Listening to Stanley Kubrick Read Free Page A

the Fight.
    As Walter is examined by a physician, the music again takes a darker turn that continues through Walter’s lunch at a steakhouse owned by a friend. According to the narrator, the time is four o’clock, and there are still six long hours to the fight. Fried’s music becomes a bit more anxious, especially in the sequence where Kubrick shows Walter’s “tools of [the] trade”: gloves, robe, ice pack, shorts, tape. The cue at the end of this sequence gives way to tense music with a driving, percussive beat in the woodwinds and brass. The music grows to a fever pitch as the narrator explains Walter’s necessary transformation as fight time approaches:
    Walter isn’t concerned with the hands of the clock now, just his own hands. As he gets ready to walk out there in the arena, in front of the people, Walter is slowly becoming another man. This is the man who cannot lose, who must not lose. The hard movements of his arms and fists are different from what they were an hour ago. They belong to a fierce new person. They’re part of the Arena Man: the fighting machine that the crowd outside has paid to see in fifteen minutes.
    The pulse of the music at this point has gotten faster, louder, and higher in pitch. But once Walter walks out to enter the ring, Kubrick makes an interesting choice. The underscore disappears, as does the narrator, and the sound of the arena becomes the soundtrack. Because the music has been constant, the ambient noise of the fight draws the audience in. We hear the announcer on the tinny microphone (in typical announcer-speak, he introduces “Walter Car-teer”), the clang of the bell, the cheers and whistles of the crowd, and the sounds of the gloves hitting their targets. The fight becomes real, and the audience experiences it in real time. For the fight itself, Kubrick and Singer both shot from different angles—so as not to lose any footage—and Singer caught Cartier’s knockout of his opponent while Kubrick was reloading. 15 As Cartier’s opponent Bobby James hits the canvas, Fried’s score starts again, cymbals heralding the “Gloved Gladiators” cue—which makes its first and only appearance here, and in truncated form—before the referee has even finished counting to ten. The narration returns for a brief comment to neatly tie things up, and Fried’s music ends with a triumphant major chord and crash of the cymbals. Fried led the nineteen musicians well and achieved a tight score for the project. He would go on to score more newsreels for RKO, and indeed his career as a composer for film and television was quite successful thereafter. He continued to work with Stanley Kubrick, scoring the director’s first four features.
    After the successful completion of Day of the Fight , Kubrick went on to do another short for RKO called The Flying Padre , this time for the Screenliner series. The score for this film was written by Nathaniel Shilkret, a successful composer and instrumentalist who worked for RKO-Pathé. This short is the story of two days in the life of Father Fred Stadtmueller, a priest who commutes among his eleven parishes in New Mexico by Piper Cub airplane.
    Synopsis and Score Description for The Flying Padre
    For the opening shot, Kubrick shows a beautiful vista and the skies over what we assume must be Harding County, New Mexico. This is accompanied by the voiceover and Shilkret’s pleasant music. Because of the location of Father Stadtmueller’s parishes and the population he serves, Shilkret composed a lively opening that echoes some of the Latino-inspired local music. We see footage of Father Stadtmueller flying his plane, the Spirit of St. Joseph , both from inside the cockpit, and from the ground. As the Flying Padre goes in for a landing, Kubrick is sure to let the audience hear the sounds of a herd of cattle that must move out of the way for Stadtmueller’s descending plane. When Father Stadtmueller lands in Gallegos to perform a funeral mass, the music