Tag: Douglas Fairbanks

Music for The Thief of Bagdad (1924; US; Raoul Walsh)

Some time ago, I wrote about the music that accompanies different releases of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers (1921). I have long been meaning to do something similar for The Thief of Bagdad (1924). In the aftermath of the festival at (or via) Bonn, I felt like a return to Hollywood, so seize the chance now to turn my eyes – and especially my ears – towards Fairbanks…

First, some context. The original music for The Thief of Bagdad was written by American composer Mortimer Wilson and was commissioned by Fairbanks himself. “Make your score as artistic as you can and don’t feel that you have to jump like a bander-log from one mood to another at the expense of the development of your musical ideas”, he told Wilson (qtd in Vance 2008, 175). The result was a fully original orchestral score, which was performed at the film’s premiere on 18 March 1924 at the Liberty Theatre in New York. Wilson’s music received very good reviews from the critics, but its qualities were not appreciated by Morris Gest. Gest had already planned, in conjunction with Fairbanks, an exceedingly elaborate road show presentation for the film’s initial release. No expense was spared on ballyhoo: a veritable circus of road show variety – stage performers, an “Arabian” band, fancy-dress ushers, decorative incense, magic carpets etc – was duly assembled to exotify each venue booked for the roadshow. To support this cavalcade of orientalist claptrap, Gest wanted a score from a composer with a “big name”. For him, Wilson was not well-known enough as a composer to encourage public interest in the roadshow. Gest therefore employed James C. Bradford to compile a score from existing music – tunes more well-known than those of Wilson, and thus (Gest reasoned) more appealing to audiences. The result was not a success and quickly dropped. It was Wilson’s score that accompanied the film during its roadshow presentation at various major US cities.

However, while The Thief of Bagdad certainly made a big splash with critics, it was not the commercial success Fairbanks (and Gest) hoped. Despite being hailed as a landmark production, it proved less popular with Fairbanks’s own fans. The film was seemingly too ambitious (too long, too fanciful, too everything) for audiences in the US. But it had made its mark on history, and the film survived in enough high-quality 35mm prints to be restored in later decades, and returned to its rightful place in the canon of silent cinema.

But what of Wilson’s score? Despite Gest’s efforts to sideline it in 1924, the music has maintained a notable presence in histories of film music – and has been championed by many writers and practitioners. Composer and conductor Gillian B. Anderson, for example, has called it “one of the best film scores ever written”. Though Anderson also details its merits in more detail in her Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929: A Guide (xxxix-xlii), and the film appears on her website’s directory of original scores, I am unsure if/when she has performed it with orchestra. (Unlike many other scores on her website, it does not include performance details or guidelines for musicians.) Indeed, it is a curious fact that, despite the amount of information on the music and the survival of the music itself, Wilson’s work has remained what you might call a “paper score”.

This music certainly didn’t feature on any of the first home media releases of The Thief of Bagdad. The first DVD of the film was the 1998 edition by Film Preservation Associates. This featured the music cues assembled by Bradford in 1924, performed by Gaylord Carter on the theatre organ. (The recording itself dates from the 1970s, when presumably it accompanied a theatrical re-release of the film on 16mm/35mm. In 1978, Carter also released an extract from this score on an LP of music from silent films. Together with The Thief of Bagdad were extracts from the David Mondoza/William Axt score for Ben-Hur (1925) and the Ernst Luz score for The Temptress (1928). Rarities in themselves!) For all Carter’s personal links to the era, together with his admirable resurrection of historical scores, I often struggle with organ scores – especially for a film this long. And in any case, it’s a theatre organ not an orchestra. That it was recorded over other options evidences the relative ease of accessing and recording a theatre organ, and the preference for Bradford’s readily adaptable cue sheets rather than Wilson’s more complex orchestral score.

The first edition of The Thief of Bagdad that I owned was the 2004 release by Kino. This “deluxe edition” features an “orchestra soundtrack performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra”. The DVD credits further describe this as a score “compiled by Rodney Sauer and Susan Hall, adapted from the original 1924 cue sheet”. As I observed in my piece on The Three Musketeers, Kino’s marketing inevitably disappoints anyone expecting an “orchestra”: the credit sequence at the end of the DVD reveals that this consists of just five musicians. Kino’s use of the phrase “the original 1924 cue sheet” is also somewhat contentious. The first cue sheet used to accompany the film was the one that (briefly) replaced Wilson’s score after the first performances in 1924. Is the Sauer/Hall score based on this selection (i.e. the one by Bradford)? Even Kino’s “deluxe” edition does not provide any information on this issue. Even if it were Bradford’s selection from 1924, the word “original” seems a little misleading. After all, Bradford’s compilation of library music was a replacement for a truly original score by Wilson – the score that Fairbanks himself had commissioned. All this said, the Sauer/Hall score is perfectly fine. It is well performed and suits the film. But it feels out of scale with the images. As with the Mont Alto Orchestra’s music for The Three Musketeers, it sounds rather meagre next to the huge production values of The Thief of Bagdad. This film needs an orchestra, not an “orchestra”.

My disappointment with the Kino DVD was exacerbated by the fact that I knew that a Carl Davis score existed for this film. First performed in 1984 as part of the Kevin Brownlow/David Gill series of “Thames Silents” restorations, it was recorded for television broadcast and for home media. There was a laserdisc of the Thames Silents edition in 1989, and a VHS in 1991. Given the superior sound quality of laserdiscs, I chased down the laserdisc edition and giddily transferred it to DVD for my personal enjoyment. Davis’s score is compiled from the music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, especially from his famous orchestral suite Scheherazade (1888). The music is a perfect choice. After all, the sets, costumes, and overall conception of The Thief of Bagdad owes much to the influence of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and especially to their Scheherazade, which repurposed Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. As ever, Davis rearranges the historical music with extraordinary deftness. While the music maintains its original identity, it also serves the film’s rhythm and mood. As it happens, I love Rimsky-Korsakov’s music anyway, so my first encounter with the Davis score (sat in a tiny booth, squinting at the small television screen as my laserdisc whirred away on the side) was an absolute delight. It’s a glorious compilation, perfectly suiting the dreamy, exotic, fantastic, and balletic qualities of the film. So enamoured of the music was I that I laboriously transferred the soundtrack of my laserdisc to DVD-R, then from DVD-R to my PC, then used editing software on my PC to affix the laserdisc soundtrack to the superior video image from the Kino DVD, just for my own viewing pleasure. This little experiment was the best version of The Thief of Bagdad I had until the DVD/Blu-ray release of the film, issued in the US by Cohen Media (in 2013) and in the UK by Eureka/Masters of Cinema (in 2014). This edition finally reunited the Davis score with an excellent transfer of the film.

