Seeing through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores (review)

Peter Franklin begins his book by asking: “Can Hollywood films that are rich in music, even saturated with it, also tell us something about music? Can they be credited with critical self-awareness?” (p. 3) The answer, if we believe Franklin, is unequivocally yes. To this end he explores the conventional distinction between “serious” and “entertainment” music, seeking to better understand the “Great Divide” between modernism and mass culture (Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide [London: Macmillan, 1988], viii–ix). The goal of this exploration is to place film music within the broader discourses of musicology. This part of his argument is a response to Marxist critiques of film music, most notably Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler’s Composing for the Films (originally published under Eisler’s name alone: New York: Oxford University Press, 1947; new edition, London: Athlone Press, 1994). Following Huyssen’s model of the “Great Divide,” gendered language—masculine modernism vs. feminine romanticism—is of particular interest to Franklin. Here he draws heavily on Heather Laing’s The Gendered Score (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007) and David Schroeder’s Cinema’s Illusions, Opera’s Allure (New York: Continuum, 2002). Taken as a whole, Seeing through Music presents a powerful argument about the relevance of film music to a broader understanding of twentieth-century music.

The selection of films discussed is rooted in a well-established canon of film scores such as Casablanca, Citizen Kane, King Kong, Psycho, and Rebecca. Consequently, Franklin assumes the reader is familiar with all of the films and he dispenses with any comprehensive approach to individual scores. While this presents little problem for film music scholars, it demands much of students or other readers less familiar with the standard film music repertoire. Unfortunately, Franklin relies on this canon without enough critical self-awareness. He acknowledges that almost all of the films represent the “feminine” genres of film noir, melodrama, and “weepies,” rather than the “masculine” westerns, action adventures, and gangster films (p. 3). But the question remains as to how representative these films are of broader practices in Hollywood. Many are early examples of auteur cinema, despite being produced in the Hollywood studio system, and all of them have exceptional scores. Most problematic is David Lean’s Brief Encounter (pp. 31–35), which was financed by J. Arthur Rank— who had a famously laissez-faire attitude toward his directors—and produced by Cineguild, the premiere art film studio in England during the 1940s and 1950s. The justification for including it is the prominence of Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s Second Piano Concerto, which links it directly to Franklin’s focus on that composer’s place on the “feminine” and “popular” side of Huyssen’s “Great Divide” (pp. 28–31). For a book about classic Hollywood film scores, Brief Encounter is simply too British to represent Hollywood.

Apart from the issue of film selections, the argument is consistently strong and provocative. The greatest strength is Franklin’s rereadings of familiar films and scores. In his analysis of Max Steiner’s first cue for King Kong, he expands Claudia Gorbman’s analysis of the same scene in Unheard Melodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Gorbman notes that as the ship is anchored off Skull Island, Jack and Fay—the film’s love interests—are below decks, while the rest of the crew is above listening to the islanders’ sacrificial rite. As the film cuts between the lovers and the crew, Steiner’s score accompanies only the lovers, ensuring that audiences recognize the budding romance. Gorbman identifies feminine qualities in the romantic music, which are interrupted by the musical silence of the crew’s masculine space. Franklin, on the other hand, argues that the score is not interrupted, but rather seems to be composed around the cuts, employing “extended equivalents of those Luftpausen . . . that Steiner would have been familiar with in the Viennese waltzes of his youth” (p. 66...