33, describes a device for edge-numbering picture and sound, thus facilitating resynchronization of cut footage. J. I. Crabtree and C. E. Ives describe methods of splicing the track, blooping or painting over the cut to efface the sound it would produce, punching over the splice, and using diagonal cuts; see J. I. Crabtree and C. E. Ives, “A New Method of Blocking Out Splices in Sound-Film,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 14, no. 3 (1930): 349–56; see also “Editing and Splicing,” in “Progress in the Motion Picture Industry,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 15, no. 12 (1930): 774. 39. Kenneth Lambert, “Re-recording and Preparation for Release,” chapter 5 of Motion Picture Sound Engineering, by the Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (New York: Van Nostrand, 1938), 69–70; Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology, 234–35, also considers these to be among the most significant developments in sound technology in the United States in the 1930s. 40. James G. Stewart, interview with Irene Atkins, in American Film Institute / Louis B. Mayer Oral History Collection, part 1, no. 22 (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1976), 156–57; see also Jacobs, “The Innovation of Re-recording,” 12. 41. Sergei Eisenstein, “Nonindifferent Nature: The Music of Landscape and the Fate of Montage Counterpoint at a New Stage,” in Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 42. Eisenstein’s analysis of a scene from Alexander Nevsky appears in “Vertical Montage,” in Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 2, Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 388–98. The essay posits a parallelism between the

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“shape” of a musical phrase and graphic elements within the shot. It has been attacked by, among others, Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Continuum, 2007; originally published by Oxford University Press, 1947), 104–7; and Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: Norton, 1977), 211–14. The essay is defended by Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 134–47. See also Kevin Bartig, Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 72–73; and Rick Altman, “Visual Representation of Film Sound as an Analytical Tool,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 75–77. 43. Arthur Honegger, “Du cinéma sonore à la musique réelle,” Plans, Jan. 1931, 77 (my translation). 44. Ernö Rapée, Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists: A RapidReference Collection of Selected Pieces, Adapted to Fifty-Two Moods and Situations (New York: G. Schirmer, 1924; repr. New York: Arno, 1970). 45. Julie Brown, “Audiovisual Palimpsests: Resynchronizing Silent Films with ‘Special’ Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 586. 46. Kurt London, Film Music (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 129. 47. Joseph McBride, Hawks on Hawks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 80–81; Lea Jacobs, “Keeping Up with Hawks,” Style 32, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 402–26. 48. The most extensive study of this material is Laurent Guido, L’âge du rythme: Cinéma, musicalité, et culture du corps dans les théories françaises des années 1910–1930 (Lausanne: Éditions Payot, 2007); see also René Clair, “Rythme,” Les cahiers du mois, no. 16–17 (1925): 13–16; and Léon Moussinac, “Du rythme cinégraphique,” Le crapouillot, March 1923, both reprinted in Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Éditions Corréa, 1946), 291–93 and 250–56 respectively. 49. David Bordwell, “The Musical Analogy,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 141–56. 50. For a somewhat different perspective on narrative film rhythm, largely dealing with European art cinema, see Yvette Bíro, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design, trans. Paul Salamon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

chapter 2. a lesson with eisenstein 1. Ian Christie, “Making Sense of Early Soviet Sound,” in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London: Routledge, 1991), 177, 180–81. 2. Vsevolod Pudovkin, “Rhythmic Problems in My First Sound Film,” in Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. Ivor Montagu (New York: Bonanza Books, 1949), Film Technique, 166.

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3. Vsevolod Pudovkin, “Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film,” in Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. Ivor Montagu (New York: Bonanza Books, 1949), Film Technique, 159–60. 4. Even in the American cinema it was still common for sound tracks in dialogue scenes to be directly printed from edited negative in 1931, and sound editors were still avoiding rerecording of dialogue several years later (see Salt, Film Style and Technology, 234; and Jacobs, “The Innovation of Re-recording in the Hollywood Studios,” 12). 5. Pudovkin, “Rhythmic Problems,” 169–70. 6. Shawn Gary VanCour, “The Sounds of ‘Radio’: Aesthetic Formations of 1920s American Broadcasting” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2008), 318–22; Jacobs, “Innovation of Re-recording,” 6. 7. Andre J. Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 286; John Harvith and Susan Edwards Harvith, eds., Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph: A Century in Retrospect (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987); Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 8. Millard, America on Record, 199–201, 289–308; Peter Copeland, Sound Recordings (London: British Library, 1991), 26–30; see also Michael Biel, “The Making and Use of Recordings in Broadcasting before 1936” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1977). Michele Hilmes discusses early experiments in editing radio sound conducted by Philip H. Cohen and Charles T. Harrell using the Millertape system for the documentary series America in the Summer of 1941 in Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2011). A wonderful firsthand account of the way in which editing transformed the recording of classical music may be found in Glenn Gould, “Rubinstein,” “The Prospects of Recording,” and “Music and Technology,” all in The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (New York: Knopf, 1984). 9. John Grierson, “Pudovkin on Sound,” Cinema Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1933– 34): 106–10. 10. John Grierson, “Introduction to a New Art,” Sight and Sound 3, no. 11 (1934): 101–4; published in a revised version as “Creative Use of Sound,” in Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1966; originally published by William Collins Sons, 1946), 157–63. 11. Grierson, “Introduction to a New Art,” 101. 12. Ibid., 101–2. 13. Anthony Asquith, “Ballet and the Film,” in Footnotes to the Ballet, ed. Caryl Brahms (New York: Henry Holt, 1936), 243–44. 14. Roger Leenhardt, “Petite école du spectateur (suite): Le rythme cinématographique,” Esprit 40 (Jan. 1936): 629 (my translation). 15. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Fourth Dimension in Cinema,” in Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 1, 1922–1934, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 186.

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16. Vladimir Nizhny, Lessons with Eisenstein, ed. and trans. Ivor Montagu and Jay Leyda (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), 172n53. 17. Sergei Eisenstein, “From Lectures on Music and Colour in Ivan the Terrible,” in Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 3, 1934–1947, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 321. 18. On the limitations of Soviet sound-recording equipment in the 1930s see Salt, Film Style and Technology, 235; and Bartig, Composing for the Red Screen, 72. See also Prokofiev, “Ego uvazheniye k muzïke bïlo tak veliko,” in Eyzenshteyn v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov, ed. R. Yurenev (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1974), 302–5, translated as “His Respect for Music Was So Great,” in Bartig, Composing for the Red Screen, 169–71, where Prokofiev recalled placing trumpets and choir in separate chambers and recording them simultaneously for the score of Alexander Nevsky, further suggesting that they were mixing all the sound live rather than combining tracks in postproduction. 19. Marina Rakhmanova and Irina Medvedeva, of Moscow’s Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture, “Ivan the Terrible by Prokofiev-Eisenstein,” introduction to Sergei Prokofiev, Music for Sergei Eisenstein’s Film “Ivan the Terrible,” Opus 116 (Hamburg: Musikverlag Hans Sikorski, 1997), 28: “Prokofiev began to write the music without waiting for work on the film to start, and relied heavily on the detailed stage directions and drawings supplied by Eisenstein.” See also Bartig’s account of the collaboration (Composing for the Red Screen, 135– 37); and the recollections by Eisenstein’s music mixer Boris Volsky, “Memories of S. S. Prokofiev,” in Sergey Prokof’yev: Materialy, Dokumenty, Vospominaniya, ed. S. I. Shlifshteyn (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye muzïkal’noye izdatel’stvo, 1961), 525–36, translated in Bartig, Composing for the Red Screen, 171–77. 20. Eisenstein, “Nonindifferent Nature,” 332; Bartig, Composing for the Red Screen, 70, 135, discusses Eisenstein and Prokofiev’s division of labor on the score for Alexander Nevsky, distinguishing between sections composed before film was shot, utilized for synchronization to playback, and sections composed after shooting for postsynchronization; he describes a similar arrangement for Ivan. 21. Eisenstein, “From Lectures on Music and Colour,” 321. 22. Cited in Rakhmanova and Medvedeva, “Ivan the Terrible by ProkofievEisenstein,” 29, in Sergey Prokof’yev: Materialy, Dokumenty, Vospominaniya, 486. Note that the translation of this passage differs from the one in the English version of Eisenstein’s essay on Prokofiev, “PRKFV” in Notes of a Film Director, trans. X. Danko (New York: Dover, 1970), 158. 23. Prokofiev, “His Respect for Music Was So Great,” in Bartig, Composing for the Red Screen, 171; on Mira Mendelson’s role in preparing timings see ibid., 135–36 and 204n26. Bartig also cites excerpts from Prokofiev’s score for Alexander Nevsky and explains the composer’s method of timing for that film: “After Prokofiev viewed and timed rushes, he blocked a number of measures that, relying on precise metronome markings, accommodated the stopwatch to the second. He then sketched musical ideas in the allotted space, often exploring several different possibilities before drafting the cue” (ibid., 70–71).

