How to Watch a Movie (14 page)

Those anecdotes only scratch the surface. In so many countries where subtitling is reckoned to be a deterrent to audiences, all the dialogue is dubbed. Sometimes this is done with great skill so that a voice actor may be a great star in Spain or Italy for several decades. But if we treasure real voices—if we would be inclined to place that attribute very high in any estimate of John Wayne, Margaret Sullavan, James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck, Jeanne Moreau, or Jean-Paul Belmondo—then dubbing is an alteration of human nature, and one that is still taken for granted.

Dubbing, or looping, is also a way of rewriting, or heightening films. Dialogue can be recorded at the moment of shooting, but there are so many factors that can make that original sound quality less than perfect. So wild tracks are a source of guidance in postproduction, and a preparation for the careful building of the sound track later. That begins with the dialogue, where the players come to a sophisticated sound studio and record the words in time with their own moving lips—
unless the picture needs to alter its dialogue for some story reason: then the sharp-eyed viewer may notice that the picture goes out of synch for a moment or two. Most of the time is spent getting the actors to deliver their best reading, or acting, of the dialogue, and to give their voice the proper aural placement.

In the early years of sound, the talk was uniform and restricted. It seemed to be emerging from too much white noise or through a mesh of interactive brushes. You could hear the furtive noises of a studio and sometimes the bumps of filmmaking. Nowadays, we expect not just high fidelity (being able to hear what is said) but the ideal aural-emotional context for the words. That means telling indoors from the open air, knowing the size of the room, or the emotional scale of the action, and gauging the various kinds of room tone or supernatural presence in the sound. In the films of David Lynch—in
Blue Velvet
and
Mulholland Dr
.—rooms and corridors have their sound signature. On top of, or beneath that, there may be a hum or a grind that can hardly be translated into words, but which surely affects our response to what is going on. Some creature or machine is breathing.

Once upon a time, sound was credited to a recordist, but now it has its designers, as befits a new kind of décor. Presence or effects are not new. But the sophistication in recording technology has made great progress—so long as the various theaters, our television sets, or our computers can match it. I have been present at sound mixes in the best studios in America and heard variations in aural pressure or stealthy presence that I have never heard again in regular commercial outlets. Today a sound designer wants to know whether the wind required in a film is a mounting storm in Mongolia, the tropic winds in
Hawaii, or the nagging Santa Ana of mental disorder. It may be real wind recorded by a field unit, or it may be an actor blowing into a box.

You never know what will work—but you know not to trust the real thing. Sound effects are negotiable items—like the sound of Cary Grant's battered top hat thumping against Katharine Hepburn's silky bottom in
Bringing Up Baby
to protect her exposed panties from view and humiliation. Was that recorded on set, or was it a Hawksian joke discovered later in bursting a small paper bag? A sound designer has an ear for nature and real life, of course, but he does not rely on that. He listens as carefully as the spectator must learn to do.

In 1982, Robert Towne wrote and directed a film,
Personal Best
, in which two Olympic-caliber athletes (played by Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Townsend) become lovers. The film would have many sequences of the women running, and Towne was anxious to get the right sound of feet on the track. Recording units were sent here and there to running tracks in Oregon and California, but it was not easy to record a runner running. When the microphone moved, the sound level fluctuated. Towne was close to giving up on his idea of perfection when one day, in the postproduction studio, someone dropped a full reel of 35 mm film. The coils of film went flap-flap-flap. It was the sound the team had been looking for, and because the reel of film was stationary, each flap was like another. In other words, it was running as it sounded to a runner. No one claimed that it sounded precisely like running. But it worked on the sound track. It sounded right.

