Listening to Stanley Kubrick (7 page)

On the soundtrack to the film, the resemblance to the earlier cue is not as obvious, but on a compilation album of themes from Kubrick’s films (made by the Prague Philharmonic), the similarity is eerie. There is something elemental about this cue and the one from
Fear and Desire
that for Fried must have symbolized the fear of war, a fear that encroaches relentlessly upon one’s sanity.

As the men on the night patrol grow more anxious, the timpani part changes slightly and also becomes twice as fast. A fourth musical element of the scene are rolls on the snare drum (there are actually two snares, one with snares on and one with them off), which are added to the cue, while the percussion of weapons—guns, grenades, and explosions—seamlessly becomes part of the texture. Corporal Paris, the third man in the night patrol, continues looking for the missing man after Roget retreats. The cue ends with a shot of the dead body of the missing member of the night patrol. The startling discovery is accompanied by a jarring roll on a hanging cymbal. The cue is very effective, although the Prague recording reveals unheard instruments and musical gestures that one can easily miss in the film.

In
Paths of Glory
, scenes with dialogue, in particular, are given no underscore, although there are two exceptions. At the beginning of the film, General Mireau walks through the trench, stopping to ask different soldiers if they are “ready to kill more Germans.” While he walks, rolls on the snare drum accompany his movements. When he stops to speak, the drum stops as well. And then there is the scene of the conversation between Colonel Dax and Major General Broulard. Dax has come to Broulard’s house to plead once again for the lives of his men. While they speak, waltzes from a party at Broulard’s house are heard softly in the background. Here the Johann Strauss waltz
Künsterleben
(“Artist’s Life”), from 1867, forms a stark contrast between the cruel percussion of the battlefield and the opulent surroundings of the commanding officers. We see General Broulard dancing at his party while we know that the men are sleeping in the trenches, cold, filthy, and scared. Kubrick does not explicitly make this comparison by cutting between the two scenes, but it is not a far stretch to realize how different the life of a solider is as opposed to the life of the general.

The execution scene features the bass and snare drum, playing an unceasing cadence that begins as the condemned men walk to the execution and continues through to the priest’s final blessing. It stops just before Lieutenant Roget calls “Ready, aim, fire!” There is one more important musical moment in the film, and it is an extremely powerful and emotional one. It was an invention of the screenwriters (although there was some disagreement about who should take credit for the final decision). After the execution, Colonel Dax returns to the men and finds them in a café, watching some entertainment. A young German woman is there, her face wet with tears, humiliated and scared as the host asks her to sing. She begins singing “The Faithful Hussar.” The German folk song, likely dating from the early nineteenth century, speaks of a faithful soldier who travels only to return home when he hears that the woman he loves is sick. There are two musical phrases in the tune. The first phrase consists of the pick-up measure (the first measure is not a complete three beats), three full measures, and the first note of the fourth measure. The first two lines of each verse are sung to this phrase. The second phrase is actually made up of a repeated smaller phrase (starting in the middle of m. 4 and repeating in the middle of m. 8); the last two lines of the verse are meant to be repeated in this second phrase.

Traditionally, there are many verses to the song, but the character sings only the following three (and then repeats the first two):
41

The young woman sings (she is billed as Susanne Christian, but she was Christiane Harlan, who was to become Kubrick’s third wife), and at first the men are shouting and catcalling and it is difficult to hear her. As she continues, however, the men become quiet and begin to listen. They do not know the words to the song, but they seem to know the tune, and soon they are singing along with her. Tears fall down the faces of some of the men who are watching, matching the tears of the woman.

Outside the café, Dax listens to them, his face softening for the first time in the film. It is as if music, particularly melody, is the humanity that the men have forgotten out on the battlefield. As they share the music, singing the melody in unison, they momentarily cease to be soldiers, and the line between French and German is blurred. Kubrick and Fried have made these final moments of the narrative especially powerful because they have withheld melody for the majority of the film. Besides
La Marseillaise
at the opening credits and the diegetic waltz of General Broulard’s party, the only musical elements we have heard are drum rolls and the percussive cues of the night patrol scene. We the viewers—and these characters—have been starved for melody and starved for humanity. Kubrick gives us both in this final moment, and it is all the more sweet because we have been deprived of them. An orchestrated version of “The Faithful Hussar” accompanies the credits. In his book about the music of Kubrick’s films, Gerrit Bodde says this about the music in
Paths of Glory
:

We can assume that Kubrick wanted to create this interpretation of the film: France’s power and glory (as shown in the main title theme) has a high price, which is paid by the soldiers. This is shown through the cinematic action, in the disconsolate mood of the soldiers’ celebration, and through the end titles).
42