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24. Eisenstein, “Nonindifferent Nature,” 324–25. 25. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage 1938,” in Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 2, Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 321–24. 26. Hilaire Belloc, “Lord Finchley,” in More Peers (London: Duckworth, 1911), 22–23. 27. Eisenstein, “Montage 1938,” 321. In Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 2, 416nn331, 332, Richard Taylor identifies the citation: Viktor M. Zhirmunsky, Vvedenie v metriku. Teoriya stikha [Introduction to Metrics: A Theory of Poetry] (Leningrad: Academia, 1925), 178. 28. Eisenstein, “Nonindifferent Nature,” 310–25. 29. Ibid., 350–54. 30. Ibid., 353. 31. The Criterion DVD that served as my source had interlacing at some cuts. For some of these the original frames could be determined. For others an original frame at the cut had been replaced by a repeat of another, adjacent frame. However, a comparison of the digital file mounted in Final Cut with a 16 mm print of Ivan the Terrible, Part I, held in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Madison, revealed that the addition of frames was comparatively rare. The margin of error for any given shot length is plus or minus two frames. 32. The title of the cue derives from the Hans Sikorski full score. 33. Eisenstein, “Nonindifferent Nature,” 325. 34. The scene is also discussed in Brown, Overtones and Undertones, 141–43. 35. In describing films, I generally use score to refer to the music heard on the track, and published score or transcription as appropriate to refer to written music. I compared the published score for Ivan the Terrible with the music heard in the film and have noted the discrepancies. For the other films discussed in this book, I utilized transcriptions of the musical track because written scores were not available to me. 36. Thanks to Maria Belodubrovskaya for dialogue transcription and translation and help with the analysis of line readings. 37. In “Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’—the Races” Eisenstein’s discussion of Karenin’s monologue anticipates how he would handle Ivan’s speech, although in this instance he thinks about interweaving words and the graphic qualities of the image track rather than words and music: In concrete terms: the actors playing Vronsky and Cord (Vronsky’s trainer), the required number of “extras,” a thoroughbred horse in the role of Frou-Frou and the whole scene of Vronsky mounting Frou-Frou must be “set,” “as though to music,” to the words spoken by Karenin that have been chosen to accompany this scene. We must find the rhythm, the slowing down and acceleration of the spoken words, the intervals between them, the points of accentuation, the hesitations, the pauses and the places where Karenin draws breath, through all of which

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his psychological condition and state of mind are expressed with the utmost clarity, using them simultaneously as the canvas, made up of sound and time, on which to lay the graphic construct of the scene in which Vronsky mounts Frou-Frou. (Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 2, Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor [London: British Film Institute, 1991], 285) We find a similarly tight weave of music and words in the scene in which Ivan pleads with the boyars. 38. Eisenstein, “Nonindifferent Nature,” 335. In the scene with the boyars it sounds like the solo instruments, such as the bass, are miked separately. 39. Eisenstein, who had just finished directing a production of Die Walküre at the Bolshoi Theatre, was clearly interested in experimenting with leitmotifs (see Sergei Eisenstein, “The Incarnation of Myth,” in Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 3, 1934–1947, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 142–69). He and Prokofiev compiled a schema of musical motives for Ivan the Terrible as a whole (see Rakhmanova and Medvedeva, “Ivan the Terrible by Prokofiev-Eisenstein,” 28–29). Although the theme associated with Ivan’s plea to the boyars is limited to this scene and the one that follows, the musical figure in bars 5 through 7 is assigned a strikingly clear narrative and dramatic function. 40. On the role of tonality in determining rhythmic accents see Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 14. 41. The effect of enjambment achieved through the score may be found in other scenes as well, most obviously in the procession that leads to Vladimir’s murder in the cathedral at the end of Ivan the Terrible, Part II. The scene, which consists almost entirely of men walking—the oprichniki walking with Vladimir into the cathedral, Vladimir’s penetration of the darkened space, Ivan’s appearance after the murder—is all scored in 43 time. For another discussion of the procession scene see Kristin Thompson, Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible”: A Neoformalist Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 248–56. 42. On the prominence of axial cutting in Eisenstein see Nizhny, Lessons with Eisenstein, 77–81; and David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 216–19. On cutting near the axis as a violation of the Hollywood continuity style, see Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (1953; repr. London: Focal Press, 1968), 220–22. 43. As I noted in chapter 1, Eisenstein’s own analysis of a scene from Alexander Nevsky, in “Vertical Montage,” depends on this kind of parallelism. 44. The downbeat of bar 48 might best be characterized as a diminished seventh chord with E in the root position, and the progression passes through E minor to the final C-minor chord. Thanks to Stephen Dembski, Steve Lewis, and Jeff Smith for clarifying the harmony throughout this cue. 45. For examples of negotiations over timings see Earle Hagen, Scoring for Films: A Complete Text (New York: Criterion Music, 1971), 30; and Frank

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Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (New York: Walt Disney, 1981), 287. 46. Yuri and Gunnar Tsivian have devised a program, accessed through their Cinemetrics website, that enables scholars to count shots while viewing films on DVD on a computer and to enter these data into the Cinemetrics program, giving access to a number of statistical tools of analysis. For a histogram of shot lengths in Ivan the Terrible, Part I see the measurement in the first approximation to Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Groznii) Part 1, submitted by Yuri Tsivian, at Cinemetrics, www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=6808 (accessed June 3, 2011). 47. Carl Dreyer, quoted in Andrew Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 111. 48. On the narrative representation of time and its relationship to duration see Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 122–44; and David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 80–88. I discuss these issues in Jacobs, “Keeping Up with Hawks.”

chapter 3. mickey mousing reconsidered 1. Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 154–57. Barrier’s interviews with Harman and Ising indicate that they learned the technique of synchronization from Bert Lewis, at that time (1930) working as a conductor for Disney. 2. Ibid., 156. 3. Jon Newsom, “ ‘A Sound Idea’: Music for Animated Films,” in Wonderful Inventions: Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound at the Library of Congress, ed. Iris Newsom (Washington: Library of Congress, 1985), 59. 4. For a discussion of silent-film-accompaniment practices for animation see Daniel Goldmark, “Before Willie: Reconsidering Music and the Animated Cartoon of the 1920s,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music In Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard D. Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 225–45. 5. William Garity, “The Production of Animated Cartoons,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 20, no. 4 (1933): 314. The bar sheet in figure 33 is reproduced at ibid., 313. This example, and the following discussion of timing animation to music, may be further substantiated by analysis of Rudy Ising’s bar sheets for the 1933 Merrie Melodies cartoon Shuffle Off to Buffalo at animationresources.org (http://animationresources.org/?cat=205 [last accessed Dec. 26, 2013]). I am indebted to Derek Long for this reference. 6. Garity, “Production of Animated Cartoons,” 311–12. 7. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 101–2. 8. Ross Care, “Symphonists for the Sillies: The Composers for Disney’s Shorts,” Funnyworld 18 (Summer 1978): 44; see also Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life, 287.

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9. Garity, “Production of Animated Cartoons,” 315. 10. Michael Barrier, “An Interview with Carl Stalling,” in The Cartoon Music Book, ed. Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Cappella, 2002), 44. 11. Garity, “Production of Animated Cartoons,” 315. 12. Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life, 290. 13. Ibid., 287. 14. Barrier, “An Interview with Carl Stalling,” 44–45; according to Barrier, Wilfred Jackson disputes the claim that Steamboat Willie was out of sync (ibid., 58n10). 15. Ibid., 42–43. 16. Garity, “Production of Animated Cartoons,” 321. 17. By 1933 in Hollywood the studios were certainly building and mixing multiple effects tracks for live-action films; see Jacobs, “The Innovation of Re-recording,” 19. 18. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 77. 19. Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life, 290. 20. On my DVD the walk cycle is one frame ahead of the beat. I think it likely that this derives from errors introduced during the film-to-DVD transfer. It is also possible that the original source material was out of sync—at this point in the transition sound was postsynchronized in a single take that included all music and effects performed live, and it was surely possible to lose sync by a single frame. But I find this second option unlikely given the musical and visual emphasis placed on synchronization in the period and the fact that the DVD is consistently only one frame out. 21. Here again, the synchronization of movement is one frame ahead of the beat; see note 20. 22. I am assuming that the animators were counting these 86 bars in two, based on the timing of the animation on twelves and the fact that the original music was a march. 23. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 63–68, 84, discusses the departure of Ub Iwerks in this context, as well as the initiation of Don Graham’s drawing classes on the sound stages in November 1932; J. P. Telotte, The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), argues that over the course of the 1930s, sound in the shorts increasingly came into line with the “illusion-of-life aesthetic that was coming to dominate Disney animation” (34). 24. Animation on Three Little Pigs was done by Fred Moore, Norm Ferguson, Art Babbitt, Dick Lundy, and Jack King; on Playful Pluto it was done by Les Clark, Norm Ferguson, Dick Lundy, Art Babbitt, Jonny Cannon, and Gerry Geronimi; see disneyshorts.org (last accessed Dec. 26, 2013). 25. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 91–100. 26. The editing of Three Little Pigs and Playful Pluto observes the rules of continuity editing for live action, including the predilection for making cuts as inconspicuous as possible; the editing is quite different in the early shorts, such as Hell’s Bells, in which the animators frequently cut on beats, even on down-