But soon after this edition was released, it became apparent that a new restoration was in the works – one that was to revive Mortimer’s score from 1924. For this, an entirely new performing edition of the score was prepared in 2015 by Mark Fitz-Gerald. As Fitz-Gerald records in his excellent liner notes for the CD release (discussed below), the surviving music required a good deal of editing and preparation to ensure it matched the restoration of the film. Since Wilson composed the music during the production and allowed room for adjusting the length/order of scenes after the film’s premiere, there was a degree of inconsistency between surviving music and montage. Fitz-Gerald found that there was too much music for some scenes and not enough for others – as well as plenty of notational errors in various instrumental parts. These are common issues to the reconstruction of silent film scores, and there are many examples which necessitate very elaborate editing or additional composition. Nevertheless, Wilson left enough clues (and more than enough cues) for his score to be readily edited into its current working form. Fitz-Gerald’s edition of the score premiered with the film at the Pordenone festival in October 2016. Subsequently, the score was recorded in Frankfurt in April 2019 and then broadcast on ARTE later that year, with Fitz-Gerald conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Highlights from this recording were released on CD in 2022. This CD contains 75 minutes of music, which the liner notes inform us represents the “complete” score, minus the repeats of cues that make up the remaining 75 minutes of the film’s timespan.

I had to listen to Wilson’s score a couple of times before it properly sank in. I suspect this was because I was very used to Davis’s music. Though both are full, symphonic soundworlds, rich without being dense, there is a definite difference in tone. Wilson is less rapt, less intense, less filled with grand, sweeping gestures. One might say that Wilson is less inclined to being showy or flash, which Rimsky-Korsakov’s detractors would certainly argue is the case with some of his music. (Though few would argue that he isn’t one of the greatest of all orchestrators.) Davis is also working with music that is already well-known, saturated with memorable melodies – melodies that I knew incredibly well even before hearing his score for The Thief of Bagdad. Wilson’s melodies have gone virtually unheard in a century, and they are decidedly less emphatic than Rimsky-Korsakov’s – but no less worthy of being seen alongside this film. And Fitz-Gerald notes the echoes of other composers like Puccini, Reger, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner in Wilson’s score. (He even compares parts of the soundworld to that of Alban Berg, which is perhaps over-selling it. A score doesn’t need to be, or to sound, “modernist” in order to be relevant or interesting.) But there is never direct quotation, just these echoes – in the shape of melodies, or the texture of sounds.

As well as the difference in musical/historical contexts for these scores, Wilson’s original music is surely conceived with a different objective in mind. In Scheherazade Rimsky-Korsakov is conjuring an entire picture from scratch, using the orchestra to form an impression in the listener’s imagination; whereas Wilson is accompanying an already-imagined world. If Wilson is less intense, perhaps this is because he isn’t striving to do everything: half the drama is already there on screen, so he is happy to be less emphatic. Just as the city walls seem to hover over those polished black floors, or the minarets hang before those dreamy picture-book skies, so Wilson’s music floats over the images. Everything works in tandem with the action, but the music has its own tempo, its own sense of mood. While there are plenty of examples of percussive effects for particular moments (gongs, weapons, jewels, clapping hands, magical apparitions etc.), the score itself is never in a rush to match every movement on screen. Wilson maintains a very pleasing balance between fidelity and independence. His music seems to have just the right tempo, both for individual scenes and for the film as a whole. It flows with the drama, seamlessly negotiating each sequence – picking out individual moments to highlight, but always with a wider sense of forward momentum. It certainly exudes the same warmth, geniality, and feeling as the drama.

Such qualities are immediately clear in Wilson’s opening theme, spelt out over the opening title. This theme is a slow, singing melody: wistful, yearning, gentle. If it lacks the absolute immediacy of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opening theme on the solo violin, used by Davis for the film’s prologue, it possesses a kind of calm that really works. This is music that’s never in a rush to impress. Like the film, it takes its time to unfold. Wilson’s main theme is heard for the first time within the drama when Ahmed enters the mosque and we see the Holy Man speak. The immediate sense of peace that Wilson conjures, a kind of sonic balm, is perfect. From the bustle of the streets, we enter a different kind of space – physical and emotional.

Later, when Ahmed first sees the Princess, the music grows into a slow, dreamy ecstasy. Like the opening theme, subsequently associated with the Holy Man, Wilson produces a drawn-out, singing melody – this time brought out in the low strings. It’s like a romantic version of the spiritual theme. In Davis’s score, the scene is more musically ambiguous. The theme that we will hear fully developed, expanded in orchestration and in volume at the end of the film’s first part, when Ahmed sets out on his quest, is here heard for the first time in tentative form. Over quiet, tremolo strings, solo oboe and then clarinet start to spell out the theme – but are soon interrupted in the scene when the Princess’s guards return. Davis’s score recognizes (in its orchestration) the intimacy of the scene, but (in its melody) hints at the dramatic consequences of this first contact between Ahmed and the Princess.

I have spent the best part of three mornings listening to the Davis and Wilson scores side-by-side, and I love them both. For sheer richness, variety, and moments of piercing intensity, Davis’s is hard to beat. (How I wish I had heard this score performed live!) But Wilson’s score has a tremendous cumulative impact: everything about it simply works. It’s beautifully organized, orchestrated, and fits the film like a glove. The restoration of Wilson’s score is reason to celebrate.

Added to this are the qualities of the Photoplay Productions restoration of The Thief of Bagdad. While the off-air copy from ARTE that I have watched does not do the astonishing imagery justice, it immediately signals its difference from earlier transfers of the film. Firstly, it contains the original credit sequence. The version presented both on the Kino DVD and the Cohen/MoC Blu-ray has a different (less elaborate) font for the main title, then dissolves straight to the image of the Holy Man and child in the desert:

In the Photoplay version, the more elaborate title is followed by full credits of cast and crew, then the desert prologue scene:

But the major difference is that the image in the Photoplay restoration is darker, the colours more saturated; it is as though the whole film has had a bath in some enriching elixir. I suspect that many viewers might worry the shadows are too dark. Having never seen an original tinted print from 1924, I cannot say how it compares with a contemporary copy – nor can I say how it compares to a contemporary projection of the film. What I can say is that it makes the previous transfers look anaemic, as though they have been over-cleaned. This is especially obvious in the beautiful transition from day to night via a dissolve. In the Cohen version, the tinting dissolves almost to monochrome for night:

In the Photoplay version, the tinting dissolves to deep blue:

As you can see from the following captures, the overall difference in colour and contrast makes a big difference. In the images below, stills from the Cohen Blu-ray are on the left, images from the ARTE broadcast of the Photoplay version on the right:

I simply don’t know which is more “authentic”, but I must say I’m a sucker for the shadowy saturation of the Photoplay version. I also note that many compositions in the Photoplay restoration are less cropped at the top, left, and bottom of the frame. (The takes and editing appear to be exactly the same in Cohen/Photoplay versions, so I don’t think this is an instance of each copy deriving from a different negative.) This, combined with the title font and longer credit sequence, suggests a different, and dare I say superior, generation print being used by Photoplay. It really does look gorgeous.

But will we ever see it on home media? And will Wilson’s score ever get a chance to accompany it? There is certainly reason enough culturally, and surely room enough commercially, for both the Davis/Cohen release and the Wilson/Photoplay restoration to co-exist. Please, someone make it so!

Paul Cuff

References

Gillian B. Anderson, Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929: A Guide (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988).

Mark Fitz-Gerald, liner notes for Mortimer Wilson: The Thief of Bagdad, First Hand Records FHR126, 2022, compact disc.