Yet sometimes sounding wrong is right. At a critical juncture in
The Godfather
, Michael Corleone goes to meet his enemies, Sollozzo and McCluskey, in a neighborhood Italian restaurant.
They have come close to murdering Michael's father, Vito, and the son wants vengeance. The Corleone family have contrived to hide a loaded gun in the lavatory cistern at the restaurant. It is a pleasant place, with a small group of diners. “Try the veal,” says Sollozzo. “It's the best in town.” Perhaps, but surely that kind of modest yet distinguished restaurant would not tolerate the periodic din of a subway train running just below it? Yet as Michael emerges from the lavatory and kills his enemies, the noise of the train rises by a factor of three or four. The loco now seems to be hurtling through the room. This is the device of the sound designer Walter Murch (he was credited as post-production consultant), and you can argue, reasonably, that the sound of the train is a measure of Michael's trepidation and our suspense. Spelled out like that, the device can seem calculating. But it worked in 1972. Today? Perhaps it begins to seem more cold-blooded, but that is a sign of how even the best films can become dated. And maybe we have seen
The Godfather
too many times—it is like a club for which we want to keep up our membership.

What matters in this example is the evidence that sound can be taken out of all proportion to make a uniquely cinematic effect, but one that is no more fanciful than a camera and its crew being there in the restaurant unnoticed, while a musical score plays in the air. I think it's clear that a restaurant as reputable as this one, and favored by these people, would not play music to encourage its diners to hurry—unless they had that much propensity for melodrama. That's where the subway train is inseparable from the music. (Of course, the restaurant will change after the double hit.)

The subway is a huge intrusion, but sound effects can be far smaller. Robert Bresson's
A Man Escaped
concerns a French
Resistance agent, Fontaine, who has been captured by the Gestapo. While anticipating torture or execution, he thinks of getting free. So he fashions a spoon to dig at crumbling masonry, and he has to listen for the muffled sounds of prison life that warn of guards. To hear the film and to share the man's plight is to become sensitive to all these small scraping noises. And it is not just elation, but aesthetic triumph, that when he is free at last the small noises are replaced by Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor.

Music was never too far from movies. Often, when emotional scenes were being shot, a silent production would have a violinist on set, or a trio, to set up a fitting mood for the actors. When we look at silent pictures, it is helpful to feel that some of the players are ecstatic or tormented in line with music they are hearing. Music, dance, and singing are some of the ways in which many people can lose their inhibitions. It may also account for the several set expressions of silent screen acting—beseeching, demanding, reacting, needing—a series of markedly outward signals, as opposed to the more inward acting that came when talking actors felt less pressing need to carry the message or spell out the action of a film.

That on-set music might be reproduced in theaters where a piano, an organ, a string quartet, or even a full orchestra played “suitable” or encouraging music for the film. If you've ever had the chance to watch a film with a veteran accompanist, someone who worked in the silent era, you will know that such practitioners possessed a repertoire of set-up tunes, emotional triggers, and standard refrains that covered most ordinary actions—walking, running, running away, pursuing, charging, riding to the rescue. It was a scheme that soon grew limited. A few films had composed scores—Hugo Riesenfeld
wrote an orchestral score for
Sunrise
, for instance—but that was an expense that could not be borne by a film as it traveled the country. Moreover, this accompaniment was visible, energetic, like performers in a play. The toiling musicians could not help but detract from the magic of a musical score that arose in the air without labor or strain, and was as essential and inexplicable as the light show itself. Among many other things, music on the sound track helped us believe we were alone with the miracle, with music unchosen by us, unbidden, but seeming like the natural companion to the actors and the action.

As on
Chinatown
, the people in charge of a film are at pains to get the music “right.” It's easy therefore to assume that they have been successful; Max Steiner's music for
Gone With the Wind
is as famous as the film, and redolent of movies in that era before the Second World War. In
Laura
, the picture is streamlined by David Raksin's lush theme which is now known as “Laura”—it was given lyrics later on by Johnny Mercer and it became a hit song. But suppose that in the film of
Laura
the song that kept playing had been “Long Ago (and Far Away),” by Jerome Kern. That was another 1944 song and it was written for the picture
Cover Girl
, where Rita Hayworth sang it to Gene Kelly. But it only seemed to be Hayworth. That fabulous dancer had a poor voice so she mimed to a recording by Martha Mears. But “Long Ago” would work in
Laura
, because both songs are written on the idea of a lost love or an occasion from the past.

As for Steiner's music for
Gone With the Wind
, it may be immortal, but why don't you play some parts of the film to the accompaniment of, say, Franz Waxman's music for
A Place in the Sun
, the slow movement from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, or even Louis Armstrong's “Potato Head Blues”?