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beats, and at the conclusion of an action, strategies that minimize opportunities for movement across cuts. 27. Animating to the phrase as opposed to the beat seems to have become standard for the industry by the mid-1930s. Walter Lantz poses the problem of synchronization in terms of fixing the number of frames per bar (e.g., twentyfour or thirty-two frames per bar) rather than fixing the number of frames per beat, and he demonstrates how segments of the action were coordinated with several bars of music at a time. See Walter Lantz, “Synchronizing Sound Cartoons,” American Cinematographer 16, no. 2 (1935): 76, 82–83. 28. Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life, 292–93. Perhaps I should emphasize that Thomas and Johnston did not work on the animation of Three Little Pigs (see note 24). 29. The connection between rhythm and phrasing is well established in music theory, as noted in Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Music Composition, ed. Gerald Strang with the collaboration of Leonard Stein (London: Faber and Faber, 1967): “Rhythm is particularly important in moulding the phrase. It contributes to interest and variety; it establishes character; and it is often the determining factor in establishing the unity of the phrase. The end of the phrase is usually differentiated rhythmically to provide punctuation” (3). 30. Care, “Symphonists for the Sillies,” 42. 31. See, e.g., Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life, 288–89; Care is more circumspect, noting that according to Stalling, the Silly Symphonies were “intended to showcase more fluid, coherent and self-contained scores than did the Mickey series” (Care, “Symphonists for the Sillies,” 39). 32. Although several thuds are heard both before and after the cut, and although the run cycles on 12s (thus on the beat), there is no pronounced sense of Pluto running in sync with the music. This is in part because of the legato nature of the accompaniment, in part because the lateral camera movement also lacks discrete rhythmic units, and in part because the running sound effects quickly fade—like the bark, they mark the beginning of the run rather than accompanying the movement throughout. 33. It seems to me that a similar argument could be made for Carl Stalling’s scores for Warners; it is now the vogue to consider them apart from the film not simply as clever musical pastiches but as discontinuous, almost avant-garde, works. But in the context of the narrative, and considered in relation to the rhythm of figure movement, cutting, and sound effects, Stalling’s scores have a structural logic and function. 34. Care, “Symphonists for the Sillies,” 46.

chapter 4. lubitsch and mamoulian 1. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 141–42; see also Altman, Jones, and Tatroe, “Inventing the Cinema Sound Track.” 2. Lucy Fischer, “René Clair, ‘Le Million,’ and the Coming of Sound,” Cinema Journal 16, no. 2 (1977): 34–50.

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3. A fourth, The Merry Widow (November 1934), was distributed by Loew’s. 4. The Variety review (Nov. 15, 1932, 19) repeatedly compared this film to the Chevalier musicals. 5. Alberto Cavalcanti, “Sound in Films,” Films 1, no. 1 (1939): 25–39; reprinted in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 98–111. 6. Clair, “Trois lettres de Londres,” 154–55. 7. George Lewin, “Dubbing and Its Relation to Sound Picture Production,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 16, no. 1 (1931): 42–43. 8. On the intimacy and use of direct address characteristic of the performance aesthetic in the Vitaphone shorts see Charles Wolfe, “Vitaphone Shorts and The Jazz Singer,” Wide Angle 12, no. 3 (1990): 58–78. 9. As far as I can determine, however, instrumental and vocal performances were simultaneously recorded until the latter half of the decade; see Jacobs, “Innovation of Re-recording,” 23–27. 10. The space is not actually unified since there is a shot that makes use of what was then the new technique of rear projection to show two characters speaking and singing in the wings against the backdrop of the dancers’ movements. 11. Important work by scholars such as David Neumeyer and Michael V. Pisani has emphasized the continuities between the placement and structure of music in nineteenth-century stage melodrama and later sound-film accompaniment. See David Neumeyer, “Melodrama as a Compositional Resource in Early Hollywood Sound Cinema,” Current Musicology 57 (1995): 61–94; and Michael V. Pisani, “When the Music Surges: Melodrama and the Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Precedents for Film Music Style and Placement,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 559–82. Here, however, I want to call attention to the qualitative changes in live-performance traditions produced by the innovation of mechanically synchronized sound. 12. Porgy, written by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward and produced by the Theatre Guild, opened on October 10, 1927. The play became the basis for the libretto of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. Mamoulian directed the first production of the opera, also by the Theatre Guild, which opened on October 10, 1935. The opera included a “Symphony of Noise” at the beginning of the last act; see Brooks Atkinson, “Dramatic Values of Community Legend Gloriously Transposed in New Form with Fine Regard for Its Verities,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 1935, 30. 13. Harriette Underhill, “ ‘Porgy’ and the Man Who Has Made It What It Is Today,” New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 23, 1927, E2. 14. Mamoulian’s revision of the script of Porgy is in Box 115, Folder 7, of the Rouben Mamoulian Collection of the Library of Congress. Mamoulian’s role in the 1927 production of Porgy is described in Joseph Horowitz, “On My Way”: The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess” (New York: Norton, 2013), 20–64. Act 3, scene 2 in Mamoulian’s

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script, the “Symphony of Noises,” is reproduced in Horowitz, “On My Way,” 224–28. 15. A search on “Love Me Tonight cues” in the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) database, www.ascap.com/ace/ (accessed June 2012) turned up several untitled cues attributed to Rodgers and Leipold, as well as song titles from the film attributed to the same team, or to Rodgers individually. It should be noted that Leipold seems to have been involved in all of the musicals by Lubitsch and Mamoulian discussed in this chapter. I am grateful to Jeff Smith for clarifying the attribution of several cues in this and other titles discussed. 16. London, Film Music, 75. 17. Ibid., 181: “Choirs are, and for the present will continue to be, unsuitable for the sound-film. The capacity of the recording units is not yet adequate to register the plastic character of a multitude of voices; but, just as the choir in ‘living’ performances can very seldom be understood word for word, so it cannot reckon on being understood by anyone at all through the loudspeaker.” 18. On the narrative integration of this song see Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997), 316–17. 19. See Barry Salt, “The World Inside Ernst Lubitsch,” in Moving into Pictures: More on Film History, Style and Analysis (London: Starword, 2006), 174–78. 20. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 118, dates the extensive use of prerecorded dialogue in the Disney films from The Flying Mouse, released in 1934. 21. Although it is difficult to find information on Leipold’s career, we do have independent evidence of his great skill as an arranger: he was one of four composers who shared the Academy Award for the Stagecoach (1939) sound track, a skillful weave of American folk tunes. A search of ProQuest Historical Newspapers also reveals a brief but tantalizing letter that Leipold wrote to the Los Angeles Times in defense of Schoenberg’s music: One point overlooked is that composers of the stature of Schoenberg and Toch are master contrapuntists in even the Palestrina school and would easily write that kind of music if they should have occasion to. Yet how little counterpoint is taught today and how much more stress is placed on harmony. The belief that music is a matter of chords and chord progressions is a fallacy that will forever block out the creation of anything particularly NEW in music. Why do composers not realize that every good-sounding “dissonant” note that ever got into music was present and in good use because it was part of good contrapuntal principles? . . . I cannot recall any overworking of the principles that produced the subtle and charming cross-rhythm construction to be found in the Mozart Quartet in E Flat, K. 428: nor have I heard a tiresome use of the ideas

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that produced the clever seven-measure sentences on the Apprentices’ Dance from “Die Meistersinger.” (LA Times, July 30, 1950, D6) 22. Allen Forte, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 36–41. 23. Listening to the sound track on the Criterion DVD of Monte Carlo at slow speed reveals a just perceptible bloop in the audio at the commencement of the last eight bars; I have not been able to locate an original print to verify if there is indeed a cut in the sound track at this point. 24. Hagen, Scoring for Films, 38–54, indicates that cue sheets were prepared with the start time and end time of each line of dialogue. 25. Leonid Sabaneev, Music for the Films: A Handbook for Composers and Conductors, trans. S. W. Pring (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1935), 40–41.

chapter 5. dialogue timing and performance in hawks 1. See the lecture delivered at Columbia University on March 30, 1939, published in Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 269. 2. Maurice Pivar, “Film Editing,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 29, no. 4 (1937): 367. 3. Reisz and Millar, Technique of Film Editing, 84–85. 4. Pivar, “Film Editing,” 368–69. 5. Reisz and Millar, Technique of Film Editing, 100. 6. Edward Arnold, Lorenzo Goes to Hollywood: The Autobiography of Edward Arnold (New York: Liveright, 1940), 274–75; cited in Playing to the Camera: Film Actors Discuss Their Craft, ed. Bert Cardullo, Harry Geduld, Ronald Gottesman, and Leigh Woods (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–78. 7. Eric Portman, “The Film Actor,” in Working for the Films, ed. Oswell Blakeston (London: Focal Press, 1947), 49; cited in Cardullo, Geduld, Gottesman, and Woods, Playing to the Camera, 94. 8. Prominent exceptions are the films made at Goldwyn and MGM over which Hawks exerted less control. These tend to have more source music, and considerably more underscore, than the films produced at Warners and Columbia. For example, Barbary Coast (Oct. 1935), a Goldwyn production, uses source music as dialogue underscore extensively, as in the scene in which Chamalis fleeces Sawbucks McTavish of his gold and then has his partner murdered. 9. Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (New York: Grove, 1997), 220; see also the discussion of Hawks’s collaboration with writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur on Twentieth Century (ibid., 200); the improvisation on the set he instigated with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn on Bringing Up Baby (ibid., 251); and with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell on His Girl Friday (ibid., 282–85).

