Listening to Stanley Kubrick (5 page)

It’s an apt musical cue as it accompanies the letter, which speaks about Uncle George and Aunt Grace’s simple life on the farm. The theme seems to be musically related to Davey’s fanfare of the opening, both in terms of time signature and rhythmic gestures.

We hear the noise of the arena, as Davey gets ready for his fight, and then we cut to the dance club where Gloria works. The men and women in the club are dancing to a record (sourced on-screen), which is actually the swing band version of “Once.” The saxophone is in the lead with two trumpets, two trombones, piano, and bass to back it up. Fried writes over the saxophone solo: “with much jazz embellishment.” We see Gloria getting ready to work, changing her clothes, and then we cut to the arena, where Davey’s manager is applying Vaseline to Davey’s face and chest. Back at the dance club, “Once” is still playing, and Vince turns on the television to see Davey’s fight. The noise from the television covers the tune somewhat. Vince interrupts one of Gloria’s dances (and has the unsatisfied customer removed by his goons) so that she can watch her neighbor’s match.

As in
Day of the Fight
, there is no music to accompany the fight itself. Kubrick uses similar camera angles as he did on his first short, but also allows the camera to take on Davey’s perspective at one point. When he is knocked down, the camera thuds to the ground and “looks up” at the lights on the ceiling. After the fight, Vince kisses Gloria to the sound of some rhythmic Latin jazz. The scene fades to black and the sound of the music becomes absorbed into ambient city noise as Gloria walks home some undetermined time later. Fried’s use of Latin jazz to represent Rapallo stems from, among other things, Fried’s feeling that Latin rhythms are exciting and consequently build suspense.
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Davey sits alone in the silent dark of his apartment. When Gloria returns and turns her lights on, Davey watches her, the band version of “Once” playing in the background. Gloria is getting ready for bed. The song continues while Davey takes a phone call from Uncle George and plays until he turns off his light and goes to bed. Dissonant music accompanies his dreams, but he is woken up by a woman’s scream. He rushes to the window to find Gloria struggling with Vince. Although Davey runs to help her, Vince escapes to the sound of Latin jazz music, the same song we heard before. There is no apparent source for this music, it just appears when Vince comes out of Gloria’s door, and it fades away as Vince walks out of the scene. Gloria tells Davey what happened, in flashback: Vince knocks on Gloria’s door, the Latin jazz already playing before he walks in. He apologizes for what happened earlier (we don’t find out exactly what he’s done, but we can assume), but Gloria doesn’t want to hear it. She tells him to get out and threatens to scream if he doesn’t. When he won’t let her go, she does scream. Vince’s music ends with the flashback. Davey offers to sit with her while she sleeps. The orchestral version of “Once” plays as Davey looks around her apartment. The song ends as the scene fades to black.

Davey explains in a voiceover that he locked her door and went home, returning the next morning. Davey and Gloria are then seen eating breakfast and talking while the band version of “Once” plays under the voiceover. As the dialogue comes to the foreground, the song stops abruptly at the end of a phrase. Gloria tells Davey the story of her sister, Iris, a ballet dancer, and a new musical cue accompanies Iris’s dance.
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The music transforms into “Once” for a moment and then returns to the dance cue. At the end of Iris’ story, “Once” returns. A brief interlude—in which we revisit Davey in the train station, still waiting—features the sound of the station, but then we return to the courtship and to “Once.” The scene ends with Davey having professed his love for Gloria. They agree to go to Seattle to Davey’s uncle’s farm.

A new scene begins with Vince at the dance club, and his signature music is playing. Receiving word that Gloria is coming by to pick up her final paycheck, Vince is upset and throws an empty glass at the wall, effectively ending the scene and the musical cue. Back at the gym, Davey calls to ask his manager for the money from his last fight. Davey and his manager agree to meet in front of the dance hall. The scene changes to an evening in the city, with two Shriners dancing down the street, one of them playing “O Susanna” on the harmonica. As Gloria enters the dance hall, a slower version of “Once” plays, this time with a very jazzy piano in the lead. As Gloria crosses the dance floor, the melody is taken up by the trombone. Gloria’s departure is accompanied by “Once” in the saxophone. Vince’s music takes over as he sends his goons down to kill Davey. They accidentally kill Davey’s manager instead, and Vince’s music continues through the attack and afterward, as Davey and Gloria head home.

“Once” begins again as Davey packs, the melody in the violin. It fades away as Davey goes to Gloria’s apartment. Discovering she’s not there, Vince’s music starts up again, and Davey hears noise across the way. The police are looking for him in conjunction with the death of his manager. Davey goes back to the dance hall in order to follow Vince and hopefully find Gloria. No music accompanies this. Eventually, Davey pulls a gun on Vince, and Vince admits that the goons are holding Gloria captive in a loft. The loft is by the river, and the sounds of ship horns are heard, reminding us of Davey and Gloria’s impending journey, if only they can be together. The goons attack Davey and take his gun, and Gloria tells Vince she will go with him. Vince’s music starts up, but stops when Davey escapes through the window. As Davey runs away to find Vince again, Fried provides an atmospheric cue with percussive sounds that mingle with the sounds of boats on the waterfront. After being chased across rooftops, Davey goes into a loft full of mannequins. Fried’s cue “Murder ’mongst the Mannikins” begins to play. (On the original score sheets, Fried called this cue “Mannikin Weirdo #1.”) The spooky string glissandi bring to mind other atonal twentieth-century works from the classical tradition, and the tremolos add tension. Fried characterized the cue as an “eerie theme scored for high strings and muted brass, with an insistent undercurrent of drums.”
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The music, which has been growing louder and more insistent, stops when Vince grabs an ax off the wall. The only sound then is their struggle among the mannequins and the wail of a police siren. The sound of Vince’s scream as Davey stabs him with a hook dissolves into one of the train whistles.

