Film Scores At Last: Casino Royale

Now, some of you out there may know me well enough to have heard me mention, update or complain about recent deadlines for my masters course at the Royal College of Music – and I remember saying, although it may a be a little later than expected, that I’d be writing reviews about film scores at some point… I think that now I’m done with the former for this academic year, it seems like a more than appropriate time to start on the latter; I can forget my own music for a little while and explore some of the film music that I enjoy.

So without further ado, I present to you, a film score review. Starting off with, as was tentatively hinted at in my previous post, Casino Royale.

I think that everybody who gets this far into the page can now start humming the 007 theme to themselves, right? It’s so iconic, it is James Bond; as much a part of the character himself as his love for Aston Martins and treating pretty young women badly. So what If I told you that it’s not really in Casino Royale – at times it’s hinted at, and yes, it makes a show at the very end of the film, but otherwise it’s somewhat absent – would those of you that haven’t watched Casino Royale in the last two weeks believe me?

Strange: very strange. Do you know what is in the film? Click below.

That, of course, is the obligatory opening title song that accompanies the usually unrelated opening visuals to a 007 picture, this time by Chris Cornell and the film’s composer David Arnold: You Know My Name. But it’s not just the opening titles and it’s not just another Bond song; that falling melody that guides ‘If you take a life, do you know what you’ll give’ is more than just an opening verse. It is the most pertinent melody for most of the soundtrack. It appears everywhere in the film, sometimes as just the violins imitating that first line, and sometimes where the whole verse is sung by the shifting instrumentation of a full orchestra. It actually still dazzles me that a catchy melody from (what I think, at least is) a very good song, let alone a Bond song, can integrate itself wholly into the film’s soundtrack without the audience ever realising.

Before I get on to showing you some of these examples, I should probably answer the question that you may have thought of originally: Why ditch the famous, established Bond Theme and use something new?

There is quite a simple and clever answer to this that lies in everything that Casino Royale depicts. A new, young, hasty and extremely green Bond is delivered to us as though there had not been twenty films of the same franchise preceding Daniel Craig’s casting. We have a film that starts without a 007, before Bond has accumulated all the experience that makes him that cold, calculated, womanising and suave killer we’ve all come to know. With no established character and the potential for something new, the old theme doesn’t seem quite right. It embodies all the things about the previous Bonds, all the things we already know and in some cases loathe. There’s a reason why it’s at the end of the film: that is when we have been with our refurbished Bond for a couple of hours and have all the information we need about his character. At the start, like Bond’s character it doesn’t exist. And why re-vamp a franchise with the same old parts, eh?

Aston Montenegro - Casino Royale Soundtrack

If you played the short track above you’ll hear the ghost of Chris Cornell’s voice hinted at in the opening harp figures, and then lavishly spread over the violins in the second half. I was thinking of making a medley of little moments where this melody makes an appearance but you’ll just have to trust me that it is everywhere, even smaller fragments and other melodies are variations on the same one. I do recommend that you buy the soundtrack for yourselves and have a listen. Getting into buying soundtracks is a great way to start expanding the kinds of music you listen to because they contain so many different types and genres (or emotions etc.). Don’t think for a second that they’re classical or contain any snobby preconceptions, they’re always interesting and engaging; and this is one of the best to start with.

As a side note, those of you that know me better know that the soundtracks I’ve purchased can, and often do, take on a second life: this is something you should definitely try. I like to take video games that don’t already have their own fantastic movie-esque soundtracks and start to synchronise some particularly epic music alongside the gameplay. One of my favourites is putting the score to The Dark Knight alongside Grand Theft Auto 4 while I drive down long strips of concrete dropping grenades from my windows that ingeniously explode on large hit points in the music. The pinnacle of this though is with a game that can be purchased on the Playstation Store for less that eight pounds sterling: Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars. Yes, it is what you think. The only way that the game could be described more beautifully would have been to add ‘playing football’ (or soccer to those over the pond) to the already lengthy acronym SARPBC. The Dark Knight works well here too, as does Angels and Demons, but it is the soundtrack to the The Matrix: Reloaded that makes the ultimate combination of epic and cars that defy gravity. You’ll have to find the score and not the soundtrack CD release as that contains only commercial tracks that vaguely (or do not) have a connection with the film. You could use the third Matrix soundtrack, but you’ll be rewarded for your efforts if you put the music to the Burly Brawl sequence alongside a game – I’m sure it’s on YouTube.