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10. Ibid., 112. 11. Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 60; see also Leslie Midkiffe DeBauche, Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 188–90. 12. American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, Feature Films, 1921–1930 (New Providence, NJ: Bowker, 1971), entry F2.2411: Hell’s Angels (available by subscription at http://afi.chadwyck.com). 13. Review of Hell Divers, Variety, Dec. 29, 1931, 106. 14. My act divisions are based on Hawks’s use of titles to differentiate sections. For example, the first act ends with Scott asleep in his bunk and Courtney anticipating the next day. It is followed by a title that reads “Four A.M.” over a photograph of the sky at dawn. The third and fourth acts are similarly defined by expository titles superimposed over images and, in the case of act 4, a brief montage sequence. 15. Lane, New Technique of Screen Writing, 10. 16. Ibid., 13. 17. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 62. 18. Lane, New Technique of Screen Writing, 10. 19. The one exception is the first scene in Tony’s apartment, with a duration of 07:54:09, which establishes Guino’s murder of O’Hara, Tony’s burgeoning relationship with Poppy, and the steel shutters and hidden escape route that become important at the film’s close. 20. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 133–34, 136. 21. Ibid., 158–59, 166–69. 22. Brooks Atkinson’s review of the play, “In Which Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur Fire a Squib at the Theatre of Broadway,” New York Times, Dec. 30, 1932, 15, identifies it as “a play in three acts”; and a subsequent article in that paper, “18 Hours from Chicago,” New York Times, Jan. 1, 1933, X3, discusses the difficulties the producers had in getting Hecht and MacArthur to finish the third act. However, these sources are agreed that the main action is restricted to the time of the journey from Chicago to New York. In the adaptation by Ken Ludwig, published by Samuel French in 2004, this action is divided between act 1 and act 2, scene 1. The brief act 2, scene 2 is set in Grand Central Station; it is clearly an epilogue. 23. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 200. 24. In act 3 subsequent breaks between sequences 14 and 15, 15 and 16, 16 and 17, and 17 and the epilogue are marked with fades, wipes, or dissolves. 25. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 185. 26. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Twentieth Century, Based on a Play by Charles Bruce Milholland in a New Adaptation by Ken Ludwig (New York: Samuel French, 2004), 40. 27. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 202–3; in addition to the quote from Hawks, apparently discussing Twentieth Century, in McCarthy, see his discussion of His Girl Friday in McBride, Hawks on Hawks, 80–81.

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28. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page, which premiered at the Times Square Theatre in August 1928, is also often cited as an important example of fast-talking comedy, and the form of the written dialogue clearly sets the actors up to step on each other’s lines. See my discussion of the play, as well as the Hawks and Milestone adaptations of it, in Jacobs, “Keeping Up with Hawks,” 405–17. 29. Margot Peters, Design for Living (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 71. 30. Richard Boeth, “Alfred the Great,” Newsweek, August 15, 1977, 59; cited in Peters, Design for Living, 71. 31. Mordaunt Hall, review of The Idle Rich, New York Times, June 17, 1929, 33. 32. Peters, Design for Living, 107. 33. See the Hollywood Reporter, Sept. 3, 1931, 3; cited in the American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, Feature Films, 1931–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), entry F3.3545, on Private Lives (available by subscription at http://afi.chadwyck .com). 34. Review of Private Lives, Variety, Dec. 22, 1931, 15; Mordaunt Hall, “A $650,000 Bundle of Laughter,” New York Times, Dec. 27, 1931, 93. 35. McBride, Hawks on Hawks, 80–81. 36. Ibid., 35–36. 37. Jacobs, “Keeping Up with Hawks,” 418–25.

chapter 6. afterword 1. See Maurice Jaubert, “Music on the Screen,” in Footnotes to the Film, ed. Charles Davy (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937), 108. 2. “Answer from Mr. Newman,” in “A Symposium on the Composer’s View towards the Psychology,” in Hagen, Scoring for Films, 160. 3. Quoted in Neil P. Hurley, “The Many-Splendored Actor: An Interview with Jimmy Stewart,” New Orleans Review 10, nos. 2–3 (1983): 5–14; excerpted in Cardullo, Geduld, Gottesman, and Woods, Playing to the Camera, 205. 4. Max Steiner, “Max Steiner on Film Music,” in Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art & Craft of Movie Music (Burbank: Riverwood Press, 1991), 69. 5. Frank Caffey to Fred Leahy, inter-office communication, Re: Musical Numbers—“Road to Singapore,” Oct. 16, 1939, Box 166, File 6, Paramount Pictures Collection, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 6. John Mueller, Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 20–21; for more on Astaire’s refined rhythmic sense see Todd Decker, Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 7. Mueller, Astaire Dancing, 15–20. 8. Steiner, “Max Steiner on Film Music,” 70–71. 9. George Groves, interview with Irene Kahn Atkins, in Louis B. Mayer / American Film Institute Film History Program, Oral History with

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Early Sound and Music Editors (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1977), 47–52 (and unpaginated figures). 10. “Cue sheet” is often used for the list of music cues required by the legal departments of the studios for copyright clearance purposes. However, the term was also used by music and sound editors and mixers in the sense in which Groves employs it here: a detailed list of music cues with footage and time markings used to indicate when fragments were to be inserted into the music track. 11. Irene Kahn Atkins, “The American Film Institute’s Hugo Friedhofer Oral History,” ed. Tony Thomas and Linda Danly, in Hugo Friedhofer: The Best Years of His Life, ed. Linda Danly (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999), 42. Earle Hagen, Scoring for Films, 95–109, describes a somewhat similar system of marking the film with punches and flags. 12. Kathryn Kalinak, “Max Steiner and the Classical Hollywood Film Score: An Analysis of The Informer,” in Film Music 1, ed. Clifford McCarty (New York: Garland, 1989), 124–25. 13. Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), 150. 14. Steiner, “Max Steiner on Film Music,” 71. 15. James Buhler, David Neumeyer, and Rob Deemer, Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 218–21; see also David Neumeyer and Nathan Platte, Franz Waxman’s “Rebecca”: A Film Score Guide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2012), 101. 16. Hugo Friedhofer, “Hugo Friedhofer on Film Music,” in Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art & Craft of Movie Music (Burbank: Riverwood Press, 1991), 211. 17. On objections to mickey mousing see Fred Steiner, “What Were Musicians Saying about Movie Music during the First Decade of Sound? A Symposium of Selected Writings,” in Film Music 1, ed. Clifford McCarty (New York: Garland, 1989), 97–99. 18. Atkins, “The American Film Institute’s Hugo Friedhofer Oral History,” 46.

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Filmography

The following filmography gives title (as used in this book, with the title in the original language or an English translation if the original title is used in the text), the country of production, the production company (and the distributor, if different), the year of release, and the original running time in minutes (with the assumed frame rate for silent films). A nous la liberté. France. Films sonores Tobis, 1931, 104 minutes Alexander Nevsky (Aleksandr Nevsky). U.S.S.R. Mosfilm, 1938, 112 minutes All Quiet on the Western Front. U.S. Universal Pictures, 1930, 138 minutes American Madness. U.S. Columbia Pictures, 1932, 75 minutes Animal Crackers. U.S. Paramount-Publix, 1930, 99 minutes The Band Concert. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1935, 9 minutes Barbary Coast. U.S. Samuel Goldwyn, 1935, 90 minutes The Barnyard Concert. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1930, 6 minutes Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin). U.S.S.R. Goskino, 1925, 79 minutes (at 20 fps) Bringing Up Baby. U.S. RKO Radio Pictures, 1938, 100 minutes Cheyenne. U.S. Warner Bros., 1947, 99 minutes Coquette. U.S. Mary Pickford Corporation, United Artists, 1929, 78 minutes Crime and Punishment. U.S. Columbia Pictures, 1935, 85 minutes The Criminal Code. U.S. Columbia Pictures, 1931, 96 minutes The Crowd Roars. U.S. Warner Bros., 1932, 84 minutes The Dawn Patrol. U.S. First National Pictures, 1930, 105 minutes The Dawn Patrol. U.S. Warner Bros., 1938, 103 minutes 253