That goes too far? I'm sure you're right. Still, you may be surprised and tickled at how well “Long Ago” and the Waxman work. And when the complacent Selznick era's views of black folks are put beside the blazing lyricism of Louis and the Hot Seven (1927), we have a history lesson on our plate. These wayward alternatives are not unhelpful. Edgar Ulmer's
Detour
(1945), a raffish noir classic, includes the song “I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me” (sung as it happens by Martha Mears), as well as some selections from Chopin. But try that macabre, ultra-economical movie about loathing and chance with Erik Satie's
Gymnopédies
(written in 1888), a sparse piece for lonely piano. The result is stunning, and somehow the trashy jewel of a film becomes an enigmatic, existential parable. How can such things be? The answer (and I will not claim that the method is unfailing) is that there is a natural affair (it's not a marriage—the illicit lurks) between the movies and music that has its roots in the word “melodrama.”

So you were ready to believe that film is one great ocean of visual material that requires the most careful attention? You thought it is about watching? But sound is a second ocean, hiding in the first.

I have left till last the thing announced in “the talkies”—human voices communing, snarling, or falling in love (if it's a Hawks film,
His Girl Friday
or
To Have and Have Not
, it's all three). It's still the case that some sound films take pride in doing without talk—as if an old purity has been regained. So critics and scholars honor the long silent robbery in
Rififi
, and they enjoy stories of John Ford ripping pages of fussy talk out of his scripts, or Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen refusing a line because they reckon they can carry it in their faces.

Those are fine moments, deserving of recognition. But be
wary if film culture and cinephilia ever seem to be hostile to talk for the sake of hostility, and in the cause of grim silence. One of my favorite stills is of Brando, Duvall, and Caan on the set of
The Godfather
. All seems normal, but Duvall wears a tabard-length white sheet on which Brando's lines are written out in capitals. So Brando is staring forward at Duvall's navel—and giving a great performance. Talk is rapture, and it is everyday: it is the insane linguistics of Abbott and Costello's “Who's on First?” and the mounting folly of Groucho talking to Chico—antipathy enough to make us wonder why the Marx Brothers never became a gang to rival
Bonnie and Clyde
. Nearly as much as a modern talksmith, Aaron Sorkin, I love the times in Hawks's pictures when Bogart and Bacall, or Grant and Hepburn, fence with words. Whatever its moody aura of Los Angeles, with guns and cars and dames,
The Big Sleep
is our most audacious screwball comedy, with the greatest of telephone scenes. But don't let those estimates put you off
The Lady Eve
and
Sullivan's Travels, Midnight
and
My Man Godfrey
, or even
To Have and Have Not
, in which the flag of the Free French comes down in favor of innuendo and wise-cracks. To hear Rudy Vallee talk in
The Palm Beach Story
is to be close to heaven. To hear the chill politeness of Catherine Deneuve in
Belle de Jour
is to be there. What a couple she and Vallee would make.

After all, talk has the chance of intelligence, wit, and the attempt to speak to people. With those hopes, talk can be the surest way of handling the opposite sexes. In the verbal overdrive of Abraham Polonsky's
Force of Evil
, John Garfield's crooked lawyer could be speaking blank verse. I ache whenever the doomed but ardent voice of James Mason reaches up toward hope, whether as Humbert in
Lolita
or Johnny in
Odd
Man Out
. Quentin Tarantino is so besotted with movie talk that it often obscures his ignorance of life. I am happy to have talk brief and pungent, and many of us squirm at the spread of “small talk” about 1.2 seconds after it begins. In general, the more pained, sincere, and life-affirming a speech in a film the shorter time it will endure. I groan at Paul Muni getting ready to save the world, and I despair over the sermons in the films of Stanley Kramer, Frank Capra, and John Cassavetes. I never wanted to be among the people Ma Joad embraces at the end of
The Grapes of Wrath
, but I could listen forever to Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan bickering in
The Shop Around the Corner
. The only hope for a lasting relationship is argument, misunderstanding, and the ensuing comedy.