Now to get into the meat of it all, though, and talk about why this score is as good as I profess it to be. We could talk about the great tension throughout the film; we could talk about the atonal music that precedes Bond’s double-O-status promotion only to become more tonal when he quickly becomes more experienced; we could highlight the hints at Monty Norman’s original theme at the end of the first poker game in the Ocean Club or the fantastic use of rhythm and time signature changes throughout the film that seamlessly sit alongside erratic cinematography; we might discuss the dissonant harmony or that this Bond feature has a great integration of synthetic sound and percussion, notable in the scene where James sneaks into the surveillance room in the Ocean Club to surround himself in a Sony manufactured utopia. We could talk about all of the above, but I don’t think it’s necessary: with these reviews I really want all of you reading to be able to talk about film music in real terms and not be bullied by musical terminology. Having dissected this soundtrack I can assure you that a barrage of musical reasoning is behind everything that I have outlined; I think, though, that I have a better way of showing you the magic in this score. Press play on the video below and I’ll write my final natterings below it.

Miami International - Casino Royale Soundtrack

For me, this may just be the single greatest piece of film music that has ever graced an action sequence. The 12 minute long mammoth of a recording never gets boring; it maintains tension and suspense almost continuously and bridges what could be quick boring taxi-following-taxi scenes into a furious high octane, mobile fistfight where Bond attempts to stop a travelling bomb and assailant from destroying a very, very big aeroplane. It’s worth watching with the film after you know the music a little better, but I feel in essence that this one cue summarises everything I mentioned above. More so, its unlike any other bond score save for the part in the middle that has blaring trumpets and gongs to accompany that dinosaur of avian machinery, which could easily slip into Goldeneye. It’s synthetic, it’s harsh and edgy, visceral and erratic; somewhat like our new man in the series: Daniel Craig’s bond is much more like Ian Flemming’s original portrayal in the books – a cool, suave bastard. I think that’s what David Arnold has done here, made a cool, suave bastard of a soundtrack, something that elevated the Bond nexus and gave it a hard shove into the 21^st century. And for the composers in the back, I spoke with the orchestrator and conductor on this project, the fine man Nicholas Dodd, who told me in a roundabout way that Mr. Arnold had most of this done himself. For those of you that don’t know, some composers are very lazy and let their orchestrators (people that arrange musical parts for instruments and sections) take on a creative role that falls far outside of their responsibilities. It’s always worth remembering that any score is the labours and, in some cases, the interferences or more people than are evident.

This begs the question then, why wasn’t David Arnold selected to score the upcoming and eagerly anticipated Skyfall. While there may be simple or complex reasons for such a travesty, the bigger question for me is: why has perhaps the most iconic film series that carries with it the most responsibility of any sequel fallen to Thomas Newman, the man who we know best for American Beauty, Finding Nemo and Wall-e, whose music to the first in that triptych commonly graces pleas for aid and charitable donations?

Now, don’t take me for a hater… Thomas Newman is a fantastic composer who I could write an equal number of words about including a part about his enormous impact on the film music world, but the idea of him scoring a Bond film is somewhat of a foreign concept, a square peg that wouldn’t get into that circular hole no matter how much lubrication the film studio slathers on him. I’m hopeful, I’m optimistic, but deep down I’m a little scared. I’m sure Skyfall will be immense – but if it’s full of wobbling drones then I’ll be very disappointed. Nevertheless, whatever the outcome, we will certainly be waving goodbye to the ‘something special’ that would have ensued had David Arnold scored them all from now on. I hope he Googles himself and reads this, Casino Royale really is a masterpiece.

Alex

As is custom now, I have a little piece of interesting spiel about Monty Norman, the man who wrote the original James Bond theme. He was invited by a producer on Dr. No, Harry Saltzman to fly off to the Bahamas and soak up the flavour of the film before he wrote the music to it – along with a whopping £250 cheque and the option to get out of the project if he wanted. Monty wrote a few little songs for the film, and with them a slightly more Indian sounding version of the Bond theme, made of partial remnants from the score to one of his old stage-shows that didn’t do too well. In the end, it was decided that a commercial orchestrator was needed to bring that theme to life and a young John Barry got the job, making the definitive version of the music we can conjure so easily to mind today. £250 for the Bond theme – but he did get another job out of it, going on to write music with John Barry’s input for a film called Call Me Bwana. After weeks of working on the recordings in Pinewood studios, Monty realised that he still hadn’t signed any contract about payment, and so he called his producer Saltzman to right the issue. He was met with this response: ‘Monty, if you want to talk money, then we can’t do business!’ Charming, and something that interestingly enough is still felt today by composers – why we just don’t work for free, I don’t know… Suffice to say that he didn’t have any more dealings on Saltzman’s films.

And just to add salt to the wound, people, press and public opinion accused Monty of having bought the theme from a Jamaican for $100 and then claimed outright that John Barry had written the theme. Monty Norman has spent a large amount of his life defending his artistic integrity in the courtroom over the latter accusation; the latest case ending in 2001, almost forty years after the release of Dr. No.

All that trouble and two-hundred-and-fifty quid for the most famous film music theme of all time. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… but I’d be pretty bitter. I can only hope he dealt with it like James Bond would have…

Step One: Order a martini, angrily refuse to specify whether it’s shaken or stirred.

Step Two: Have someone smash a giant knot into your nuts over and over again.