Listening to Stanley Kubrick (12 page)

When the scene changes, Quilty’s theme appears briefly, as does Quilty himself. Bernd Schultheis suggests that his theme “creates an atmosphere known from crime stories.”
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Quilty speaks to the manager of the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, Mr. Swine, but walks off when Lolita and Humbert enter to the strains of “Lolita Ya-Ya.” Quilty recognizes Lolita and listens to the conversation between Humbert and Mr. Swine. The song continues as they go to their room with its single bed. Humbert explains that they may have to share lodgings while they travel and then leaves her alone in the room and goes downstairs for a drink. Music, a jaunty little upbeat number, which sounds like it’s coming from a room off the lobby, continues under a scene in which Humbert has a conversation with Quilty. Quilty, who keeps his face averted, tells Humbert he’s a policeman and elicits details about Humbert and Lolita’s travels.

The scenes in the hotel room following the meeting with Quilty unfold with no underscore. There is a comical interlude in which Humbert and a bellhop try to put up a cot in the room without waking Lolita. In the morning, Lolita asks Humbert if he’d like to play a game. Not being sure what she means, he plays dumb until she explains (she whispers in his ear). In the car later that day, presumably after the physical relationship between Lolita and Humbert has begun, he tells her that Charlotte has died. The news is not accompanied by any music. But when Humbert comforts her and tells her they will go to Beardsley College and live there, a quiet version of the love theme plays, the melody in the high woodwinds.

A brief musical cue provides the transition from the road to Beardsley in Ohio. Humbert tells us in voiceover that “six months have passed” and that Lolita is now attending a good school. In Lolita’s bedroom, Humbert is at the foot of the bed, painting her toenails (an echo of the opening of the film, although there is no music this time). They argue about her friends and her after-school activities. The next cue appears in the next scene; it is the brief opening of Quilty’s theme as Humbert arrives home to find Dr. Zempf (Quilty in disguise) waiting there for him. During the course of the scene, in which Dr. Zempf convinces Humbert to let Lolita participate in the school play, there is no underscore.

The next scene takes place at Lolita’s school, at the performance of Quilty’s play “The Hunted Enchanters” (a reversal of the name of the hotel, the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, where Quilty by chance met up with Humbert). Again, there is another bit of Quilty’s theme, as we see him, undisguised, exchanging a glance with Lolita before her last entrance on-stage. The end of the play and the ensuing argument between Lolita and Humbert has no underscore.

A lively cue transitions from Beardsley to the road, as Lolita and Humbert take off on a trip. The cue becomes more sinister and minor as Humbert’s voiceover reveals that they are being followed. The music becomes tense as Humbert sees Lolita talking to a person in a strange car. The music is in a minor key, with pizzicato strings and tremolos. Gerrit Bodde describes the cue as “bumpy,” suddenly changing pace from the lively music of the road trip.
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Lolita becomes ill and Humbert takes her to a hospital. Humbert, who soon falls ill himself, receives a mysterious phone call (from Quilty), which prompts Quilty to pick her up from the hospital in the night. Upon finding out that she has left earlier in the evening with an uncle, Humbert becomes belligerent. The love theme appears low in the orchestra, creeping up, as Humbert realizes that he has lost Lolita. As he leaves the hospital, dejected, the music gains prominence, the piano solo taking over. The cue ends on an unresolved cadence, as if to reflect that things are up in the air.

A few years have passed, and Lolita—now married and pregnant—types up a letter to Humbert, asking for money. The next scene begins with a determined cue for muted brass, percussion, and string tremolos, which accompanies exteriors of the car driving to Lolita’s house. When he parks, Humbert takes a gun out of the glove compartment. It is a tense, repetitive cue, echoing Humbert’s sense of purpose. Humbert presses Lolita for answers about how and why she disappeared, and a slow, dreamy version of the love theme accompanies her explanation about her affair with Quilty. The music ends as Lolita’s husband, Dick, comes in from the backyard. But the love theme begins again when Humbert asks Lolita to come with him. She refuses, and as he runs from the house, the theme surges louder on the soundtrack, and suddenly we see the misty foggy road from the opening of the film. The cue, which becomes thornier and more dissonant as Humbert walks through the mess of Quilty’s house, ends as Humbert calls out for Quilty. The dissonant version of the cue continues over the epilogue, which states that Humbert died in prison awaiting trial. The theme ends in a minor key, reflecting the tragic ending. The epilogue says nothing about what happens to Lolita. In the film, we must imagine that she and Dick have paid off their debts (with the money Humbert provided) and moved to Alaska. In the novel, however, we are told in the foreword by the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., that Humbert dies awaiting trial and that Lolita died giving birth to a stillborn child just a few months after Humbert’s visit.