Jeffrey Vance, Douglas Fairbanks (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

Silent images into music: Louis Aubert’s Cinéma, six tableaux symphoniques (1956)

Recently, I wrote about Charles Koechlin’s The Seven Stars’ Symphony (1933), a remarkable musical evocation of stars from the silent and early sound era. This week is a kind of sequel, devoted to another obscure late nineteenth/early twentieth-century French composer. Louis Aubert (1887-1968) was (like Koechlin) a pupil of Fauré, was well respected by Ravel (whose Valses nobles et sentimentales he premiered as a performer), and made his name as a composer with the fairytale opera La forêt bleue (1911). Though he produced numerous works for piano and for orchestra, his work is rarely heard today. Indeed, there is only one modern recording of some of his orchestral works—and it was through this CD (released by Marco Polo in 1994) that I discovered Aubert in the first place. I found it at a local Oxfam for £2.99 and wasn’t going to turn down the chance to encounter another interesting obscurity.

What really sold me on it was the fact that one of the works on the CD was called “Cinéma”, six tableaux symphoniques. Very much like Koechlin’s symphony, this suite offers six portraits of various stars/aspects of cinema. (The recording with which I’m familiar is only available in six separate videos on youtube, so I have included links to each movement below.) Unlike Koechlin’s symphony, however, Aubert’s music was originally designed with a narrative purpose. In 1953, Aubert wrote a score to accompany a ballet called Cinéma, performed at the Paris Opéra in March 1953. This offered (according to the CD liner notes) a series of “episodes” from film history, from the Lumière brothers to the last Chaplin films “by way of Westerns and stories of vamps”. I’m intrigued by the sound of all this, though I can find only one image from the performance—depicting Disney characters (see below)—to suggest anything about what it was like on stage. I also presume that the ballet consisted of many more musical numbers than are selected for the “six tableaux symphoniques” that is the only version of the score that appears to have been published (and certainly the only portion to be recorded). Nevertheless, the music is a marvellous curiosity…

Douglas Fairbanks et Mary Pickford. Here is Fairbanks—listen to that fanfare! Drums and brass announce his name. The strings snap into a march rhythm (off we go: one-two! one-two! one-two!). but then the rhythm slows, fades. Harp and strings glide towards a sweeter, softer timbre. Mary Pickford swirls into view. But there is skittishness here as well as elegance. The music is lively as much as graceful. There is a kind of precision amid the haze of glamour, strong outlines amid the shimmer of sound. A drumbeat enters the fray, then cymbals and snare bustle in. Doug has bustled in, caught Mary unawares. His music sweeps hers away. He’s busy doing tricks, showing off. The music cuts and thrusts, leaps, jumps—and lands triumphantly on the downbeat.

Rudolf Valentino. After a boisterous introduction, a sinuous saxophone melody unwinds across a busy pizzicato rhythm in the strings. It’s a superb image the music conjures: a kind of rapidity amid a vast, unchanging landscape. Surely this is the image of a desert, of Valentino in The Sheik, riding across an immensity of sand. But it’s also nothing quite like the film itself. It’s a memory, a mistaken recollection. And the music develops this simple idea, building slowly in volume. (More like the famous first shot of Omar Sharif’s character in Lawrence of Arabia than a scene in The Sheik.) Then figure disappears, riding off into the distance. Fade to black.

Charlot et les Nymphes Hollywoodiennes. Here is Charlot! Bubbly, jaunty rhythms. There’s a jazzy swagger, rich twists of sound. A violin solo breezily dances over the brassy orchestra. The drums are played with brushes: a pleasing, rustling soundscape. Then all is wistful, dreamy. A solo violin dreams over gentle strings, over warm breaths of woodwind, over a muted trumpet call.

Walt Disney. Almost at once, the music is mickey-mousing across the soundscape. But the orchestration is also weirdly threatening. It’s as if Aubert is recalling the sorcerer’s apprentice section of Fantasia, threatening to take Mickey on a perilous journey. And there he goes, marching off—the percussion jangling, as though with keys in hand, walking edgily towards a great door that he must open, behind which is the unknown…

Charlot amoureux. Another facet of Charlot. Wistful, dreaming, languorous. A private world, an inner world. (One can imagine the Tramp falling in love, comically, tragically, delightfully.) But reality intervenes. A blast of sound, then an awkward silence. Quietened, tremolo strings swirl under an ominous brass refrain. It is love lost, abandoned, proved false, proved insubstantial, unobtainable, unrequited.

Valse finale. Hollywood bustles in. The orchestra sweeps itself into a waltz. It’s grand, if a little undefined. Here is glamour in sound, showing itself off for our appreciation. It makes me think of Carl Davis’s glorious theme for the television series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980). But, as so often, Davis has the genius to make his melody instantly memorable—conjuring in the space of two bars an entire world, mood, and feeling. Aubert’s waltz is both less memorable but more orchestrally substantial (it is, crudely, louder, written for larger forces). So it’s at once dreamy and unwieldy, a kind of too-crowded dancefloor. You can’t see the stars for the wealth of movement, of swishing figure, of gleaming jewels. (Glockenspiel and triangle chime and jingle.) The music swirls and swaggers to its inevitable conclusion: THE END.

Aubert’s score is (I think) less musically inventive—less outlandishly exotic in tone and texture—than Koechlin’s Seven Stars’ Symphony. The CD linter notes (by Michel Fleury) argue that Aubert’s music is (like Koechlin’s) more interested in creating mood pieces than in recreating specific scenes from films. But I wonder how true this is. After all, the music accompanied specific dramatic action on the stage. Listening to it, I can more readily imagine it accompanying images/action than I can the majority of Koechlin’s score. I could even see the music working well as silent film accompaniment, and I wonder if the original ballet mimicked this very strategy in the theatre. As with Koechlin, I want to know what kind of experiences Aubert had with the cinematic subjects he depicts in music. Did he go to the cinema in the silent era? If so, what kind of music did he hear there? I’d also ask similar questions about the ballet of 1953: what kind of a history of film did this present, and what inspired it? (And what did the spectators think of it, especially those who knew the silent era firsthand?) Many questions, to which I currently have no answers. But I’d be intrigued to find out more, and may (in time) do a little more digging to find out. In the meantime, we have Aubert’s music, which is well worth your time. Once again, go listen!

Paul Cuff

Silent images into music: Charles Koechlin’s The Seven Stars’ Symphony, op. 132 (1933)

I adore the soundworld of late romantic music. I have lived and continue to live in this lush, exotic, expressive, excessive, experimental realm—I spend hours every week immersed in music well-known and music forgotten. I love the great composers, but I also love the lesser-knowns. The latter appeal to my obsessive side: they are people I can hunt down through footnotes, through asides, through the marketplace outlets and only-available-as-offair-broadcast-mp3 sharers of the world. Give me your Austro-German oddities, your Scandinavian obscurities. Give me your tone poems on bizarre themes, your operas about abstract ideas, your itinerant harmonies and luxuriously strange orchestration, your dozens of weird symphonies, your books of diverse chamber works. Give me your Schrekers, your Braunfels, your Schulhoffs and Schmidts (and Schmitts!), your Atterbergs and your Langgaards. Francophone? No problem! Give me an obscure French composer of orchestral music who was born (approximately) in the latter half of the nineteenth century and died (sometime) in the interwar years and I’ll be a happy man. D’Indy? It’s a done deal! Magnard? Yes please! Rabaud? You bet! Pierné? Seconds please! I love the music of all these composers (and many more besides). What I love especially is when this music overlaps with the world of silent cinema, either in my imagination or in that of the original composer’s intentions. The instruments and rhythms of popular music of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s bleeds into the legacy of orchestral music from the nineteenth century—and the fusion produces fantastic things. And of course I delight in original silent music scores written in the era, since it introduces me to any number of more obscure composers. So you can imagine my joy when I came across the music of Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) and, in particular, a symphony he wrote that was inspired by silent cinema…

