Taking an previous movie rating and dropping it into a brand new movie is “like carrying any person else’s underwear,” veteran composer Earle Hagen used to say.
Hagen, the Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning composer of such basic themes as “The Andy Griffith Present,” “The Dick Van Dyke Present” and “The Mod Squad,” would have been appalled by the musical decisions in Netflix’s “Could December.”
A scene from that movie, with Julianne Moore opening her fridge door to a melodramatic piano cue, has gone viral. It’s a humorous second if you happen to don’t acknowledge that music.
However if you happen to do, like 1000’s of movie buffs around the globe, then it’s both cringe-worthy or simply head-scratching. The music in query is Michel Legrand’s rating for “The Go-Between,” a 1971 English cinema basic directed by Joseph Losey from a script by famend playwright Harold Pinter.
“The Go-Between” was a interval romantic drama that starred Alan Bates and Julie Christie and has, through the years, been hailed as “one of many world’s nice movies” and “Losey’s masterpiece,” amongst different reward. It received the Palme d’Or at Cannes that yr.
Legrand’s rating — classically structured as a theme and 11 variations for 2 pianos and orchestra, reflecting his coaching on the Paris Conservatory — is among the many biggest works of the French composer, conductor and pianist, who died in 2019.
And whereas different Legrand film scores (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “Summer season of ’42,” “Yentl”) and in style songs (“The Windmills of Your Thoughts,” “What Are You Doing the Remainder of Your Life?”) could also be extra well-known, “The Go-Between” is taken into account amongst his masterpieces. He typically carried out the whole 21-minute suite in live performance, taking part in one of many pianos himself.
Context is every thing. Legrand designed the music particularly for “The Go-Between.” It’s a highly effective presence all through the 1971 movie as an impressionable schoolboy (Dominic Guard) delivers love notes from an aristocratic girl (Christie) to a tenant farmer (Bates), finally resulting in tragedy.
This, in fact, has nothing to do with “Could December,” loosely based mostly on the true Nineties story of a schoolteacher who had an affair with a sixth grader; Moore performs the girl and Natalie Portman is the actress who’s about to play her in a film.
Repurposing movie music — particularly basic movie music — is rarely a good suggestion. When Michel Hazanavicius did it in “The Artist,” inserting Bernard Herrmann’s music from “Vertigo” in opposition to a climactic scene, an outraged Kim Novak ran an advert in Selection declaring: “I need to report a rape. I really feel as if my physique, or no less than my physique of labor, has been violated.”
She was voicing the complaints of 1000’s of movie buffs who have been distracted, mystified and irritated by the presence of music that was created for, and is inextricable from, Hitchcock’s masterpiece. As one critic acknowledged on the time, “It yanks you out of 1 movie and locations you within the mindset of one other.”
Sci-fi buffs are nonetheless irritated, 44 years later, about Ridley Scott’s unlucky selection to make use of excerpts from Jerry Goldsmith’s 1963 rating for “Freud” in “Alien,” as an alternative of the brand new rating Goldsmith had written for him.
“Could December” director Todd Haynes has benefited enormously from the advantageous music that composers have written for him prior to now. Elmer Bernstein’s music for “Far From Heaven” and Carter Burwell’s for “Carol” have been Oscar-nominated, and Burwell’s music for “Mildred Pierce” received an Emmy.
And the irony of the “Could December” rating is that, when composer Marcelo Zarvos is allowed to depart from the Legrand music, that music is efficient. Had the remainder of the rating been authentic, it might have felt prefer it belonged solely to the movie — not an off-putting, second-hand use of music.
Stanley Kubrick’s well-known use of classical music excerpts in “2001: A House Odyssey” is one thing else. These items weren’t designed as a creative aspect of one other movie and didn’t have prior cinematic associations.
Composers craft their scores particularly for the story at hand; it’s a fee for an authentic piece of labor — on this case, Legrand’s was an excellent rating. It shouldn’t be handled as some type of a commodity to be purchased, offered and traded round.
All that does is cheapen the brand new movie. Like carrying any person else’s underwear.