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Filmography

The Deserter (Dezertir). U.S.S.R. Mezhrabpomfilm, 105 minutes Design for Living. U.S. Paramount, 1933, 88 minutes Disraeli. U.S. Warner Bros., 1929, 89 minutes Don Juan. U.S. Warner Bros., 1926, 111 minutes The Doorway to Hell. U.S. Warner Bros., 1930, 79 minutes Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Three from the Filling Station). Germany. Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, 1930, 99 minutes East Lynne. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1931, 102 minutes Egyptian Melodies. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1931, 6 minutes The Flying Mouse. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1934, 9 minutes The Front Page. U.S. Caddo, United Artists, 1931, 90 minutes The Gold Rush. U.S. Charlie Chaplin Productions, United Artists, 1925, 95 minutes (at 24 fps) The Guardsman. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1931, 81 minutes Hallelujah. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929, 108 minutes Harmony at Home. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1930, 70 minutes Hell Divers. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932, 110 minutes Hell’s Angels. U.S. Caddo, United Artists, 1930, 115 minutes Hell’s Bells. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1929, 6 minutes His Girl Friday. U.S. Columbia Pictures, 1940, 92 minutes Hold Everything. U.S. Warner Bros., 1930, 83 minutes The Idle Rich. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929, 82 minutes In Old Arizona. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1929, 97 minutes The Informer. U.S. RKO Radio Pictures, 1935, 91 minutes Intolerance. U.S. Wark Producing Company, 1916, ca. 187 minutes (at 16 fps) Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny), Part I. U.S.S.R. Mosfilm, 1944, 103 minutes Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny), Part II. U.S.S.R. Mosfilm, 1958, 88 minutes Jungle Rhythm. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, states rights, 1929, 7 minutes The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929, 96 minutes Lightnin’. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1930, 94 minutes Lights of New York. U.S. Warner Bros., 1928, 58 minutes Little Caesar. U.S. First National Pictures, 1931, 77 minutes Love Me Tonight. U.S. Paramount-Publix, 1932, 90 minutes

Filmography

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255

The Love Parade. U.S. Paramount Famous Lasky, 1929, 111 minutes Madame X. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929, 98 minutes Manhattan Parade. U.S. Warner Bros., 1932, 77 minutes Masquerade. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1929, 63 minutes The Merry Widow. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1934, 99 minutes Mickey’s Grand Opera. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1936, 8 minutes Mickey’s Service Station. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1935, 7 minutes Le Million. France. Films sonores Tobis, 1931, 81 minutes Monkey Melodies. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1930, 7 minutes Monte Carlo. U.S. Paramount-Publix, 1930, 90 minutes Morocco. U.S. Paramount-Publix, 1930, 92 minutes Music Land, U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1935, 10 minutes Now, Voyager. U.S. Warner Bros., 1942, 117 minutes On Ice. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1935, 8 minutes One Hour with You. U.S. Paramount-Publix, 1932, 75 minutes Only Angels Have Wings. U.S. Columbia Pictures, 1939, 119 minutes Pett and Pott, a Fairy Story of the Suburbs. U.K. GPO Film Unit, 1934, 29 minutes A Plantation Act. U.S. Vitaphone, Warner Bros., 1926, 10 minutes Playful Pluto. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1934, 8 minutes Private Lives. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1931, 82 minutes The Public Enemy. U.S. Warner Bros., 1931, 74 minutes The Racketeer. U.S. Pathé Exchange, 1929, 68 minutes Raffles. U.S. Samuel Goldwyn, United Artists, 1930, 72 minutes Rebecca. U.S. Selznick International Pictures, United Artists, 1940, 127 minutes Rio Bravo. U.S. Warner Bros., 1959, 141 minutes The Road to Singapore. U.S. Paramount, 1940, 84 minutes Sally. U.S. First National Pictures, 1925, 105 minutes (at 22 fps) Sally. U.S. First National Pictures, 1929, 103 minutes Santa’s Workshop. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1932, 7 minutes

256

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Filmography

Scarface. U.S. Caddo, United Artists, 1932, 90 minutes Show Boat. U.S. Universal Pictures, 1929, 129 minutes The Skeleton Dance. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1929, 6 minutes The Smiling Lieutenant. U.S. Paramount-Publix, 1931, 88 minutes Song o’ My Heart. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1930, 86 minutes Sous les toits de Paris. France. Films sonores Tobis, 1930, 96 minutes Stagecoach. U.S. Walter Wanger Productions, United Artists, 1939, 95 minutes Steamboat Willie. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, states rights, 1928, 8 minutes Street Angel. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1928, 102 minutes Sunny Side Up. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1929, 133 minutes Sunrise—a Song of Two Humans. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1927, 97 minutes Swing Time. U.S. RKO Radio Pictures, 1936, 103 minutes The Terror. U.S. Warner Bros., 1928, 85 minutes Three Little Pigs. U.S. Walt Disney Productions, United Artists, 1933, 8 minutes Tiger Shark. U.S. First National Pictures, 1932, 78 minutes Today We Live. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1933, 110 minutes Tol’able David. U.S. Inspiration Pictures, United Artists, 1921, 95 minutes (at 20 fps) Tol’able David. U.S. Columbia Pictures, 1930, 82 minutes The Trial of Mary Dugan. U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929, 118 minutes The Trial of Vivienne Ware. U.S. Fox Film Corporation, 1932, 56 minutes Trouble in Paradise. U.S. Paramount-Publix, 1932, 81 minutes Twentieth Century. U.S. Columbia Pictures, 1934, 91 minutes Vesyolye Rebyata (Jolly Fellows/Moscow Laughs). U.S.S.R. Moskinokombinat, 1934, 96 minutes Whoopee! U.S. Samuel Goldwyn, United Artists, 1930, 93 minutes Wings. U.S. Paramount Famous Lasky, 1927 (sonorized version, 1929), 136 minutes (at 24 fps)

Index

A nous la liberté (film), 109 abstract film, 23, 24 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 3, 4 accompaniment, silent-film, 21–23, 59, 121, 221, 235n4 acting: integrating dialogue and action, 167–69, 196; silent-film, 168, 169 adaptations, theatrical, 5, 6, 8 Adorno, Theodor, 230n42 Alexander Nevsky (film), 21, 31, 229n42, 232nn18,20,23, 234n43 Alexandrov, Grigori Vasilievich, 26, 109 All Quiet on the Western Front (film), 170 Allister, Claude, 128, 132 alternation, 10, 14, 19, 25, 73; of action and dialogue scenes, 166, 167, 170, 196, 204 Altman, Rick, 2, 230n42 America in the Summer of 1941 (radio documentary series), 231n8 American Cinematographer (magazine), 4 American Madness (film), 219 American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), 113, 129, 239n15 Animal Crackers (film), 6 animation, 21, 58; adding beats, 63, 63 fig. 37; bar sheet, 59, 235n5;

dominated by music, 58, 59, 64, 89, 109; exposure sheet, 63; postsynchronization, 59, 235n1; tyranny of the beat, 107 Anna Karenina (novel by Leo Tolstoy), 233n37 Arliss, George, 5 Arnheim, Rudolf, 2 Arnold, Edward, 168, 169, 212 Arnoux, Alexandre, 1 Asquith, Anthony, 29, 30 Astaire, Fred, 69, 220, 221, 242n6 Atkins, Irene Kahn, 221, 222 Atkinson, Brooks, 238n12, 241n22 Babbitt, Art, 236n24 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 32, 37 ballet, 29, 30 Band Concert, The (film), 89 bar sheets, 59, 235n5 Barbary Coast (film), 240n8 Barnyard Concert, The (film), 64 Barrier, Michael, 58, 59, 62, 64, 72, 235n1, 236nn14,23, 239n20 Barrymore, John, 196, 200, 203–15 Bartig, Kevin, 32, 230n42, 232nn18,19,20,23 Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, film), 26 Baxter, Warner, 7 Belloc, Hilaire, 33 Belodubrovskaya, Maria, 233n36

257

258

/

Index

Bernstein, Leonard, vi Bing, Herman, 207–10 Bíro, Yvette, 230n50 Boeth, Richard, 201 Bolton, Guy, 5 Bordwell, David, 2, 181, 182, 229n35, 234n42, 235n48 Borzage, Danny, 223 Borzage, Frank, 9 Brass Bowl, The (novel by Louis Joseph Vance), 6 Bright, John, 183 Bringing Up Baby (film), 200, 240n9 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 28 Brooke, Tyler, 143 Brown, Joe E., 6 Brown, Julie, 22 Brown, Royal S., 230n42, 233n34 Buchanan, Jack, 143, 148, 151, 152, 159 Burnett, W. R., 184 Butterworth, Charles, 124 Byrne, Charles, 64 Caddo Company, 183 Cagney, James, 169, 183 camera: blimp, 2, 19; booth, 2; movement, 56, 74, 123 Cannon, Johnny, 236n24 Cantor, Eddie, 6 Capone, Al, 184 Capra, Frank, 219 Care, Ross, 62, 85, 107, 237n31 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 28, 29, 110, 112 Cherkasov, Nikolai Konstantinovich, 42, 45, 49, 51–53, 55 Chevalier, Maurice, 109–13, 122, 123, 144, 147, 238n4 Cheyenne (film), 221, 222 Christie, Ian, 26 Churchill, Frank, 62, 63, 72, 99, 105, 107 Cinemetrics project, 56, 235n46 Clair, René, 2, 7, 23, 109–11, 127, 143, 230n48 Clark, Les, 236n24 click track, 56, 64, 122, 128, 221, 222