The Seven Stars’ Symphony, op. 132 (1933)

Koechlin wrote this “symphony” in 1933, when sound had conquered cinema. The stars he recalls in music thus straddle the divide between these two eras. He’s recalling the silent screen as well as acknowledging the coming of sound. Across seven movements, we get sonic pictures—or recollections—or seven stars of the screen. This is not a symphony in the classical sense, since there is no overarching unity of form or design to the work. Rather, it is a series of tone poems that conjure a musical-cinematic universe. Just as Koechlin uses one medium to evoke another, so must I use prose to try and capture his music. (Of course, you can listen to the symphony here.) I make no pretence at real analysis, offering only an impression of Koechlin’s impressions:

I. Douglas Fairbanks (en souvenir du voleur de Bagdad). We step into a harmonic world of the orient. The movement instructs us to recall The Thief of Bagdad. But as soon as we begin, we’re lost. This is not the film of 1924: it’s a dream of the film. Woodwind tiptoes up weird scales. Slow-motion strings unwind in the stratosphere. Weird curlicues perform oriental turns. Melodies bubble up and die away. There is no drama, only glittering stepping stones towards sonic dissolution. It’s six minutes of spellbinding strangeness. Nine years had passed between the film’s premiere in Hollywood and Koechlin’s score being written. A distant memory revived in sound.

II. Lilian Harvey (menuet fugue). A graceful dance, strings shining over warm woodwind. Is Harvey performing a turn on screen? What does Koechlin remember of her? A saxophone line blooms in the orchestra. The music turns chromatically sour for an instant, threatens to unwind the texture. Then this moment of drama dissipates. All ends with a dreamy slide up into silvery nothingness.

III. Greta Garbo (choral Païen). The ondes Martenot spells out something that may or may not be a melody. It’s an unstable base on which to build a movement. Woodwind tread in its path. Strings uncommittedly slide underfoot. If Garbo is here, she is as insubstantial as quicksilver. Here is her unknowability, her ungraspable form on the screen. The image does not flicker. The music is a portrait of the surface of the screen: it’s all sonic sheen, all gleaming illusion. There is no scene, hardly any form—just something slipping away, beyond one’s grasp.

IV. Clara Bow et la joyouse Californie. Bustle! Brass! Light, skipping percussive steps. Here is Clara Bow, or the sonic imprint of her liveliness, her spirit. This is the first time Koechlin’s orchestra has shown real body, something approaching a full, round, sweep of sound. It’s more harmonically traditional. That is, until the whole soundscape dies away. Suddenly there is a skittish rhythm and a reduced texture, a kind of circus-like dance in the distance. (In the background, a glockenspiel adds texture to the downward line of melody, then an upward leap.) Is this California? Are we on the street, a studio lot, or in a fictional world? Of course, this is all a fictional world, at one, two, three, or four removes from reality. The harmonies thin again. It’s like a pair of curtains part, revealing another vista—some way off. A saxophone ripens the melody. Then the melody unpeels into weird, restless harmonies. The whole world threatens to collapse, until the brass and strings gather together and bulldoze forward. The movement ends in a massive affirmation.

V. Merlène Dietrich (variations sur le thème par les letters de son nom). Oh my word, this is gorgeous orchestration. Dietrich in sound is more worldly than Garbo in sound. The melody unfolds on the woodwind. A repeated refrain moves slowly, turning back on itself, comes on again. If this is Dietrich, she is alone. It’s a kind of hum. (Somewhere deep in the orchestra, pizzicato double basses pick out a regular beat.) The music turns from us, departs, trailing melancholic satisfaction. (Note Koechlin’s misspelling of Dietrich’s name: “Merlène Dietrich” is surely a deliberate marker of the composer. Here is his star, his memory of her.)

VI. Emil Jannings (en souvenir de l’Ange bleu). Growling, brooding brass. A kind of slow stomp in sound. Bitterness, darkness. Depths and weights and plugs of music. Then the strings recall some distant melody, some dim memory of pleasure, of longing that may be satisfied. The movement refers to Der blaue Engel, but not to a scene so much as a mood—a portrait of Jannings’ character as the character might himself feel before he falls asleep. Anger, resignation, memory—fading away.

VII. Charlie Chaplin (variations sur le thème par les letters de son nom). What begins melodically soon turns chaotic. Entropy enters the rhythms, the harmonies. This is Chaplin in the form of his movement, his sudden bursts of speed, of wit, of evasion. Charlie is skipping, Charlie is running, Charlie is fighting. There are bursts of exquisitely controlled fury, such that threaten to turn atonal—to wrench us into another genre. Then all is sinisterly quiet. Bubbles of noise rise to the surface, burst, and vanish. Where are we? What’s happening on screen, or in our souls? Woodwind try to rescue the mood from eerie, high-stringed harmonies. Where is Charlie? A solo violin rises from the chromatic unease, but only for a bar. Soon the unrest resumes. It’s a kind of sonic starvation, minimalism on the lookout for sustenance. Where are we? Is this winter? Is this the dawning of madness in The Gold Rush? Poverty pulls at the edges of the score, threatening to impinge on this portrait of a comic icon. Eventually, after meandering through various scrapes and scraps of scenes, the solo violin leaps up against outbursts of brass, clattering glockenspiel, sinister fanfares. Some kind of resolution is reached, and it’s hardly a happy one. Has the Tramp died? Is he on his way to heaven? High woodwind detaches itself from the ground. The saxophone freewheels in the mid distance. Odd percussive clashes are far below us. Is this the dream of heaven in The Kid? If so, Koechlin treats it as a slow, surreal scene. The orchestra appears to waken. All is bleary, unsure of itself. The solo violin recalls something, leaves behind the other strings. Finally, a determined little march: woodwind steps, one-two, one-two, one-two; pizzicato strings, one-two, one-two, one-two… To where are we heading? Toward silence. The little march fades into the distance. Is this the end? Just as it seems as though silence is the answer, the whole orchestra rises into an enormous crescendo of sound: an apotheosis that towers over the preceding caesura, as if spelling out an enormous intertitle on screen—“THE END”!

What an absolute delight this music is. The orchestration is as lucid and precise as that of Debussy but anticipates later work by Messiaen. It’s lush and rich yet teeters on the brink of atonality. By turns gossamer light and terrifying dense, soothing and scarifying, evocative and vague, particular and meandering, this score is everything I love about late romantic music.

