We celebrate Veterans Day today. Like millions of Americans, I have veterans on both sides of my family, deceased as well as living. They were, and are, all over various maps in their political convictions and personal beliefs regarding war and its casualties. I suspect the one thing they'd have in common is a love for Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Great Escape, because honestly -- hawks, doves, everyone in between -- who can resist such a rousing Hollywood tribute to sheer, valiant tenacity?
The war movie genre never was a single genre. Our stories of why we fight, and life back on the home front, are too expansive and varied to follow a single ideology or type of story.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a war movie. So is They Were Expendable. So is The Steel Helmet. And My Name Is Ivan. And The Green Berets -- God help us. And Inglourious Basterds. And Lebanon. Some you know; some you may not. The movies cited above defy a through-line. While most war movies tell us the fictions we crave, others, fewer of them, insist on a little bit of the truth.
We don't notice the music in a war movie if it sounds like every other musical score we've heard under similar circumstances. Or, in the case of the new World War II picture Hacksaw Ridge, if it's determined to wage sentimental war on our defenses. I'm sure Rupert Gregson-Williams meant well. But writing for Hacksaw Ridge, the composer settled for stating and restating the obvious emotions at play, piling a 36-person heavenly choir on top of his orchestral assault.
Avoiding cliches is no easy campaign in this genre. Film music, one of my favorite avenues of continuing education, has taught me that our best composers find the secrets in a character, a moment, a story, and unlock them for us. When that happens, the music lives on far beyond the end credits.
I've been listening to a lot of war movie music, in preparation for an hour-long program scheduled for broadcast at 7 p.m. today on Chicago's WFMT-FM, 98.7. (The program is available for streaming at wfmt.com.)
"The Film Score: Music for Veterans Day," produced by Matt DeStefano and hosted by yours truly, will feature music written for films depicting the Civil War (James Horner, Glory), World War I (Carl Davis, The Big Parade), the Vietnam War (Ennio Morricone, Casualties of War) and the hunt for Osama bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty, Alexandre Desplat).
A large part of the program revisits World War II, from The Best Years of Our Lives (Hugo Friedhofer) to Saving Private Ryan (John Williams). And, yes, Bernstein's Great Escape theme gets its due.
But there's one piece of music that really sticks with me. It has ever since I heard it coming out of a speaker hanging from the driver's-side window of my parents' Olds Vista Cruiser, parked at the Westgate Drive-In in Racine, Wis., 46 years ago.
The film? Patton. Jerry Goldsmith's score for that picture is guided by its main title theme, a fairly astonishing composition dividing George C. Scott's formidable, vainglorious general into three clashing personalities. We first hear repeated trumpet triplets, which sound like the battle cry of a slightly deranged leader. Goldsmith used what was called an "echoplex," electronically reverberating the trumpet lines via a tape-looping device.
The repeat-and-fade fanfare sounded mysterious, bordering on threatening. Patton believed in reincarnation. The movie, a compellingly ambiguous portrait speaking directly to a nation divided over the Vietnam War, gave Scott some juicy, reflective moments in which he spoke of his metaphysical connection to wars and warriors past.
Within seconds Goldsmith's title theme adds an organ chorale, suggesting Patton, the divinely inspired conqueror. Soon thereafter comes the conventionally stirring passage, the military march, which is still performed by high school and military bands around the country, and heard on U.S. military bases around the world.
Goldsmith is no rah-rah warmonger; the repeated trumpet echo, different notes each time, makes for an unsettling intrusion on the big parade. The three sides of Patton's personality co-exist, but discordantly. I never forgot the chills those "BA-dum-dum-BA-dum-dum" triplets gave me that night at the drive-in. Goldsmith's theme remains one of the most admired, examined and wondrous of all movie themes, not just war movie themes.
Here's another lesson from Patton. Director Franklin Schaffner's film runs nearly three hours. Goldsmith (Oscar-nominated for his original score) wrote just over a half-hour's worth of music for it. He didn't treat the assignment like a wallpapering job, the way many composers -- some on the order of John Williams, others a little lower down the chain -- prefer to work, saturating the picture with mood music.
Goldsmith's restraint makes us listen more intently. And the final four words spoken by Scott in this particular war film -- "all glory is fleeting" -- are unnecessary, really. The main title theme expresses the same idea wordlessly, in music that will echo down through the ages.
MovieStyle on 11/11/2016