Clifford, Tom, 10 Cohen, Philip H., 231n8 Columbia Pictures, 240n8 Connolly, Walter, 205–9 Cooper, Grosvenor, 234n40 Coquette (play by George Abbott and Ann Preston Bridgers; film), 5 Coward, Noel, 202 Crabtree, J. J., 229n38 Crafton, Donald, 239n18 Crawford, Joan, 200 Crime and Punishment (film), 168, 212 Criminal Code, The (film), 182, 183, 195 Criminal Code, The (play by Martin Flavin), 182 Criterion Collection, The, 129, 233, 240n23 Crosby, Bing, 220 Crowd Roars, The (film), 183, 195, 196, 204 cue sheet, 157, 221, 222, 243n10 Cummings, Irving, 7 cutting: axial, 44, 49, 51–53, 55, 234n42; rate, 41, 53, 55; on and off the beat, 55, 56, 58 Dale, Charlie, 6 dance film, 30 Davis, Bette, 224 Dawn Patrol, The (film, 1930), 23, 169–72, 180, 182, 195, 196, 200, 204, 215; acting, 180; alternation of dialogue and action scenes, 171, 172, 180, 215; background sound, 174, 175, 180, 215; dialogue and movement, 180; direct sound, 170, 175, 179; live mixing, 170, 175; multiple-camera shooting, 169, 170, 174, 179, 215; offscreen sound, 178, 179, 180, 215; overlapping dialogue, 170, 175, 180; rerecording, absence of, 170; segmentation, 171, 172–79, 241n14; shot-reverse-shot, 170, 174, 179; “Stand to Your Glasses” (music cue), 174, 175 Dawn Patrol, The (film, 1938), 172

Index de Mille, William, 4, 5, 201 Decker, Todd, 242n6 Del Ruth, Roy, 6 Dembski Stephen, 234n44 Deserter, The (Dezertir, film), 26, 27 Design for Living (film), 165 dialogue, 6–8, 22, 23, 218; alternation with music, 158, 162; combination with action, 166; overlapping, 170, 200–202 (see also Scarface; Twentieth Century); speed of, 23, 201, 219; underscoring, 20, 42, 99, 141, 142, 148, 164, 165, 167, 169, 219, 221, 223, 224 (see also Monte Carlo) Dillon, John Francis, 5 direct sound, 2, 10, 19, 20, 23, 27, 110, 111, 112 Disney. See Walt Disney Productions Disraeli (play by Louis N. Parker; film), 5 Don Giovanni (opera by Mozart), 55 Don Juan (film), 110 Doorway to Hell, The (film), 183 Drei von der Tankstelle, Die (film), 22, 109 Dreyer, Carl, 56 dubbing, 20 Dubray, Joseph, 4, 5 Dulac, Germaine, 23 East Lynne (play by Mrs. Henry Wood; film), 5 editing: continuity, 3, 236n26; eyeline match, 53; in relation to the beat, 21; sound, 3, 20, 25, 26, 28, 30, 59, 113, 231n4. See also shot-reverse-shot Egyptian Melodies (film), 64 Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 30–39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 49, 51–53, 55–57, 103, 131, 169, 192, 218, 229n42, 232nn19,20; collaboration with Prokofiev, 31, 32, 232nn19,20; counterpoint as metaphor for sound editing, 32, 33, 42, 131; editing as bricklaying, 34, 35 figs. 15–16, 36; enjambment as metaphor for sound editing, 33, 34,

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44, 234n41; “The Fourth Dimension in Cinema” (essay), 30; integration of dialogue and music, 233n37; leitmotifs, 43, 234n39; metrical montage, 30; “Montage 1938” (essay), 33; “Nonindifferent Nature” (essay), 20, 25, 33, 35; rhythmic montage, 31; vertical montage, 31; “Vertical Montage” (essay), 30, 229n42, 234n43 Eisler, Hanns, 230n42 Elizabeth the Queen (play by Maxwell Anderson), 14, 202 Ellis, Edith, 201 Everson, William, 3 Faulkner, William, 200 Ferguson, Norm, 89, 236n24 Fetchit, Stepin, 219 figure movement, 23, 24, 36 Final Cut Pro, 36, 37 fig. 17, 233n31 Fischer, Lucy, 109 Fitzroy, Emily, 10 Flavin, Martin, 182 Flying Mouse, The (film), 239n20 Fontaine, Joan, 224 Fontanne, Lynn, 201, 202 Forbes, Ralph, 197, 203 Ford, John, 9, 223 Fox Film, 9, 10 Foy, Brian, 195 frame cycles, 60, 61 figs. 34–35, 62, 62 fig. 36, 64, 65 frame rates per beat, 59, 60, 65, 236n22, 237n27 Francis, Kay, 162 Franklin, Sidney, 202 Friedhofer, Hugo, 222, 225 Front Page, The (film), 3, 23, 205, 242n28 Front Page, The (play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur), 187, 241n22, 242n28 Furthman, Joseph, 219 gangster film, 183, 184 Garity, William, 59, 63, 64

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Gaynor, Janet, 111 General Post Office Film Unit, 28 Genette, Gérard, 57, 235n48 Geronimi, Clyde “Gerry,” 236n24 Gershwin, George, 123, 238n12; “An American in Paris” (symphonic poem), 123 Gertovich, Josef Frantsevich, 42 Gillett, Burt, 62, 72, 107 Glasmon, Kubec, 183 Godard, Jean-Luc, 42 Gold Rush, The (film), 1 Goldmark, Daniel, 235n4 Goldwyn Pictures, 240n8 Gorbman, Claudia, 109 Gould, Glenn, 231n8 Gounod, Charles-François, 65 Graham, Don, 236n23 Grandeur (70mm film format), 10 Grant, Cary, 169, 240n9 Green, Alfred E., 5 Grieg, Edvard, 65 Grierson, John, 27–29 Griffith, David Wark, 25 Groves, George, 221, 242n9, 243n10 Guardsman, The (film), 201, 202 Guardsman, The (play by Ferenc Molnár), 201 Guido, Laurent, 230n48 Hagen, Earle, 222, 234n45, 240n24, 243n11 Hallelujah (film), 21 Hamilton, Neil, 180 Hand, David, 62 Harline, Leigh, 62 Harling, W. Frank, 133, 141 Harman, Hugh, 58, 60, 235n5 Harmony at Home (film), 3 Harrell, Charles T., 231n8 Hart, Lorenz, 113 Hawks, Howard, 23, 169–71, 173–77, 179, 180, 182–84, 187, 191–93, 195, 196, 198–202, 204, 205, 210, 215, 216, 219, 220, 240nn8,9, 241nn14,27, 242n28

Hecht, Ben, 169, 184, 187, 196, 197, 200, 240n9, 241n22, 242n28 Hell Divers (film), 171 Hell’s Angels (film), 170, 241n12 Hell’s Bells (film), 65–68, 70, 71, 73, 81, 225, 236n26; animation on the beat, 72; “Fingal’s Cave overture” (music cue), 65, 70, 71, 71 fig. 44; frame cycles, 65, 67 figs. 39–40, 68 figs. 41–42, 71 fig. 44; frame rates, 65, 66, 70; “Funeral March of a Marionette” (music cue), 65, 69, 70, 70 fig. 43, 81; “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (music cue), 65, 66, 66 fig. 38; mickey mousing, 65, 66; synchronization experiments, 65; use of light classical music, 65 Henreid, Paul, 224 Hepburn, Katherine, 240n9 Heymann, W. R., 22 Heyward, Dorothy and Dubose, 113, 238n12 Hilmes, Michele, 231n8 His Girl Friday (film), 23, 200, 202, 204, 240n9, 241n27, 242n28 Hitchcock, Alfred, 166, 169, 170 Hold Everything (film), 6 Honegger, Arthur, 21 Hope, Bob, 220 Horowitz, Joseph, 238n14 Hughes, Howard, 170, 183 Idle Rich, The (film), 201 In Old Arizona (film), 7 Informer, The (film), 9, 223; “The Informer Theme” (music cue), 223 intertitles, 4, 7, 10 Intolerance (film), 26 Ising, Rudolph, 58, 60 235n5 Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozni), Part I (film), 20, 21, 31–34, 36, 40, 43, 44, 46–51, 54, 57, 218, 232nn19,20, 233nn31,35, 234nn38,39, 235n46; “Ivan pleads with the boyars” (music cue), 36, 42, 43, 43 fig. 19, 44, 45, 45 fig. 20, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 234n39; scene of Ivan at Anastasia’s

Index funeral, 33; scene of Ivan pleading with the boyars, 34, 36–55; score by Prokofiev, 38; shot lengths, 235n46; synthesis of image, speech, and music, 218 Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozni), Part II (film), 31–33, 44, 57, 218, 232nn19,20, 234nn39,41, 235 Ives, C. E., 229n38 Iwerks, Ub, 65, 72, 107, 236n23 Jackson, Wilfred, 58, 59, 62, 236n14 Jacobs, Lea, 151, 229nn37,40, 235n48, 236n17, 238n9, 242n28 Jaubert, Maurice, 217 Johnston, Ollie, 63, 65, 81, 84, 235n45, 237n28 Jolly Fellows. See Vesyolye Rebyata Jolson, Al, 110 Jungle Rhythm (film), 64 Kadochnikov, Pavel Petrovich, 36 Kahl, Milt, 65 Kalinak, Kathryn, 223 Kent, Sidney, 8 Kern, Jerome, 5 King, Henry, 7 King, Jack, 236n24 Kohlmar, Lee, 207–10 Korngold, Erich Wolfram, 222, 223, 225 Laemmle, Carl, Jr., 181, 186 Lambert, Kenneth, 20 Lane, Tamar, 9, 181, 182, 186, 196 Lantz, Walter, 58, 60, 237n27 Last of Mrs. Cheyney, The (play by Frederick Lonsdale; film), 6 Lastra, James, 2 Lawrence, Gertrude, 202 Leenhardt, Roger, 30 Leipold, John M., 113, 129, 141, 148, 153, 157, 164, 218, 239nn15,21 LeRoy, Mervyn, 183 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 217 Lewin, George, 110 Lewis, Bert, 62, 235 Lewis, Steve, 234n44