But how might we understand the relationship between The Seven Stars’ Symphony and the cinema that inspired it? Koechlin is surely more interested in these stars as starting points for music, as representatives of cultural moods and manners. In conception, the symphony reminded me of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Face of Garbo” (in Mythologies, 1957). I don’t just mean in the sense that, in Barthes’s words, “The face of Garbo is an Idea”; but in the way both treat Garbo as an excuse to produce delightfully vague and suggestive evocations using the actress (or rather, the image of the actress) as their starting point. Though Barthes had recently re-encountered Garbo in a revival of Queen Christina (1933) in Paris, he too was surely relying on memories—not just of films, but of images and associations. The distance between star and spectator itself becomes the subject of interrogation. Barthes is not interested in the history or life of the star so much as her symbolic function in (an exceedingly ill-defined conception of) cinematic history:

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.

Koechlin’s music allows the listener to become as “lost” in Garbo-as-sound as one might be “lost” in the image of Garbo-on-screen. Koechlin’s symphony is the product of a kind of fandom: an expression of his encounters with Garbo in film. But it’s also an analysis of that experience: a musical exploration of the idea of cinema. The Seven Stars’ Symphony offers a glimpse of the afterlife of stars within the imagination of contemporary viewers. Images become sounds, cinema becomes music.

As well as these more abstract thoughts, the symphony also makes me want to ask more practical questions. How often did Koechlin visit the cinema, and where did he go? What films did he see in the silent era, and in what circumstances? (I would buy the one and only book on the man to find out more, but it’s been out of print for decades and will currently set you back the best part of £200 to get it. My curiosity can wait.) As so often, the cinematic life of artists who lived through the silent era is frustratingly obscure. How often have I wanted contemporary writers and painters and composers to have left accounts of everything they saw and heard… Of course, Koechlin’s symphony is itself an account of his experiences, even if only the abstract impressions left on him by the cinema. His seven studies are mood pieces, fleeting glimpses of life and stillness and movement on screen, of rhythms that might have been seen or heard or felt at the cinema. Koechlin’s extraordinary orchestration offers us a way to explore cinematic impressions through sound, to let the transmuted forms of one medium live again in another. By any measure, with or without a filmic context, The Seven Stars’ Symphony is a glorious sonic experience. Go listen to it.

Paul Cuff

Music for The Three Musketeers (1921; US; Fred Niblo)

Last year I wrote about the Film Preservation Society’s Blu-ray of The Three Musketeers, released for the hundredth anniversary of the film in 2021. Since then, Cohen Media released another version of the film in a Blu-ray package which also includes The Iron Mask (1929; US; Allan Dwan). The Cohen Media release is an entirely separate restoration to that of the Film Preservation Society. Scanned in 4K and transferred at 21fps, the Cohen release looks excellent – but it is presented entirely in monochrome. As I wrote in my previous post on thefilm, The Three Musketeers was designed to be shown with extensive tinting – including use of the Handschiegl colour process to render D’Artagnan’s “buttercup yellow” horse. In recreating these colour elements, the Film Preservation Soceity’s restoration is visually superior. But where the new release is decidedly stronger is in its musical accompaniment, and it is this soundtrack that I want to write about here.

In 1921, Louis F. Gottschalk assembled a score for The Three Musketeers that was performed by an orchestra for the film’s first run. The music survives, but it has not been well treated in its modern realizations. The soundtrack for Kino’s old DVD edition of the film featured the Gottschalk score “performed by Brian Benison and the ‘Elton Thomas Salon Orchestra’”. Sadly, this “orchestra” wasn’t an orchestra at all, but a collection of synthesized MIDI files. Though I have listened to this rendition of Gottschalk’s music, I still wouldn’t claim I’ve heard the real thing. Budget-saving soundtracks will be familiar to anyone who has collected enough home media release of silent cinema over the years. It’s a familiar history of “orchestral scores” not performed by orchestras, of original music being rendered null by synthetic sound or else replaced entirely. I remember struggling to enjoy much about The Three Musketeers when watching the Kino release. The aesthetic effect of this synthetic soundscape is the homogenization of musical rhythm and timbre, and its computerized tones ensure that the acoustics are divorced from human performance. Put bluntly, the assemble of MIDI files is a bland, insipid procession of synthetic sounds that makes me squirm in my seat. Even if Gottschalk’s music were more varied or exciting (and it isn’t really either of these things), this realization renders it null and void on the soundtrack.

The Film Preservation Society’s Blu-ray release of The Three Musketeers in 2021 featured a score arranged by Rodney Sauder and performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra (a six-piece ensemble). But even if it consists of real musicians playing real music, this “orchestra” cannot produce an orchestral soundscape. My earlier piece discussed how the score frequently lags behind the film’s action, and (above any other factor) struggles to match the scale or richness of the world presented on screen. By contrast, the Cohen Blu-ray features a new orchestral score arranged by Robert Israel and performed by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra. And yes, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra is an actual orchestra. Despite the claims of the last two home media editions, Israel’s score is the first truly orchestral score this film has received.

Right from the off, the difference is apparent. When the film’s opening titles appear, we get a brassy, boisterous theme—the whole orchestra is up and running. It sets the tone of the film perfectly. It sounds like a period score (i.e. one from the 1920s) while also evoking the kind of music more familiar from this genre in later decades. (One can imagine Errol Flynn arriving on screen just as much as Fairbanks.) The music also captures the tone of Fairbanks’s adventure: excitement, drama, and (above anything else) fun. The period of the film’s setting is soon evoked through baroque turns of phrase and instrumentation. For the domestic scenes with Queen Anne and her staff, a harpsichord forms part of the orchestral texture; then, organ and bell appear for the introduction of Father Joseph. Period, character, and tone are all created and developed with the choice of melody and orchestration.

Israel’s orchestration also makes room for smaller combinations of instruments and soloists. It can alternate between the chamberlike scale that introduces D’Artagnan’s home and father with the brassy fanfare for D’Artagnan himself. There also little gags made musical by Israel’s instrumentation. The little bassoon solo that accompanies the comic figure trying to escape D’Artagnan’s first fight with Rochefort at the inn. Or, when D’Artagnan has just bought his new hat in Paris, the descending glockenspiel scale that signals someone chucking out a bucket of water into the street. The same little gesture occurs again when D’Artagnan trips up on the steps of Bonacieux’s shop. The glockenspiel motif thus becomes one not just of a sight gag, but of D’Artagnan’s social embarrassment.

The greater variety provided by Israel’s orchestral forces means that, even when very familiar pieces are used, you do not get the impression of direct copy-and-paste musical assembly that you sometimes do with smaller ensembles. The melody that accompanies a scene between Queen Anne and King Louis (from Saint-Saëns’s prelude to Le Déluge (1875)) is one that I’ve heard used many times over in silent film scores. (Indeed, I’m sure I’ve heard Israel use it before in his other work.) I’ve heard it reduced for a small ensemble, for a duo with piano, for… well, god knows what else; I’ve heard it well played, poorly played, indifferently recorded, badly recorded. It gets used a lot. What makes it work in Israel’s score for The Three Musketeers is hearing its proper treatment: the violin taking the melody, with strings providing an underlying rhythm, by turns consoling and agitated. The tempo modulates across the scene, quickening as the King interrogates the Queen. The strings sometimes divide into multiple parts, then settle back into their united rhythm. Brass occasionally supports the strings, either to emphasize the return of the main melody, or else to add weight to a particular beat on screen. Even in repeating the same melody, the orchestral timbre provides a shifting soundscape across the scene. What can sound thin and trite when performed by a tiny ensemble has greater depth and gravitas when rendered (as Saint-Saëns originally intended) for orchestra. Give a well-worn theme musical body, greater acoustical depth, and it assumes a kind of grandeur. Put simply, it’s nice to hear a melody written for orchestra actually played by an orchestra.