The soundtrack to
Lolita
performs a number of dramatic tasks. The two recurring musical ideas—“Lolita Ya-Ya” and the love theme—illustrate the natures of the two protagonists. “Lolita Ya-Ya” is the musical representation of Lolita the character—at least as she is at the beginning of the film. It is simple, repetitive, and there’s not much to it. However, it can also be viewed as a symbol of her youth, her girlhood. Tellingly, it pauses just as Charlie enters at Camp Climax; he is the young man to whom Lolita has lost her virginity. If “Lolita Ya-Ya” is a symbol of her purity, it retreats when Charlie appears. Once the physical relationship is consummated between Humbert and Lolita, the song is not heard again, because Lolita’s girlhood is gone. By contrast, Bob Harris’s love theme is Humbert’s
idealization
of Lolita. It is the sound of a grand love story written in the stars. It is Humbert’s fantasy, and as he sees this fantasy crumble and his last hope gone, the love theme collapses into dissonance.

Kubrick understood the power of music to elicit emotion from the audience, and he also knew that music could help his actors. Just as he played music for Woody Strode and Kirk Douglas on the set of
Spartacus
(and would later play Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
for the young actor in
The Shining
), Kubrick also played music on set for Sue Lyon in
Lolita
. A blurb in the
Journal-American
explains that the director played Sinatra albums during rehearsals to help Lyon get into the proper emotional mood for certain scenes.
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The soundtrack to
Lolita
offered Kubrick his first opportunity to financially capitalize on the music from a film. Bob Harris’s “Love Theme for Lolita” entered the charts in a couple of versions, and it was such a hit that the
New York Post
reported that legendary classical pianist Van Cliburn was going to record a piano version of it: his first “popular” recording.
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At some press screenings (and even some public premieres) paper disks of songs from the soundtrack were given to attendees. An ad for the film in a Philadelphia paper touted, “To the first 500 patrons, souvenir recordings of the smash hit ‘Lolita Ya-Ya.’” Kubrick’s view of music in his films was changing, and
Lolita
was an important step on this musical journey.

Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
was Kubrick’s next project. Adapted from a novel called
Red Alert
by Peter George, Kubrick shared screenwriting credit with him and Terry Southern. Peter Sellers contributed a lot of ad libs in the dialogue but was not given a writing credit. Because the role of Quilty was expanded in the film version of
Lolita
, and because Sellers did such an admirable job playing Quilty in multiple disguises, Columbia Pictures agreed to finance
Dr. Strangelove
if Sellers was given multiple roles. Of the four roles he was slated to play—British Captain Lionel Mandrake, U.S. President Merkin Muffley, former Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, and Major T. J. “King” Kong—Sellers played only the first three. Slim Pickens memorably played Kong, a character who, at the first sign of trouble, puts on his cowboy hat. Pickens had appeared in Brando’s
One-Eyed Jacks
, the film project Kubrick had briefly worked on before
Spartacus
.

The film began as a serious Cold War drama; however, as Kubrick worked with the material, he began to see the comedic possibilities in the topic. He envisioned what he called a “nightmare comedy” about a paranoid general (played by Sterling Hayden, who starred in Kubrick’s
The Killing
) who initiates an unprovoked attack on the Russians that cannot be recalled. To add to the comedy, the character of Dr. Strangelove was added, an over-the-top former Nazi whose right arm and leg seem to be out of his control. The music adds ironic counterpoint to the film, although
Dr. Strangelove
is not a very musical movie. There are two preexistent songs that bookend the film, and there is the recurrent musical trope of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Many of the scenes—especially those in the war room and at Burpelson Air Force Base—have no underscore at all. For the musical portions of the film, Kubrick hired British composer and arranger Laurie Johnson. In his career, Johnson has worked with big bands, including the Ted Heath Band and his own London Big Band, and has composed and arranged music for film, television, and the stage.

