Conference Agenda

Jazz entered the international film music lexicon in the 1950s, but as Royal Brown notes, it remained attached to gangster films, narratives of “‘lower-class’ people involved in sleazy dramas,” as documented by Derrick Bang’s recent two-volume collection Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen (2020: Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen, 1950–70 and Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen Since 1970). British jazz composers who tried their hand at genre film soundtracks risked comparison to American jazz-tinged scores by Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin and Quincy Jones, not to mention those by U.K. titans John Barry and John Dankworth. Whether due to production, financing or other pressures, many well-crafted genre scores of the late 1960s and early 1970s sound as dated as the trade novels that formed the basis for their screenplays. I argue that those films which rise above their genre designation—Mike Hodge’s Get Carter (1970) most prominent among them—do so because their pared-back dialogue and production values are matched by a minimal score that perfectly complements a naturalistic, unfettered approach to the British crime drama.

This paper will trace a brief history of notable soundtracks to British gangster and spy films of the 1960s and ‘70s before discussing soundtracks by jazz pianist and composer Roy Budd (1947–1993), with a focus on the score for Get Carter. Hodges credits hiring Budd to score the film as the most important key to its success outside of Michael Caine’s intense performance. The entire score was done quickly on a budget of £450, necessitating a jazz trio for most of the instrumental cues. Yet it also included haunting diegetic songs in a variety of styles that marked protagonist Jack Carter’s journey through the rough streets of Newcastle. The spare theme and lean instrumentation of Carter will be contrasted with Budd’s later scores for Fear is the Key (1972), The Stone Killer (1973), The Black Windmill (1974) and The Internecine Project (1974), films which arguably fail to take advantage of the Budd jazz-funk “brand’s” ability to track a compelling genre narrative to its conclusion.

The gradual decriminalization of "obscenity" in media around 1970 coincided with a period of rapid growth in the size and militancy of homophile and gay liberation organizations in the United States. One remarkable result was the emergence of what one contemporary source simply calls the gay movie. These films were erotic and explicit, but the gay movie was not merely a subgenre of pornography. Erotic themes were naturally at the heart of a genre by and for a sexual minority during the early, heroic phase of the sexual revolution. Those who consumed them frequently report that these films played a key role in fostering gay consciousness by refining its imagination, organizing its categories, and reinforcing freshly established, more prideful norms. Despite exploding into life, the gay erotic film did not survive the 1980s. Another coincidence, this time of the AIDS epidemic which devastated gay militancy, as well as the arrival of videotape, which made private what had been a public form of consumption, proved fatal.

The role of the soundtrack is especially fraught in this genre. Homoerotic reels produced by the likes of Bruce of Los Angeles in the 1960s had no soundtrack at all. Theatrical release called for sound, but it was never clear what this should be. Shoots very exceptionally recorded live sound, and there was no consensus about what made for appropriate music. Many of the higher-budget films featured original scores, and this despite filmmakers making little effort to synch up any non-musical sound to the moving image. All the same, music pervades the genre, in part because the structure of these films, which alternate between divertissements and scenes that advance the plot, have a great deal in common with musical theater, and seem to call for musical accompaniment.

Given that this genre is so little known, this presentation takes up a wide-angle lens. Its aim is to provide a general history of the gay movie soundtrack with an eye to making explicit what the filmmakers discovered about the criteria for aesthetic success in the erotic film soundtrack.

In her analysis of the film Final Destination, Eugenie Brinkema provocatively writes that “death is a structure, not a symbol” (2022: 41). In this film, the horror has little to do with the genre’s typical hauntings, monsters, or sexual transgressions. Rather, Final Destination’s horror is purely formal. Horror results from the inexorability of a structure (in this case, ordinality) that unilaterally determines the fate of the characters. Each character, no matter how clever, will ultimately – and in a particular order – succumb to the top-down imposition of this form. They are merely pawns in the machinic, sequential pattern of death’s design. And according to Brinkema, such a structuring is fundamental to horror cinema in general.

Brinkema’s formalist approach to the horror genre can be fruitfully extended into the realm of the soundtrack. In this paper, I adopt Brinkema’s idea of ordinal horror to perform close readings of two films: Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980) and David Prior’s The Empty Man (2020). I focus on the interaction between the films’ visuals, narrative, and soundtrack, arguing that these movies are representative of a number of horror films that use music and sound design to exemplify the conflict between bottom-up narrativity (in which characters’ decisions have meaningful consequences) and top-down structural domination (in which characters have predetermined ends). Such films often play out scenarios in which individuals encounter a design from which they cannot escape (for example, a plot in which characters are inevitably killed off one-by-one). Similarly, the inescapable repetition of cues and motifs in their soundtracks – both diegetic and non-diegetic – militates against any notion of development. Such explicit incommensurability between character agency/development and fatalistic form is often the very point of a horror film. In the case of Inferno and The Empty Man, the soundtrack conspires to reinforce the unfreedom of the protagonist in the face of a rigidified formal design. I conclude by reflecting on what horror’s hostile formality might reveal about the artificiality of the term “genre,” which, at least since the New Critics, has been associated with a natural commensurability of form and content.