A real orchestra also makes such a difference to the sense of the film’s scale. Early in the film, D’Artagnan approaches the city that is his destination, and his destiny. There is a title card announcing, simply: “Paris—”. The extended hyphen, which I always like to see, gives us a sense of expectation. It’s as if no more need be said, for Paris is, well… Paris—! This is D’Artagnan’s first experience of Paris, and it’s our first sight of the film’s Paris sets too. It’s a moment and it demands a response from the music. Israel gives us that response. After a few bars of silence that accompanied the previous title and transition, the full orchestra enters at a rapid tempo, responding to the excitement of seeing the city’s grand gates, its tall façade of houses, its bustling streets. This is a proper sense of musical boisterousness for a scene of visual boisterousness. (Compare this with the MIDI score on the old Kino DVD, or the music offered by the Monte Alto Orchestra. Even if the choices of music had been grander, the difference in sonic scale is tremendous. Israel evokes the bustling streets of Paris, the other scores only summon small provincial marketplaces.) Israel’s orchestral forces also have a greater ability to directly reflect sound being produced on screen. Fanfares on screen are accompanied by fanfares in the orchestra. A tambourine struck on screen becomes a tambourine struck in the orchestra. It makes the world on screen more tangible, more directly translated into the sound that occupies the acoustic space of the viewer.

Part of what impressed me was also the subtler shifts of motif within individual sequences. This is music that can shift gear quickly and effectively. Sometimes, only a few bars of a piece are used before segueing to the next. For example, Comte de Rochefort is introduced with a motif from the sinfonia of Verdi’s Luisa Miller (1849). When we first see this character at the inn of Meung, we just have time to register the melody before D’Artagnan enters the scene and the music shifts. Yet the melody recurs later in the film to remind us of this moment: when D’Artagnan sees Rochefort from a window in Paris, there is the theme again—more pronounced, carrying greater orchestral (and narrative) weight. Again, the music shifts gear and moves along… Near the end of the film, for D’Artagnan’s fight with Rochefort and his men, followed by the rooftop escape with Constance, Israel again uses the motif from Luisa Miller, but segues rapidly into Berlioz’s frenetic overture Les Francs-juges (1828). The switching from motif to motif is marvellously assured and effective. It gives the impression of a continuous musical intelligence, even though it is made up of music taken from many different sources and periods.

Many times, I was struck by how Israel’s choices make the drama more… well, dramatic. Take the scene in which Richelieu tries to keep D’Artagnan talking long enough for an assassin to kill him. Richelieu’s line, “If you were about to die, what would you do?”, is invested with real weight by beat of the timpani that underscores the moment. Then the switch to a march motif, complete with snare drum and little flourishes in the brass, makes D’Artagnan’s reply as bold and brassy as it is. The climax, when D’Artagnan makes his daring escape past the Cardinal’s guards, suddenly brings in the whole orchestra swelling into D’Artagnan’s own musical theme. The music makes the moment as thrilling, charming, and satisfying as it ought to be. Switching from motif to motif, this whole sequence worked for me in a way that it never quite did with previous scores.

There is also the pleasure of recognizing pieces of music that arrive out of the blue. For example, in the final court ball sequence, we see live music and dances being played on screen. Israel’s score accompanies the scene with a delightful orchestration of a seventeenth-century melody I recognized as one of Michael Praetorius’s terpsichorean dances (c.1612). (Rechecking my CD liner notes, I find that the melody—a bourrée—originates with Adrianus Valerius (c.1575-1625). Praetorius collected it as part of his series of 300 dances based on popular contemporary melodies from across Europe, especially France.) There was delight in recognizing the music (a quite fabulously catchy little melody) but delight too in the way Israel’s treats it. His score offers a small-scale, period arrangement of the music, then suddenly alters to bring in brass and strings whenever the scene cuts away to exterior scenes of intrigue.

So, in summary, this is a really excellent score. More than just well selected (i.e. appropriate for what’s happening on screen), Israel’s music is warm, charming, and immediately accessible. It is intelligent and emotive, subtle when it needs to be and obvious when required. Though it matches the action through tempo and instrumentation, there are also some very pleasing moments of synchronization. (I’ve already mentioned some comic touches with the glockenspiel, but a scene that brought particular satisfaction was Rochefort’s final clash with D’Artagnan. This sees a more extensive use of Luisa Millar motif, Rochefort’s theme, and Israel times the brass perfectly with several thrusts of his sword in this last scene. It’s a really lovely touch.) Israel’s score for The Three Musketeers in fact pairs very nicely with the wonderful Carl Davis score for The Iron Mask, which is also on the Blu-ray. The latter was recorded by the City of Prague Philharmonic and featured on the 1999 DVD release of the film. It’s curious that the films each have music performed by Czech orchestras (dare I say that rates are cheaper there than in the US?). Occasionally, Israel’s orchestra sounds as though it needed a couple more run-throughs to really gel. (By comparison, the Davis recording—made some quarter-century earlier—sounds not merely professional but polished.) But this is a very minor reservation indeed. Israel’s score sounds much better than many silent soundtracks, and I rejoice at being able to hear it. If only it accompanied the Film Preservation Society’s restoration of the film!

Paul Cuff

The Three Musketeers (1921; US; Fred Niblo)

Don’t make this film! That was the advice of exhibitors, producers, and advertisers to Douglas Fairbanks when he mooted the idea of making a costume picture. He asked around his friends and peers, figures in the studios, and even commissioned a survey to get a wider sense of popular opinion. Everyone said no. “Having made sure I was wrong,” Fairbanks later wrote, “I went ahead” (qtd in Goessel, The First King of Hollywood, 257). The film was an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844), and Fairbanks pulled out all the stops to ensure his production matched the scale and sweep of the original tale. Lavish sets, big crowds, gorgeous costumes, plentiful stunts… The total production costs were almost $750,000—a staggering sum for 1921. But the film was a huge success and reeled in $1,300,000 to Fairbanks’s company, as well as large profits to United Artists and any number of exhibitors who had booked the film. The success of the film encouraged Fairbanks to make even bigger costume films. The decade saw him embark on the huge productions like Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), films which dwarf even the scale of The Three Musketeers. So how does the latter rank alongside Fairbanks’s other swashbuckling films of these years?

Rather well, I think—but with some reservations. The film was directed by Fred Niblo, and in visual terms it feels rather safe and stolid. Fairbanks spends the film leaping, dancing, skipping, and hurling himself about the sets. But the camera barely moves, barely even dares offer anything in the way of dynamic editing. It’s as though Niblo is afraid of losing sight of the bigness of the sets, or of any kind of visual movement detracting from the movement of the performers.