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Lightner, Winnie, 6 Lightnin’ (play by Winchell Smith and Frank Bacon; film), 5 Lights of New York (film), 3 lip-synchronization, 110, 152 Little Caesar (film), 183 Loew’s, Inc., 238n3 Lombard, Carole, 196, 203, 210–15 London, Kurt, 22, 124, 129 Long, Derek, 235n5 Lonsdale, Frederick, 6 Lorre, Peter, 168 Love Me Tonight (film), 22, 109–13, 115–22, 124, 125, 127–29, 141, 142, 144, 162, 164, 218, 223, 238n4, 239n15; “Ah! ça ira” (music cue), 125, 127; dialogue timed to music, 144, 147; dialogue underscoring, 127, 142, 143, 162, 223; “How Are You?” (music cue), 127, 144, 147; “Isn’t It Romantic?” (music cue), 111, 112, 127, 128; “Mimi” (music cue), 124, 144; noise prelude, 113, 114, 115–18 fig. 65, 118, 121, 122, 123, 127, 218; “The Poor Apache” (music cue), 110, 111 fig. 64, 144; postsynchronization, 113, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128; “Song of Paree” (music cue), 122, 123, 126, 127; “Street Scene” (music cue), 114, 118, 119–21 fig. 66, 124, 218; synchronization to playback, 111, 112, 126, 147; “A Thousand and One Nights” (music cue), 142, 143, 162 Love Parade, The (film), 109 Loy, Myrna, 124, 143 Lubitsch, Ernst, 22, 109, 111, 113, 127– 29, 132–34, 139–41, 143, 144, 148, 152, 162, 164, 165, 169, 216, 218, 220, 239n15 Ludwig, Ken, 241n22 Lundy, Dick, 236n24 Lunt, Alfred, 201, 202 Lynn, Sharon, 110 MacArthur, Charles, 169, 196, 197, 200, 240n9, 241n22, 242n28

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McCarthy, Todd, 169, 187, 195, 200, 201, 204, 240n9, 241n27 McCormack, John, 9, 10, 19 MacDonald, Jeanette, 109, 111, 112, 128, 134, 137, 140, 143, 144, 151–53, 156–58 McLaglen, Victor, 223 Madame X (play by Alexandre Bisson; film), 5 magnetic tape, 27 Mahin, John Lee, 184 Mamoulian, Rouben, 22, 109, 111, 113, 124, 126–28, 141, 143, 147, 169, 216, 218, 220, 238nn12,14, 239n15 Manhattan Parade (film), 6 Marks, Martin, 86 Marshall, Herbert, 162 Marshall, Tully, 193 Marston, William M., 8, 9 Marx Brothers (Chico, Groucho, Harpo, and Zeppo Marx), 6, 219 Masquerade, The (film), 6 Maxwell, Edwin, 187 Mayo, Archie, 183 Meistersinger, Die (opera by Richard Wagner), 240n21 Mendelson, Mira, 32, 232n23 Mendelssohn, Felix, 65, 72 Menjou, Adolphe, 3 Merry Widow, The (film), 238nn3,4 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corp., 6, 20, 200–202, 240n8 Meyer, Leonard B., 234n40 Mickey Mouse films, 21, 22, 65, 72, 89, 113, 237n31 mickey mousing, 52, 58, 65, 107, 128, 218; deprecation of, 64, 65, 218, 225 Mickey’s Grand Opera (film), 89 Mickey’s Service Station (film), 89 microphone, 2, 3, 20, 170, 202; boom, 2, 3, 182; directional, 20 Milestone, Lewis, 3, 23, 205, 242n28 Millar, Gavin, 234n42 Miller, Marilyn, 5 Miller, Seton I., 174, 184

Millertape sound editing system, 231n8 Million, Le (film), 109 mixing, 56, 57, 59, 113; real-time, 27, 28, 59, 64, 170, 232n18; postproduction, 31, 34, 64, 220, 221, 236n17 Molnár, Ferenc, 201 Monkey Melodies (film), 64 montage, Soviet, 23, 26, 52 montage sequence, 181 Monte Carlo (film), 22, 109, 111, 112, 127–29, 132, 134–36, 138, 139, 141, 143, 148–51, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 238n4, 240n23; alternation of dialogue and music, 158, 159, 160–61 fig. 72, 161, 164; “Always, in All Ways” (music cue), 148, 149–51 fig. 70, 152, 153, 157–59, 218, 219; “Beyond the Blue Horizon” (music cue), 111, 112, 127, 128, 133, 134, 135–36 fig. 67, 137, 138–39 fig. 68, 139–41, 148, 153, 159, 219; “Day of Days” (music cue), 127, 129, 130–32, 141, 219; dialogue timed to music, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152, 154–55 fig. 71, 156–58; dialogue underscoring, 148, 151, 152, 153, 157, 158, 159; direct recording, 132, 157; “Give Me a Moment Please” (music cue), 148, 156–59, 218; postsynchronization, 129, 141, 148, 152; recitative, 151– 52; “She’ll Love Me and Like It” (music cue), 127, 132, 133, 141; shot-reverse-shot, 132–34; synchronization to playback, 111; “Trimmin’ the Women” (music cue) 143, 144; Wedding March from Lohengrin (music cue), 130 Montgomery, Robert, 202 Moore, Colleen, 5, 6 Moore, Fred, 236n24 Moran, Bugs, 184 Morocco (film), 219 Moussinac, Léon, 23, 230n48 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 127, 239n21

Index Mueller, John, 220 multiple-camera shooting, 3, 10, 19, 20, 23, 110, 182, 216, 229n35. See also Dawn Patrol, The (film, 1930) Muni, Paul, 184, 187, 189, 190, 195 music in theater and film, 238n11 Music Land (film), 107 music-and-effects tracks, 9, 10, 14, 19, 110, 121 music-dominated sound track, 109, 218, 219 musical comedy, 109, 112, 221 narrative structure, 25, 38, 39, 53, 56, 57, 217, 225, 235n48 Neumeyer, David, 224, 238n11 Newman, Alfred, 219, 221 Newsom, Jon, 59, 235 Nizhny, Vladimir, 234n42 noise-reduction recording, 20, 229n39 nonsynchronous sound, 26, 28, 29, 34, 39, 110, 112 Now, Voyager (film): “Night and Day” (music cue), 141, 224 O’Brien, Pat, 3 O’Sullivan, Maureen, 10 Olivier, Laurence, 224 On Ice (film), 89 One Hour with You (film), 22, 109, 110, 143, 145, 146, 156, 223; dialogue timed to music, 143, 144, 145–46 fig. 69, 223; “We Will Always Be Sweethearts” (music cue), 143, 144; “What Would You Do?” (music cue), 110, 156 Only Angels Have Wings (film), 215 operetta, sound-film, 22, 109, 141, 218 Pagnol, Marcel, 2 Palestrina, Giovanni Perluigi, 239n21 Palmer, W., 229n38 Paramount Pictures, 3, 4, 8, 109, 110, 113, 122, 127, 129, 133, 141, 144, 220 Perkins, Osgood, 187–90, 214 Peters, Margot, 201

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Pett and Pott (film), 28, 29 phonograph recording, 27, 231n8 Pickford, Mary, 5 Pisani, Michael V., 238n11 Pitkin, Walter B., 8, 9 Pitts, ZaSu, 133 Pivar, Maurice, 166, 167 Plantation Act, A (film), 110 Playful Pluto (film), 64, 72, 89–96, 98, 99, 101–3, 107, 218, 236n26; cyclical movement, 91, 105; enjambment, 103; frame rates per beat, 89, 93, 106; mickey mousing reconceived, 72, 92, 93, 95, 99, 106; movement against the beat, 91–93, 97, 103; movement synchronized to the beat, 95, 97, 99; movement synchronized to the phrase, 93, 218, 237n27; original music, 73; sync points, 89, 103; syncopation, 91–93 Pomeroy, Roy, 3, 4 Porgy (play by Dorothy and Dubose Heyward), 113, 238nn12,14; noise prelude, 113 Porgy and Bess (opera by George Gershwin), 238n12; noise prelude, 238n12 Porter, Cole, 224 Portman, Eric, 168 postproduction, 27, 28, 117, 166, 167, 221 postscoring, 23, 32, 221–24 postsynchronization, 10, 110, 111–13, 167, 170, 232n20 Prendergast, Roy M., 230n42 prescoring, 23, 32, 62 Private Lives (film), 202, 205, 242n33 Private Lives (play by Noël Coward), 202, 242n33 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich, 20, 21, 30–32, 34, 42, 44, 232nn18,19,20,22,23, 234n39 Prout, Ebenezer, 32 Public Enemy, The (film), 183, 184 Pudovkin, Vsevolod I., 26–28, 31 push-pull soundtrack, 20, 220, 229n39

