Dancing about Architecture

Alex Ross is right when he says it’s hard to think of a great Hollywood film score written for a comedy.

Bernard Herrmann did the score for Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, which is definitely a comedy. I watched the movie on TV in Madison, Wisconsin one afternoon when I was going to school there, but I don’t remember much about the score. All I remember is that the movie was quite funny and Shirley MacLaine was quite young and attractive in it.

Of course, The Simpsons isn’t a movie, but the music by Alf Clausen (and the theme by Danny Elfman) is quite good.

I’ve never seen Airplane!, but, if the music by Elmer Bernstein is one-eighth as good as his score for To Kill a Mockingbird, then it’s quite good.

Which brings up the question: Could a brilliant score for a total screwball comedy ever really be accepted as being brilliant? As brilliant as the score to Vertigo or Psycho is considered to be? A lot of comedic film scores really only show their brilliance when listened to in conjunction with the film. A good example of this is the hard-sync scores for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (by Alan Silvestri) and Carl Stalling’s brilliant work on the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes shorts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.