Niblo wasn’t known for his imagination, even in his earlier films. Kevin Brownlow writes that “Niblo’s style was usually lifeless”, producing “his usual series of cardboard pictures”—as evidenced in the Fairbanks vehicle The Mark of Zorro (1920) (The Parade’s Gone By…, 414). Only in the interior scenes with the various courtly intriguers—Richelieu, Queen Anne, King Louis—does Niblo offer closer shots, details that develop character or situation. (For example, Richelieu is seen petting cats, and we later get close-ups of his hand pawing/clawing at the arm of his chair, much like a cat plucks at a piece of carpet.) But the photography is strong, and there are some lovely exterior scenes in the countryside. Niblo gives us a good number of vistas down tree-lined roads, and you sense the scale of the journeys—the distances—between D’Artagnan’s home in Gascony, the city of Paris, and the remote ports of France and England.

And even if I have reservations about the direction, that’s not why we’re watching The Three Musketeers. It’s Fairbanks who is the life and soul and purpose of this film. I couldn’t wait for him to appear (the opening scenes setting up the intrigue are very stilted and slow). And as soon as he does—sat legs akimbo on the floor, listening to his father’s tales of Paris—I’m grinning as he grins, and marvelling at everything he does. He makes even the simplest actions look balletic, and the most complex feats of strength look simple. He leaps onto and off horses, backwards and forwards; he jumps up walls, climbs over rooftops, jumps from battlements, swings from windows, slides down bannisters—and all with elegance, with style, with joy.

We are told early on that he’s been taught to do everything with pride, to accept no defeat, to fight back at every opportunity. And so he does, crossing swords first with the Cardinal’s guard Rochefort, then with the Musketeers, then (alongside the Musketeers) with the rest of the Cardinal’s men. Look at the way he evades the latter, first by hurling himself around with sword in hand, then by sheer pace. When he runs from a mob of them in once scene, he skips in glee when he knows they can’t catch him. It’s such a lovely detail, and makes us marvel not merely at his physical prowess but the lightness with which he uses it.

I must also mention Fairbanks’s moustache. This was the film that inspired him to grow it, and he kept it for the rest of his life. It gives him a more continental look, but it also makes his face more complex, more interesting. It’s like a punctuation mark or accent for his smile. The film doesn’t offer that many close-ups of him, but there is one gesture that he makes several times in the film. It’s when D’Artagnan senses something is awry, or that he’s scented a clue to the intrigue. He rubs his nose on one side, as if to suggest he’s got a sniff of something interesting. I don’t think it quite works, and it’s an awkward equivalent of something that could be done by or with a close-up. It’s not as subtle a trait as used in The Thief of Bagdad. There, Ahmed (Fairbanks’s character) makes a clasping gesture with his hand to signal desire. The gesture is used to signal his urge to steal purses etc, but then—in a brilliant touch—to signal his desire for the Princess. But Raoul Walsh frames the gesture much more convincingly than Niblo does its equivalent in The Three Musketeers. There’s also a striking visual equivalent for the olfactory sense suggested by the gesture in the earlier film. In The Thief of Bagdad, when Ahmed smells freshly-baked bread, Walsh cuts via a focus pull from Fairbanks to the loaf of bread. It’s like a different sense takes over from the visual until the visual can reassert the reality of the scene to reveal the source of the smell. It’s such a lovely moment, and there isn’t anything as sophisticated or visually inventive in The Three Musketeers.

Beyond the more daring tone of The Gaucho (1927), Fairbanks’s on-screen involvement with women tends to be more comic, innocent, and flirtatious than sexual. His romantic gestures—kneeling, spreading wide his arms, pressing hands to heart—are earnest, old-fashioned; even a kiss is a rarity. In The Three Musketeers, D’Artagnan falls for Constance Bonacieux (Marguerite De La Motte). The way it’s done is charming: she drops her ball of thread, and he picks it up. From two different directions across town, they wend their way toward each other, following the thread. But she snips it off, and he loses track of her. Then, when he finds her again, he is looking for lodging. Two neighbouring houses have signs offering accommodation. Constance goes first in to one house, so D’Artagnan bounds up to the door; but then Constance goes into the next one, then back again. What to do? Bold and direct, D’Artagnan simply asks her which house she lives in—and goes in. It’s a lovely sequence, and its tone is comic, the romance having a rather childlike element. Later on, when D’Artagnan chases after Constance in the palace, Captain de Tréville leads him by the ear back to the King: Fairbanks is a naughty child, whose knees we then see tremble as he is presented to King Louis.

Elsewhere in the film, the sexual politics of the novel are elided or softened. (Care was certainly required to make the source material acceptable to the censors, but you sense that Fairbanks wasn’t interested in romantic melodrama so much as adventure.) Milady de Winter (Barbara La Marr) and D’Artagnan exchange flirtatious glances early in the film, and D’Artagnan will eventually surprise her in bed in order to retrieve the diamond broach she has stolen from the Queen—but (unlike in the novel) they never get involved. Even the affair between the Duke of Buckingham (Thomas Holding) and Queen Anne (Mary MacLaren) is remarkably chaste. King Louis himself (Adolphe Menjou) is jealous of the Queen’s private affair, but his jealousy is not emotionally complex (and hardly inflected with sexual interest).

Indeed, the King’s emotional moods—his jealousy, anger, suspicion—are mainly focused on the figure of Cardinal Richelieu (Nigel De Brulier). De Brulier is the most perfect imaginable casting: his gaunt cheeks, long face, distinctive nose, and narrowed eyes. He would reprise this same role alongside Fairbanks’s older D’Artagnan in The Iron Mask (1929), as well as in two sound adaptations of Dumas’s novel. As mentioned before, he is a feline presence on screen. His thin profile, his shoulder-length hair, and his floor-length robes give him a feminine air. Indeed, he spends more time on screen with the King than the King spends with his wife—and he is surely a kind of devilish substitute. There is something almost flirtatious in the way Richelieu needles the King about his Queen. Later in the film, when D’Artagnan flatters Richelieu to delay his scheme to murder him, De Brulier’s performance grows subtly camp. Richelieu suddenly comes over all coy and flirtatious. The handkerchief he has been holding is a signal to his guard to shoot D’Artagnan; but once D’Artagnan begins flattering him, he swiftly withdraws it, and it becomes a kind of girlish accessory. Richelieu is always a magnetic presence on screen. And I can imagine a different director, in a different kind of adaptation, making more of De Brulier than in this film.

D’Artagnan himself enjoys the boys’ club atmosphere of the barracks and the all-male rooms of his friends. Much of the middle of the film is light on plot, instead setting up the relationship between the musketeers. We see how they get by with no money, gambling, borrowing, bluffing. (There’s a nice scene where they successively blag their way into the kitchen of two monks and cadge a free dinner.) It sets up a pattern that would be repeated in Robin Hood, Fairbanks’s next film, where Robin embraces the all-male company of his “merry men”. In that film, Sherwood Forest becomes a giant playground for the antics of Fairbanks and co., who leap gleefully around their idyllic world like ballet dancers. In The Three Musketeers, there isn’t quite the same sense of scale—but the central group of four male friends is the focus of much of the film’s jollity and camaraderie. It’s all very charming, but it lacks emotional depth. Only in The Iron Mask does the friendship of these characters come to mean and feel more: that whole film attains greater weight by being about ageing, and by the sense that there can be no sequel.