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Index

Racketeer, The (film), 6 radio, 27, 231n8 Radio Corporation of America, 20, 220 Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures, 20, 220 Raffles (film), 5 Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (play by E. W. Hornung and Eugene W. Presbrey), 5 Rapée, Ernö, 21, 22 rear projection, 238n9 Rebecca (film), 224 Reis, E. W., 4 Reisz, Karel, 166, 167, 212, 219, 234n42 rerecording, 20, 26–28, 31, 59, 157, 167, 220, 231n4, 238n9 rhythm of films, 3, 8, 9, 14, 19–21, 23–25, 27–29, 218, 225, 230nn48,50; and musical rhythm, 21–25, 32, 34, 217, 225; and speaking rhythm, 34, 216, 217 Richardson, Dorothy, 1, 2 Rio Bravo (film), 215 Riskin, Robert, 219 Road to Singapore (film), 220 Robin, Leo, 129, 133, 141, 148 Roche, John, 143 Rodgers, Richard, 113, 127, 239n15 Rogers, Will, 5, 219 Ruggles, Charles, 124 Russell, Rosalind, 240n9 Ruttmann, Walter, 21, 23 Sabaneev, Leonid, 158, 162 Sachs, Curt, 109 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, 184, 193, 218 Sally (film, 1925), 5 Sally (film, 1929), 5, 182 Sally (musical comedy by Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, and Jerome Kern), 5, 182 Salt, Barry, 2, 232n18, 239n19 Santa’s Workshop (film), 59, 60, 60 fig. 33, 61–62 figs. 34–36, 64, 65 Saunders, John Monk, 182

Scarface (film), 180, 183, 184, 186, 187, 192, 195–97, 202, 204, 214–16, 218; action and dialogue scenes, 185, 187, 215, 216; “Chi mi frena” (music cue from Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti), 193; cutting speed, 191, 192; dialogue overlap, 189, 190, 195; dialogue speed, 187–90, 193–95, 215; montage sequences, 184, 186, 195; movement, 190–92; narrative pace, 186; segmentation, 184–87, 189, 191, 192, 195, 215; short scenes, 183–86, 191, 195, 215 Schlesinger, Leon, 58 Schoenberg, Arnold, 237n29, 239n21 scoring, musical, 23, 59 screenplay manuals, 8, 9 segmentation, 38, 39, 45, 73, 217. See also Scarface; Twentieth Century Shannons of Broadway, The (play by James Gleason), 8 Shearer, Norma, 202 short scenes, 180–84. See also Scarface shot length, 31 shot-reverse-shot, 10, 14 Show Boat (film), 110 Shuffle Off to Buffalo (film), 235n5 Silly Symphonies, 57, 59, 64, 65, 72, 89, 107, 113, 237n31 Skeleton Dance, The (film), 64 Smiling Lieutenant, The (film), 109 Smith, C. Aubrey, 142, 143 Smith, Jeff, 234n44, 239n15 Smith, Joe, 6 Song o’ My Heart (film); alternation, 14; cutting speed, 10; Grandeur version, 10; intertitles, 10, 14; musicand-effects version, 10, 11–13 figs. 1–6, 14, 16–18 figs. 9–14; musical score, 19; restriction by dialogue, 19; shot-reverse-shot, 10; sync-sound version, 10, 11 figs. 1–2, 15 figs. 7–8, 17 fig. 12, 18 fig. 14 sound effects, 28, 29, 64, 93, 104, 121, 128, 132, 134, 137, 170, 171, 216 sound film vs. talkie, 7, 8 Sous les toits de Paris (film), 7, 109

Index Soviet sound equipment, 26, 31, 232n18 stage and screen, comparison of, 4, 5, 8, 168 Stagecoach (film), 239n21 Staiger, Janet, 181 Stalin, Joseph, 57 Stalling, Carl, 63–65, 72, 107, 237nn31,33 Steamboat Willie (film), 58, 59, 64, 236n14 Steiner, Fred, 243n17 Steiner, Max, 220–24 Sternberg, Josef von, 168, 184, 212, 219 Stewart, James (actor), 219 Stewart, James G. (sound editor), 20 storyboard, 31 Stothart, Herbert, 221 Strauss, Johann, Jr., 142 Street Angel (film), 110 Sunny Side Up (film), 110, 111; “Sunny Side Up” (music cue), 111; “Turn on the Heat” (music cue), 110 Sunrise—A Song of Two Humans (film), 110 Swing Time (film), 69 synchronization, 2, 9, 20, 21, 23, 29, 31, 52; points, 36, 56, 81, 83; precision of, 21, 22, 59, 64, 107, 121, 218, 220, 229n38; shifting organization of, 38, 51, 52, 56, 57; strategies of, 36, 37; to playback, 23, 110–12, 232n20 Taylor, Richard, 233n27 Telotte, J. P., 72, 236n27 tempo, 1, 4, 5, 7–9, 23–25, 30, 41, 56, 57, 125; apparent vs. real, 85 Terror, The (film), 1 Theatre Guild, 201, 238n12 Thiele, Wilhelm, 22, 109 Thomas, Frank, 63, 65, 81, 84, 235n45, 237n28 Thomas, Tony, 221 Thompson, Kristin, 181, 234n41

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Three from the Filling Station. See Drei von der Tankstelle, Die Three Little Pigs (film), 72–75, 74 fig. 45, 76, 78, 79 figs. 49–50, 80, 80 fig. 51, 82 fig. 52, 83–86, 87–88 fig. 54, 89, 91, 93, 107, 236n26; added beat, 63, 63 fig. 37; changes of pace, 76, 85, 86, 89; frame rates per beat, 80, 85; mickey mousing, 72, 74, 78, 84, 89; modification of mickey mousing, 81, 83, 89; movement against the beat, 81; movement synchronized to the beat, 73, 74, 75 figs. 46–47, 76, 78, 80, 84; movement synchronized to the phrase, 81, 83, 84; “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” (music cue), 73, 76, 77 fig. 48, 85, 107 Tiger Shark (film), 195, 196, 204 timecodes, 36, 229n36 Tobin, Genevieve, 144 Toch, Ernst, 239n21 Today We Live (film), 200 Tol’able David (film, 1921), 7 Tol’able David (film, 1930), 7 tonality and rhythm, 234nn40,44 Tone, Franchot, 200 Totheroh, Dan, 174 tracks: music, 31; sound, 31 transition to sound: critical response to, 1–3, 6, 7, 23; dating of, 166; editing restrictions in, 3, 4, 7, 9, 20, 23, 27, 218; slow tempo in, 6–9, 26; stilted dialogue in, 2, 3, 180, 215 Trial of Mary Dugan, The (play by Bayard Veiller; film), 5 Trial of Vivienne Ware, The (film), 3 Trouble in Paradise (film), 109, 162, 164, 219; alternation of dialogue and music, 162–64; “Trouble in Paradise Theme” (music cue), 162–64 Tselikovskaya, Lyudmila Vasilyevna, 49 Tsivian, Gunnar, 235n46 Tsivian, Yuri, 235n46 “Turn About” (story by William Faulkner), 200

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Index

Twentieth Century (film), 23, 196, 197, 200–202, 204, 205, 216, 240n9, 241n27; dialogue speed, 200, 206, 209–15; integration of dialogue, movement, and gesture, 204–16; long scenes, 197, 216; mixing, 203, 204; movement, 197, 198, 209, 210; overlapping dialogue, 200–206; pace, 198, 207, 210; segmentation, 197–99, 205, 210, 212 Twentieth Century (play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur), 196–97, 200 underscoring, classical, 219, 221–25. See also Monte Carlo (film) Underworld (film), 184 United Artists, 72 Universal Pictures, 58, 166, 181 Vance, Louis Joseph, 6 Variety (magazine), 3–8, 23, 171, 182, 200, 202, 238n4 vaudeville, 6 Vertov, Dziga, 23 Vesyolye Rebyata (Jolly Fellows, film), 109 VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography), 31 Vitaphone shorts, 110–12, 238n8 Volsky, Boris, 232n19

Walküre, Die (opera by Richard Wagner), 234n39 Walsh, Raoul, 7, 221 Walt Disney Productions, 21, 22, 57–60, 62–65, 72, 81, 93, 107, 128, 141, 216, 218, 236n23, 239n20; development of realistic style, 72; move to specially composed music, 73 Warner Bros., 3, 58, 107, 181, 183, 184, 195–97, 215, 221, 222, 237n33, 240n8 Wellman, William, 183, 184 Western Electric, 8 White Collars (play by Edith Ellis), 201 Whiting, Richard, 129, 133, 141, 148 Whoopee! (film), 6 wild cinematography, 3, 20, 28, 170 Wilkinson, James, 4 Wings (film), 170 Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville, 5 Wolfe, Charles, 238n8 Zanuck, Darryl F., 1, 181, 183, 184, 186, 195–97, 227n5 Zhirmunsky, Viktor Maximovich, 33, 233n27