The choice of a mostly percussion score was made by both Kubrick and Fried, who said: “Now Stanley had a kind of harsh, bleak vision of life, and taking the tonality out of the music, having an all-percussion score would be just a natural.” After viewing the film in recent years, Fried almost seemed to regret the decision from a humanitarian point of view: “By taking away the tonality of the music, it was as if I had abandoned them, and I took away their humanity. I stranded them out there with no underscoring except bleak percussion. And I felt terrible.”
43

After this, Kubrick didn’t jump directly into using preexistent music; he still had
Spartacus
and
Lolita
ahead of him, but perhaps he was beginning to see the possibilities in using other sources for his scores. Kubrick and Fried would never work together again, but remained friends. It’s unlikely that Fried would have worked with Kubrick again, even if he had been asked. In recent years, Fried described the difficulty of his collaboration with the director:

He liked the first score, it was very effective and it did the job. Second score he began to get more ideas about music and then he became more demanding about certain things, and by the third score, we were already arguing. The fourth and fifth score, there were knockdown battles. But by that time, he had developed a taste and a style and he was a hard guy to argue with. . . . At the beginning, it was easy, I went my own way, but by . . .
Paths of Glory
, I had to justify every note.
44

Furthermore, Kubrick and Fried were philosophically opposed on the issue of preexistent music in film. Fried believed that classical music took the viewer out of the film experience, especially if the music was well known. In addition to that, he has said: “[Preexistent music] doesn’t support the picture because it wasn’t written for the picture.”
45
Kubrick, on the other hand, believed that preexistent music was a viable source for scores, especially because he saw the quality of that music overshadowing that of newly written scores:

However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart, or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? . . . With a little more care and thought these
temporary
tracks can become the final score.
46

Gerald Fried went on to a very successful career writing scores for both television and films. His philosophy of scoring, and his ability to work quickly, made him ideally suited for the job. Fried describes the highlights of his career as the score for the iconic television mini-series
Roots
(Quincy Jones began the score, writing a portion of it before Fried was brought in to complete the work), his work on the Kubrick films, and his work for the original
Star Trek
television show. One of his cues for that particular program, fight music for a battle in which Kirk and Spock must fight to the death (in an episode called “Amok Time”),
47
has entered popular culture as definitive dramatic (perhaps melodramatic) fight music.
48
In 2012, Fried was still composing, working on a musical (for which he wrote the script, music, and book), and living in New Mexico.

Notes

1. “Kids at a Ball-Game,”
Look,
October 16, 1945; “Dixieland Jazz Is ‘Hot’ Again,”
Look,
June 6, 1950; “Montgomery Clift . . . Glamour Boy in Baggy Pants,”
Look,
July 19, 1949. A collection of these clippings is housed at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London.

2. Mildred Stagg, “Quiz Kid,”
The Camera,
December 6, 1949, 152.

3. Raymond Fielding,
The March of Time: 1935–1951
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 63.

4. Kubrick had also done another day-in-the-life piece in
Look
on boxer Rocky Graziano in its February 14, 1950, issue.

5. United States Coast Guard website,
http://www.uscg.mil/history/img/Sailors_All_Poster.jpg
.

6. “This Is America: They Fly with the Fleet,”
Internet Movie Database
,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346020/
.

7. Quoted in John Baxter,
Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (
New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997), 37.

8. Vincent LoBrutto,
Stanley Kubrick: A Biography
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 68.

9. LoBrutto,
Stanley Kubrick
, 64.

10. LoBrutto,
Stanley Kubrick
, 67.

11. Email to the author, 5 April 2012.

12. Fleischer was editor in chief of
Ring Magazine
from 1929 to 1972.

13. Fried himself was a woodwind player (oboe), and much of his film music relies on the woodwinds to carry melody.

14. Kubrick apparently gave Cartier the dog, hoping to add a “human interest” element. LoBrutto,
Stanley Kubrick
, 61.

15. Kubrick later discussed having to do reshoots because Cartier knocked Bobby James out too quickly.

16. “The Seafarers,”
Internet Movie Database
,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045130/synopsis
.

17. From the Associated Press: “A 22-Year-Old Producer Makes Real Films for Fun and Profit,”
New York Journal-American
, December 27, 1950.

18. Interview with Joseph Gelmis, “The Film Director as Superstar,”
The Kubrick Site
,
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html
.

19. LoBrutto,
Stanley Kubrick
, 80–81.

20. Review of
Fear and Desire
,
New York Post
, March 9, 1953.

21. Frank Quinn,
New York Mirror
, no date, clipping.

22. Letter from Mark van Doren to Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick Archive, University of the Arts London.

23. John McCarten, Review of
Fear and Desire
,
New Yorker,
April 11, 1953, 128,
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1953-04-11#folio=128
.

24. The character’s name is later revealed to be MacClellan, perhaps a reference to Civil War general George McClellan, who was a brilliant man but a poor judge of his abilities on the battlefield. He was removed from his command by Lincoln because he twice missed the opportunity to not only end the Civil War but win it.