The new Blu-ray of The Three Musketeers is by the Film Preservation Society, who also produced the 2021 restoration of the film. Visually, it’s a great treat to look at. The lavishness of the costumes and scale of the sets really comes across. As well as looking sharp and rich and textured, the image benefits from the warm amber tints for the daytime scenes—and subtle blues for the nighttime scenes. Noteworthy in particular is the recreation of the original Handschiegl colour process. When D’Artagnan leaves Gascony, his horse is described as “buttercup yellow”. All the villagers en route and in Paris point and laugh at this extraordinary animal, so much so that when D’Artagnan arrives in Paris he immediately sells the animal to buy a hat. It’s a running gag for several scenes, and one which was visually inexplicable in monochrome restorations of the film. Thankfully, a fragment of a first-generation 35mm print was discovered in 2019 that revealed how the gag was supposed to work: via the Handschiegl process, the horse was quite literally coloured buttercup yellow. The 2021 restoration had digitally recreated the effect, based on the surviving 35mm fragment, and suddenly all these scenes make sense: the film was always designed to have this additional colour element, and all the on-set performances are geared towards this post-production effect.

Finally, I must mention the film’s musical score. It’s a habit among many labels—especially, it seems to me, North American ones like Image and Kino—to describe the soundtracks of their releases in unhelpful terms. As I have written elsewhere, reading in the DVD blurb that the release contains the “original orchestral score” is no guarantee that the soundtrack actually features an orchestra (Cuff, “Silent Cinema”, 287-93). Too often you have to read the small print to discover the truth, e.g. “original orchestral score, arranged for solo piano”. The back of the Blu-ray for The Three Musketeers states that the 2021 restoration is “graced by an orchestral score performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra”. Pause for a moment to consider the word “graced”. Yes, we are indeed more than fortunate to have the “orchestral score”, and it must be an orchestral score because it’s performed by an “orchestra”. Surely! Right? But the small print, in this case the liner notes by Tracey Goessel, make it clear what this actually means:

The Louis F. Gottschalk score, orchestrated for a large ensemble, would have been heard with the road show release, and is available on earlier DVD releases. Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra has created a score consistent with what would have been available to a smaller (in this instance, six-piece) group of musicians for the film’s general release.

Ah. Oh dear. So the “orchestral score” with which this restoration is “graced” is not actually written for or performed by an orchestra. It’s a score compiled from existing material, arranged for a six-piece ensemble. Fine. Disappointing, but fine. You clearly have a budget, and you have to stick to it. But what about the claim that the Louis F. Gottschalk score is available on earlier DVD releases? (I note that it doesn’t “grace” those earlier DVD releases.) Well, the back of the 2004 Kino DVD of The Three Musketeers states the following: “Original 1921 score by Louis F. Gottschalk, arranged and performed by Brian Benison and the ‘Elton Thomas Salon Orchestra’.” Don’t you just love the inverted commas around the name of the “Orchestra”? Because of course this “orchestra” is not an orchestra. The “Elton Thomas Salon Orchestra” is a euphemism for one man and his synthesized MIDI files. So, no, “the Louis F. Gottschalk score, orchestrated for a large ensemble”, is not available on earlier DVD releases. It’s never been available because no-one has ever used an orchestra to record it. I’ve listened to the synthetic version on the Kino DVD and I in no way consider myself to have heard “the Louis F. Gottschalk score, orchestrated for a large ensemble”. I wish I had heard it, but until I’ve heard it performed by “a large ensemble” (does this mean an orchestra, even a small one?) I reserve judgement.

Back to the 2021 restoration of The Three Musketeers, it doesn’t help clarify matters that the Mont Alto Orchestra calls itself an orchestra in the first place. The orchestra’s homepage—their equivalent, I suppose, of the DVD small print—describes them as “a small chamber group”; the roster of musicians’ biographies numbers just five. Even in the 1620s (the time Fairbanks’s film is set), a group of five or six people would blush at calling themselves an “orchestra”. The musicians we see on screen playing for the royal ball at the end of the film (there are about ten of them) form a larger group than we hear performing on the soundtrack. A century later, a small court orchestra might expect to field twenty players, while the larger ones double or treble that number. By the 1820s, a symphony orchestra was beginning to be standardized and you would hope to have forty or fifty players. By the 1920s, you might have a hundred or more players for larger orchestral or operatic works. Film orchestras of the era varied in size according to their venue, but the premieres of big films like the Fairbanks super-productions of the 1920s would have been big events with musical accompaniments to match.

As Jeffrey Vance documents, the premiere of The Three Musketeers was a lavish event, featuring a spoken prologue and “a full orchestra” performing the score (Douglas Fairbanks, 120). Though Vance judge’s Gottschalk’s score “particularly weak in the action sequences, and utterly unable to capture the comic aspects of the action”, he also reminds us that “Fairbanks’s increased involvement with the music and exhibition of his productions began with The Three Musketeers” (ibid.). For Robin Hood, Victor Schertzinger arranged a score “for eighteen players” (ibid., 145). The cover of the 1999 Kino DVD (the soundtrack of which was replicated for the 2004 reissue) says its restoration features “the Original 1922 Musical Score in Digital Stereo”. Of course, you must read the small print on the back to see that Schertzinger’s multi-part score is performed not by an orchestra but by Eric Beheim on “a MIDI-based synthesizer system”. Schertzinger’s score (as Vance says) certainly sounds repetitive, but how can I properly judge it as synthetic pulp rather than orchestral fibre? The way to make these scores more musically viable is not to reduce them, but to expand them—reorchestrate them to make the best use of the original material. Finding a compromise too often means doing something cheaper and less complex. (As a sidenote to this, the 2019 restoration of The Thief of Bagdad uses Mortimer Wilson’s original orchestral score. This version was broadcast on ARTE a couple of years ago but has not yet received any home media release. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all Fairbanks’s silent epics restored complete with the music that their creators intended to hear?)

The Sauer score for The Three Musketeers is perfectly good, although it often lags behind the pace of the action and can never capture the scale of the film. Six musicians can’t conjure a sound world as rich and detailed as the visual sets and crowds of extras. You need an orchestra. You need something that will sweep you up in the adventure of the film. This six-piece band can only gently suggest that you might like to come along. And although the more intimate scenes in the film don’t obviously cry out for a full orchestra, I do confess that my heart sank to hear Sibelius’s heartrending Valse triste (op. 44: no. 1, 1903-04) in the reduced circumstances of a six-piece band. Only a small portion is used in the scene where Buckingham and the Queen meet for the first time, but I wasn’t moved by the scene or even by the music—I was moved by the plight of what should be a full string section of forty or more players reduced to a single violin and cello.

But much of this is, I’m sure, down to my individual taste/snobbery. I know orchestras are expensive beasts, and that hiring them and recording them is beyond the budget of most labels. I don’t mind a score for a small chamber group, but please call it a score for a small chamber group. If it isn’t being performed by an orchestra, you’re not offering us an orchestral score.

I’m sorry to have gone on so much about the score, but I do get fed up with labels overpromising and underdelivering. The Three Musketeers is still a lot of fun, and looks as good as we can hope on this new release. Here’s hoping a new restoration of Robin Hood will follow…

Paul Cuff

References

Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By… (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).

Paul Cuff, “Silent cinema: Material histories and the digital present”, Screen 57.3 (2016): 277-301.

Tracey Goessel, The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015).

Jeffrey Vance, Douglas Fairbanks (Berkeley: California UP, 2008).