Read Listening to Stanley Kubrick Online
Authors: Christine Lee Gengaro
The next day, Bill goes to his office and sees patients while Alice takes care of the Harfords’ daughter, Helena. That evening, Bill and Alice smoke pot and talk about Ziegler’s party. In the course of this conversation Bill claims that women don’t think about cheating, but Alice confesses that on vacation the previous year she was tempted by a handsome naval officer. A phone call interrupts their conversation and Bill leaves to go the house of a patient who has just died. The patient’s daughter, Marion, professes love for Bill, but their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of her fiancé. Bill leaves and meets Domino, a prostitute who invites Bill to her apartment. Their first kiss is interrupted by a call from Alice, who is wondering when Bill is coming home. He tells her it’ll be a while, but leaves Domino’s apartment anyway. Arriving at the Sonata Café, Bill meets up with Nick who is just finishing his last set of the night. Mentioning another gig in a mysterious location, Nick tells Bill he can’t bring him along. Bill knows the password, but Nick tells him he would also need a costume and mask.
Bill arrives at Rainbow Fashions and convinces the proprietor, Mr. Millich, to rent him a tuxedo, a cloak, and a mask. While they are looking for an appropriate outfit, Millich finds his teenaged daughter fooling around with two older Japanese men. Outraged, he threatens to call the police and locks the men in a room. After a long drive, Bill arrives at Somerton mansion in a taxicab. Once inside, he dons his mask and cloak and observes a ritual set to Nick’s music. At the end of the ritual, nearly naked women choose partners from the masked partygoers. One seems to know Bill, and she urges him to leave. Bill walks around the party, observing couples and threesomes engaging in sex acts, although he does not join in. Again the woman appears and urges Bill to leave, but before he can, a man leads him back to the main room where the original ritual took place. The partygoers have assembled there for a trial of sorts where Bill is unmasked and then asked to undress. Bill tries to refuse, but the tribunal insists. The mysterious woman intercedes on his behalf and Bill is allowed to leave.
Bill returns home and finds Alice having a nightmare. When he wakes her, she tells him about the dream, in which she had sex with the naval officer and many other men and laughed at Bill as he watched them. The next day Bill attempts, unsuccessfully, to find Nick. The hotel clerk informs him that a frightened Nick was taken away by two large men early in the morning. Bill returns the cloak and tuxedo to Mr. Millich, but finds the mask is missing. Mr. Millich, who kindly says goodbye to the Japanese men from the previous night who are just now leaving, makes it clear that his young daughter is also available for rent. Bill drives out to the mansion again, but is given a typed letter asking him to leave off his inquiries. Returning to the city, Bill briefly stops at home but returns to the office in the evening. He tries to call Marion, but hangs up when her fiancé answers. Stopping by Domino’s apartment, he finds she is not there. The woman in the apartment tells Bill Domino might not be coming back since she is HIV positive.
Bill walks the streets of Greenwich Village but notices he is being followed. Facing down the man, Bill ducks into a café. He reads a story in the newspaper about Amanda Curran, an ex–beauty queen who overdosed and is in critical condition. Thinking she is the woman who offered herself in his place at the orgy, Bill goes to the hospital and poses as her doctor. Informed by the receptionist that Amanda Curran died that afternoon, Bill is taken to the morgue to see the body. As he’s leaving, he receives a call asking him to come to Ziegler’s house. There, Ziegler explains that he was at the orgy and that the ad hoc trial was staged to get him to leave. He also tells Bill that the woman who interceded on his behalf was in fact Mandy from Ziegler’s Christmas party. Ziegler assures Bill that she left the party safely and that her death really was a drug overdose.
Bill returns home to find the mask on the pillow next to Alice. He breaks down crying and wants to confess everything to her. The next morning, they take their daughter Christmas shopping at F.A.O. Schwarz. While Helena looks at toys, the Harfords decide that the events of the last few days—and even the last few years—do not tell the full story, but they should be grateful to have survived their adventures. Alice adds that they should “fuck” as soon as possible.
Appendix C
Soundtracks and Track Lists
Note: Wherever possible, tracks are listed as they are appear on album or CD covers, even when the information is erroneous. If the information originated from a vinyl record album, side listings (A and B or 1st and 2nd) have been retained.
Commercial Availability of Soundtracks
The soundtracks to Kubrick’s first feature films
—
Fear and Desire
,
Killer’s Kiss
,
The Killing
, and
Paths of Glory
—were not released to the public. The first Kubrick film to have a commercially available soundtrack was
Spartacus
. The album—which featured only some of the cues in the film—was released in 1960 on the Decca label. The
Lolita
soundtrack followed in 1962. In addition to an album of music, there was also a pop single released on 45. For
Dr. Strangelove
, Kubrick released a 45 rpm single; side A was the Laurie Johnson Orchestra playing the
Theme from Dr. Strangelove
, and the B side featured a song called “Love That Bomb.”
1
The film also re-popularized the World War II–era tune made famous by English singer Vera Lynn, “We’ll Meet Again.”