Davey is waiting for Gloria, from whom he was separated in the aftermath of Vince’s death. Among all the sounds of the station, a lone violin plays the “Once” theme. Davey picks up his suitcases and begins to walk to his train. But then Gloria runs toward him, kissing him, and the words “The End” show up on the screen, as just a short phrase from Fried’s first cue (the boxing fanfare) plays to end the film. Even though they are never heard in the film, there are lyrics written by Norman Gimbel.

In March of 1947, Kubrick had done a feature in
Look
about Aqueduct Race Track. True to form, he focused more on spectators than the horses. In the pictures we see men in hats and overcoats, trackside, studying the racing form. Kubrick snapped a standing crowd multiple times, watching them follow the horses as they went by. He found a middle-aged woman, looking on intently, finger on her nose, racing form in her hand, a beaded oval purse hanging from her arm. In the aftermath of the races, Kubrick caught the men sweeping up the garbage of racing forms and losing tickets. In his collection of Kubrick’s photos for
Look
, Rainer Crone said of the feature, “Kubrick’s portrayal of a day at the track reveals a keen sense of individual pathos as well as the potential for mass hysteria that a public event on this scale could generate.”
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Kubrick chose the racetrack as the setting for his next film,
The Killing
(1956). This high-tension crime caper was based on a novel called
Clean Break
by Lionel White. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) devises a plot to steal two million dollars from a racetrack. To do this he assembles a team who will split the money after the heist. Johnny plans to take his share of the money and marry his girlfriend, Fay (Colleen Gray). His team consists of a betting teller, a cop, a sharp-shooter, the bartender at the track, and a wrestler. The men successfully steal the money, but the plan goes awry when the teller’s scheming wife (who found out about the plan from her callow husband) enlists her lover, Val, to steal the money after the heist is complete. Everyone ends up dead except for Johnny, who tries to take the money and escape with Fay. Fate intervenes, and the money ends up literally scattered to the winds.

Synopsis and Score Description for
The Killing

The score for
The Killing
overall has something in common with
Killer’s Kiss
, namely the use of semi-improvised popular music to represent a shady character. As mentioned above, in
Killer’s Kiss
, Latin jazz accompanies the appearances of the villain, Vince Rapallo. In
The Killing
, jazz and swing represent the scheming wife, Sherry Peatty, and her lover Val. One of Fried’s cues for the film is called “Val’s Mambo.” Bernd Schultheis suggested that in both films, jazz represents the element of conspiracy.
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In
Killer’s Kiss
and
The Killing
, it’s unclear how much of this music is actually heard by the characters, although fluctuations in volume suggest that the music may be playing perhaps on a radio in the background or behind a closed door.

There are many more musical cues in this film than in the previous, especially because there isn’t a signature tune like “Once” to make up the bulk of the score. There is a main musical theme of
The Killing
, and it is what Gerald Fried called his trademark: “a rhythmic clash of confrontation. I had half the orchestra playing a four figure. The other half of the orchestra played a three figure.” So over a steady four pattern in the bass drum and timpani, the strings and brass have their rhythmic clash. In this simplified version of the theme, the first violins are on the treble staff, and the trombones are on the bass staff.

The sonic discord between the three and the four patterns builds tension, and that, says Fried, “is what Stanley loved about that movie, you know. It had people on the edge of their chair from the beginning of the movie to the end.”
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Once the initial conflict of the opening theme resolves somewhat, the snare drum provides cadences under the woodwinds, who play a low repetitive melody. Muted brass horn calls with the snare rolls create a pseudo-militaristic sound. While the credits play on-screen, horses and their jockeys ride to the starting gate. As they pause, waiting for the start of the race, Fried ends the musical cue on a dissonant chord. The bell rings, the gate opens, and the horses run out. For a moment, we hear only the announcer and the sound of the horses running, but then those sounds fade into the background as a voiceover starts:

At exactly 3:45 on that Saturday afternoon in the last week of September, Marvin Unger was perhaps the only one among the hundred thousand people at the track who felt no thrill at the running of the fifth race. He was totally disinterested in horse racing, and held a life-long contempt for gambling. . . .

The man on-screen, Unger, will turn out to be a peripheral character in the story, although he does set the plot into motion. Low underscore, a fragment of the original theme, accompanies Unger giving both the betting teller and the bartender secret written messages about a clandestine meeting. Then we cut to patrolman Randy Kennan meeting a loan shark at a bar. Jazz piano provides the soundtrack for this meeting. Kennan can’t pay his debts, but promises that he’ll be flush with cash soon. The scene ends, and the jazz piano stops. The next scene takes place with Johnny Clay, “perhaps the most important thread in the unfinished fabric,” the voiceover explains. Upon his appearance, the main theme re-appears in a slower, more pensive version as he explains to Fay who will make up the team for the heist. The music softens as Fay and Johnny talk about the last five years they’ve been apart during Johnny’s incarceration. The same slow version of the opening theme moves upward into the string section and the high woodwinds. Played this way, the cue takes on the character of a love theme, albeit a dark and pensive one.