Synopsis and Score Description for
Dr. Strangelove

The opening credits feature footage of an air force bomber refueling in midair to an orchestral version of “Try a Little Tenderness.” The romantic mood of the song against the obvious sexual reference of the long fueling tube engaging with the bomber’s tank sets the satiric tone for the rest of the film. The music and the visuals bring to mind what Luis M. Garcia Mainar calls the “main ideas in the film: the connection between desire and destruction.”
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When the tube disengages, the song concludes gently, with an almost melancholic air.

At the end of the film, the efforts to recall the last B-52, piloted by Major Kong, fail, and the nuclear bomb dropped by the plane begins a chain reaction of bombs around the world, annihilating mankind. A montage of nuclear explosions appears with Vera Lynn’s World War II–era song “We’ll Meet Again.” The lyrics, by Hughie Charles, speak of loved ones re-uniting, ostensibly after the war. Kubrick had toyed with the idea of showing the lyrics on-screen, with a bouncing ball cueing the audience when to sing. Although he ultimately decided against this, the version of the song in the film featured an informal group of voices singing along with the chorus.

The musical centerpiece of the film is the tune “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Multiple versions of this song appear over the course of the film, during scenes inside Major Kong’s bomber. There are eight such scenes, and Johnson provides a different variation of the song in each, some with full versions of the tune, some only with fragments of certain lines. The instrumentation and tempo may vary, but in each case a drum, particularly the snare, is present.

The song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” is credited to Irish American composer and bandleader Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore. Gilmore led a Boston band as part of the 24th Massachusetts Infantry. In 1863, Gilmore claimed to have written “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” although it bears striking melodic similarity to an Irish tune, “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye.” Although it was written during the Civil War, the song became a popular wartime tune, spawning many parodies and alternate versions.
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In the first bomber scene, the crew receives the order of “Wing Plan R,” a serious bombing mission that carries the implication that a field commander is retaliating for a surprise attack. The music begins only after the crew has confirmed the order from base. The first version features snare and trumpet and later humming male voices under Major Kong’s pep talk. The next scene in the bomber begins with humming voices and drum. The humming voices complete one verse then pause for drum rolls. Then they perform another verse. Major Kong distributes the attack plans to all members of the crew so they can lock in the code prefix (that will only allow the person with the code, Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper, to call off the attack). Brass instruments play the tune, with two extra measures of drum cadences between each line of the verse, effectively making the tune last twice as long. The humming version has no such delay. In the third scene in the bomber, the crew looks at the contents of their survival kits. Playing the tune this time with the drums is a harmonica. In the fourth bomber scene, in which a missile is tracking the bomber, the tune moves into the low brass, with echoes and arpeggios in the trumpets. The music gets lost in the noise after the missiles hit the plane, but part of the tune reappears at the end of the scene as the plane regains control. In the fifth bomber scene, the drum cadence has changed somewhat, allowing for an augmented (that is, lengthened) version of the tune, although we do not get the tune in its entirety, only fragments.

In the sixth bomber scene, the trumpets are in the middle of the tune, playing the last phrase. Here, Laurie Johnson adds a downward arpeggio in the lower brass. This is the least coherent version of the tune so far. In the seventh bomber scene, the tune is heard in its entirety, played in an augmented version by the lower brass. The low brass then provide squawking accents during the tune’s repetition. The arpeggios are not in time with the drum cadence. In the eighth bomber scene, the tune is played in its entirety, played by muted brass. When the crew is arming the bomb, an alternate melody appears in the muted trumpet. Then the tune is played by the French horn. As Major Kong goes down to the bomb bay, the tune continues, with drum and brass accompaniment, and then it appears in the trumpet with low brass accents. More drums have been added, ratcheting up the tension. When the bomb bay doors open, the music stops, as Major Kong drops with the bomb onto the target area.