The initial soundtrack offering from MGM for the film
2001: A Space Odyssey
featured the preexistent classical excerpts that Kubrick used in the film, omitting Ligeti’s
Aventures
, including a longer cue from his
Lux Aeterna
, and substituting a different version of
Also Sprach Zarathustra
than was heard in the film. It received many favorable reviews including four stars from
Billboard
magazine.
2
It was commercially successful, certified platinum (selling over one million units), and it introduced many people to the works of Richard Strauss and Györgi Ligeti.
Film Score Monthly
said of the soundtrack: “Its legacy in pop culture is nearly incalculable.”
3
For the week ending 19 April 1969, the top two albums on the Billboard Classical LP list were Wendy Carlos’s
Switched on Bach
at number one (twenty-one weeks on the chart), and the soundtrack to
2001: A Space Odyssey
in the second position (thirty-six weeks on the chart). At number seventeen on the same list was
Selections from 2001: A Space Odyssey
, which was a compilation of music from the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic (thirty-five weeks on the chart).
4
The latter album was produced to capitalize on the great commercial success of the
2001
soundtrack.
In a 1996 re-release of the score (TCM/Rhino), the version of
Also Sprach Zarathustra
used by Kubrick (conducted by von Karajan) was included, as was Ligeti’s
Aventures
, which had been altered for the film. There are also four supplemental tracks on the re-release: the version of
Zarathustra
on the original soundtrack album,
Lux Aeterna
in its entirety (as it appeared on the original MGM release), the unaltered version of
Aventures
, and Douglas Rain’s performance of HAL’s dialogue (see complete track list below).
The score to
A Clockwork Orange
featured the work of Wendy Carlos, whose previous album
Switched on Bach
went platinum and won three Grammy Awards in 1970. The
Clockwork Orange
soundtrack was also very popular, going gold and reaching number two on the Billboard Classical LP chart on 1 July 1972. It was ninety-seven on the Top LPs list the same week.
5
In March of 1972, both the score for
A Clockwork Orange
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
charted together, with
2001
in the fourth position and
A Clockwork Orange
at eighteen.
6
The soundtrack’s highest position on the Billboard Top 100 was at number thirty-four.
The
A Clockwork Orange
soundtrack presents both the synthesized cues that Carlos created—Henry Purcell’s
Funeral Music for Queen Mary
and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—and traditional orchestral versions of other classical cues. There are also a few songs that are heard in the film, and there is an excerpt from Carlos’s original composition,
Timesteps.
The success of the soundtrack to
A Clockwork Orange
, which spent thirty-one weeks on the Billboard Top 100,
7
inspired Wendy Carlos to revisit the material; three months after the soundtrack to
A Clockwork Orange
debuted, Carlos released
Walter Carlos’ Clockwork Orange
, a collection of music that was intended for the film but which was not finished or had not been used by Kubrick. This album spent nine weeks on the Billboard chart.
8
Carlos issued a re-mastered edition of this album, now called
A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos’s Complete Original Score,
in 1998.
The soundtracks to the later films that featured preexistent music,
Barry Lyndon
,
The Shining
,
Full Metal Jacket
, and
Eyes Wide Shut
, were all commercially available, although none of them experienced the same kind of success as the scores for
2001
and
A Clockwork Orange
. The soundtrack to
The Shining
was commercially available only for a very short time; the album was pulled soon after its release over copyright problems and has not been available since 1980.
In recent years, there have been two compilation soundtracks commercially available featuring music from Kubrick’s films, including cues from
Day of the Fight
,
Fear and Desire
,
Killer’s Kiss
,
The Killing
, and
Paths of Glory.
The first of these compilations was called
Dr. Strangelove: Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick
. It was recorded by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and released in May of 1999 by Silva America, a couple of months before
Eyes Wide Shut
premiered (and a couple of months after the death of Stanley Kubrick). This is the track list from that compilation:
Dr. Strangelove: Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick
(1999, Silva America)
There was also another compilation released at the end of 1999 called
Eyes Wide Shut: Music from Stanley Kubrick Movies
. It was recorded by and released by Golden Stars Holland. This album omits any tracks from Gerald Fried and instead includes, among other things, extra cues for
Eyes Wide Shut
, a different clip from Beethoven’s Ninth, and Elgar’s
Pomp and Circumstance
(both from
A Clockwork Orange
).
Eyes Wide Shut: Music from Stanley Kubrick Movies
(1999, Golden Stars Holland)
In 2005, Silva issued a second compilation of Kubrick’s music, this time including the Shostakovich Waltz from
Eyes Wide Shut
and Alex North’s “Love Theme” from
Spartacus.
This album omits “Surfin’ Bird,” “Midnight, the Stars, and You,” and “We’ll Meet Again.” Silva also changed the name of the compilation to
2001: Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick.
The track list differs slightly from the original compilation:
2001: Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick
(2005, Silva America)
Chapter 2: Complete Track Lists
Spartacus: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
(1960, MCA )
Lolita: The Original Soundtrack Recording
(1962, MGM)
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Other Great Movie Themes
(1954, Colpix)