Music at the Movies

Dear Ed,

Saturday afternoons when I was about ten, in 1949, I'd go to the matinee at what my mother called “the lower show.” Downstream on Main Street from "the upper (picture) show," it was not as nice (or clean, by then) as the newer theater a block to the east. It had seen much better days as an honest-to-god opera house, being architecture that most thought was much better than the art-deco movie palace up the street. This town that cherishes its status as "historic" regrets it tore down the theater once known as (and aptly so) the Grand. That decision was made when the river also was a sewer and the bank along the front of our town was a dump and an eyesore.

But when I went to the lower show as a pup it was the Saturday showplace for Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Sunset Carson, Allan (Rocky) Lane, Bob Steele, Wild Bill Elliott, Johnny Mack Brown, and Lash Larue—not to exhaust the list of B-oater stars.

My favorite, for some reason, was the “Durango Kid,” played by Charles Starrett, who was always “Steve” something when he wasn’t in his disguise, and his sidekick was Smiley Burnett, who was often as not named “Frog” because of his vocal tricks while singing along with the gentleman country band, which always did a number or two. I wonder if they were the ones who did the song that had the lyrics—

Oh what a face!
It’s a disgrace
To be showing it in any public face!

I remember that good-natured musical spoof about a homely woman—who was mercifully not present. Memory does not allow me to say which movie I heard that in, and I hope ASCAP won’t get after me for “publishing” those lyrics without permission. In retrospect, Smiley certainly had more talent than Starrett. And I was embarrassed when a few years ago I saw two of the Durango Kid movies. They were awful! I recall that I liked the music in some of them. It was awful! (Except for the gentleman country acoustic band playing a sort of Texas swing, and one orchestral passage I recall even now.)

Like a lot of other blog bullroar, this isn’t going much of anywhere, I suppose, but I wanted to talk about movie music. A passage of orchestral music from a Durango Kid movie I saw 55 years ago remains in my memory—it had a cantering rhythm, for three canters, followed by and blended in with two sustained notes, the second lower than the first, then followed by four quick notes, which skipped rather than cantered, then again the two long notes, then the four quick notes again, the canter continuing all the while underneath. The composer knew counterpoint, the work of people like Dimitri Kabalevsky, perhaps Shostakovich, I would guess, I being ignorant of music as a trained person but as a music-lover with a reasonably good listener’s ear, and the music is original to me—I’ve never heard anything like it since. This passage wasn’t in the two movies I saw as an old man, sorry to say. I think it was good music. Studios used a lot of “stock music,” I learned, some by composers such as the now eminent African American composer William Grant Still, and I would like to think it was he who composed that little figure that I liked so well that I would sit through three showings just to hear it.

And which prefigured my current love of classical music--Bach, Samuel Barber, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Hindemith, Elgar, Howard Hansen, and yes, of course, the excellent movie composers--Roy Webb (The Cat People), Rachel Portman (The Legend of Bagger Vance), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood), Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings) ... I can babble on, and since this is a blog not likely to be read by anybody much, probably will. Hope this is good bedtime reading for someone else besides me. Shalom.