Among other things, “On the Waterfront” (1954) is a glove story. Walking near the river, on a cold day, Eva Marie Saint drops a glove. Marlon Brando picks it up and puts it on. He unwraps a stick of gum. After a while, she tugs the glove from his hand. Contact is made. She goes and stands by an iron railing. He says, “You don’t remember me, do you?” Just before she replies, we hear music: woodwind solos, with the clarinet leading the way. “I remembered you the first moment I saw you,” she says. Strings join the woodwinds. Brando chews gum, walks off, turns, and beckons, calling out, “Come on.”
The music, unobtrusive yet edged with romantic encouragement, is by Leonard Bernstein. It’s the only score that he wrote directly for the movies. If only he had written more. (“On the Town” and “West Side Story” sprang from the theatre and, for many listeners, lost a jolt of energy when they arrived onscreen.) In truth, given his influence on so many realms of American culture—as a composer, a conductor, a lecturer, a TV presenter, an author, a New Yorker, and an activist—it’s astonishing how faint a mark Bernstein left on cinema. Maybe he feared, with good cause, that the compromises involved in filmmaking were even more grievous than those inflicted elsewhere. His most astute contribution may be “What a Movie!,” a mezzo-soprano number composed for his 1952 opera, “Trouble in Tahiti,” during which the heroine, Dinah, derides a film that she just saw (“What escapist Technicolor twaddle”), only to be swept up, despite herself, in the tropical fantasies that it purveyed.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 27, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 27, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Thataway Thomas McGuane
The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca.
THE CURRENT CINEMA APOCALYPSE WHEN
“Megalopolis.”
THE THEATRE - PHOTO REALISM
Moisés Kaufman's Here There Are Blueberries.”
AGE OF ANXIETY
The love songs of Billie Eilish.
FAMILY PORTRAIT
In his latest novel, Garth Risk Hallberg shrinks his frame.
EYES UP HERE
The perils and pleasures of a nice rack.
A CRITIC AT LARGE SAY THE WORD
Why liberals struggle to defend liberalism.
A REPORTER AT LARGE YOU MAKE ME SICK
How corporate scientists discovered—and then helped to conceal—the dangers of forever chemicals.
THE WORLD OF TELEVISION CASTOFFS
REALITY-TV CONTESTANTS ARE BARELY PAID, AND THE EXPERIENCE CAN FEEL LIKE ABUSE. SHOULD THEY UNIONIZE?
SHOUTS & MURMURS IDENTIFIED
A panel of scientific experts commissioned by NASA to study unidentified anomalous phenomena,” more widely known as UFOs, said Thursday that it found no evidence that any of the reported objects were extraterrestrial in origin.