Pursuit’s Undercover Rock Star goes deep underground, into the paranoid world of post-Watergate 70s cinema—and offers us these moody soundtracks to spy by on soupy surveillance days.
It’s a cold, rainy day on the watch, and Music City is more akin to Gotham City. It’s Blade Runner weather for sure. This is the kind of weather that prompts brooding, that begs for sullen soundtracks.
I’m feelin’ pretty “film noir” today.
One of my favorite eras of cinema is the post-Watergate “cinema of paranoia,” that glut of mid-to-late seventies movies that dealt in the conspiratorial and the cerebral—with sparse, haunting soundtracks to boot. It was a time when Americans were suspicious of authority, and there was no shortage of smart, crisp, investigative flicks to reflect that.
Here are a few of my favorite soundtracks of that era—a time, you could argue, that heralded the Age of Surveillance.
Taxi Driver
Bernard Hermann’s last film score is the aural equivalent of an expressionist painting. The tones are brooding and beautiful in a detached manner, a lot of jazz-informed saxophone and piano hovering around dark tonal clusters that summon the dark, unforgiving streets of Travis Bickle’s New York.
Hermann was the genius behind most of Hitchcock’s film scores, and it’s fitting that this would be his swan song. Taxi Driver is indebted to classic film noir in many regards when it comes to narrative style—antihero as protagonist, and cloudy love story. The unflinching violence and the modernist wash of paranoia and alienation are the 70s touches in evidence here.
The Parallax View
The first of three scores on this list composed by Michael Small, and also the first of three films directed by Alan Pakula.
Parallax follows an investigative reporter (played by Warren Beatty) closing in on a shadowy syndicate called the Parallax Corporation. The Corporation deals in political assassination, a subject much in vogue at the time of the film’s release. (The 1975 Church Committee’s unveiling of many of the illicit activities of the CIA and FBI washed the last bit of naïvete out of the eyes of many Americans, just one year removed from Nixon’s resignation.)
Michael Small’s score for Parallax is regal and restrained, sinister minimalism being a trademark of many of the soundtracks of this era. The theme begins with a brooding patch of strings in the background, while a dissonant, repeated two-note piano phrase serves to usher in the theme of suspicion and danger.
Klute
Donald Sutherland as the noble detective, Jane Fonda as the beautiful, morose call girl, a murder mystery, a doomed romance. All the essential ingredients are here for a prime caper.
Once again, this paired director Alan Pakula with composer Michael Small. There are minor-key waltzes, unusual touches of harpsichord here and there, lots of lonely piano. The sense of someone watching or someone being watched is constantly at hand in the soundtrack, with two different instruments conducting a sort of uneasy dialogue.
Marathon Man
Hard to think of anything creepier or more villainous than a Nazi dentist. It’s part of what makes director John Schlesinger’s 1976 thriller so enduring. A common theme throughout many of the conspiracy films of this era is that of a naïve protagonist slowly submerged in intrigue beyond his comprehension, much as the American public at the time had slowly drowned in the scandal of Watergate and the post-Vietnam fallout.
Thus, Dustin Hoffman as the young grad student pitted against Laurence Olivier’s evil Nazi dentist proves a powerful combo. Once again, Michael Small scores this one, with themes of varying dissonance and restrained beauty.
All the President’s Men
Two reporters hot on the heels of the most explosive political scandal of the 20th century—one that would eventually bring down an entire political administration and end an era of the public’s implicit trust in their government. In some ways, the importance of the Watergate scandal was more in the reaction than the crime. A generation later, skepticism of government is an American staple. But at the time, this scandal had few precedents in American life. The sense of betrayal was stark, and widespread.
Alan Pakula returns as the director for this film version of the nonfiction bestseller. This time the score is by David Shire, another master of mood and minimalism. The soundtrack essentially revolves around two themes, both low and brooding but with some sense of the magisterial. It is the sonic equivalent of the two reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, walking down long corridors of Washington DC buildings, attempting to uncover the truth while the weight of history looks in on them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRrPNpLZ5Q0
The Conversation
Francis Coppola’s The Conversation stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert drawn deeper and deeper into a sinister plot, and it’s one of the underappreciated gems of mid-70s cinema. Coming as it did in between installments of the Godfather franchise from Coppola, it’s actually quite amazing how different a film it is—small in scale comparatively from a cast and plot standpoint, but riveting and haunting.
Composer David Shire uses sparse and mournful piano themes for the majority of the score, somewhere between Monk and Satie. At various points in the film, he distorts the piano or creates interesting overlays of sound effects to evoke the concept of wiretapping.
The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3
This is a good-old-fashioned heist movie, updated for the menacing 70s of New York, with a stellar cast—including Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, and Walter Matthau. The plot pivots around a New York city subway hijacked by armed men demanding a cash ransom from the city, lest they start executing hostages.
Matthau plays the world-weary and cynical detective who has to figure out how to stop them. The soundtrack is once again by Shire, although here, instead of minimal piano weighted with implicit tension, we have a lurching , dense percussion and brass heavy theme, the meeting point of old-school film-noir jazz and new funk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kYR3lxQti4
See more installments of the Sounds of Surveillance.