LAURA

(realização de Otto Preminger; música de David Raksin, 1944)

"The tremendous success of the song "Laura" as an entity apart from the film was something of a phenomenon in 1944 Hollywood and, aside from the contribution of his own lyric gift, Raksin is aware of various intangibles that went into the success of the score to Laura. David Raksin feels that "The story of 'Laura' is like that of everything else which is a prototype of some kind. It's as though a lot of elements that are floating around in the air and ready to be grabbed of by somebody, suddenly coalesced in one gesture, and that gesture at that time happened to be 'Laura.' To say that is a lot more puffed up than even an egocentric guy like myself can live with, but I'm trying to be 'historic' and objective about it. It suddenly happened, and everybody went wild. If I had written 'Laura' last year (1973), in the present pop music climate, it would have been a failure".

The overwhelming success of "Laura" as a song exerted a tremendous influence on film scoring immediately thereafter with varying results, for Raksin as well as for other film composers. Raksin recalls: "In the noble Hollywood tradition, in which imitation is more than the sincerest form of flattery - it's a way of life - those who weren't trying to write 'another Laura’ were demanding that others write it for their pictures. In the middle of all of the excitement and acclaim, on a grander scale than anything that happened to film composers in those dear, innocent days, there was something absurd about it all. It isn't that I wasn't enjoying the long-awaited instant fame (just add blood, and stir), but along with the appreciation from one's peers - which is the best kind - there was a kind of philistine adulation that bothered me a lot. It was fine to be admired, but not so good to be admired for the wrong reasons. People made such a fuss about the 'originality' of that melody! I was thrilled about what was happening, thrilled to have composed a song that had 'reached' so many people, and I too felt that there was something different, or special about the song. But to a musician it did not seem proper when uninformed people talked about a piece that started on a supertonic seventh and made its way partly through a cycle of fifths as though its composer had invented that harmonic procedure".

(...)

The music for the film Laura is basically monothematic, that is, the material for the entire score is drawn, essentially, from one melody. There are small subsidiary themes that Raksin uses throughout the film, but the great majority of the music is derived from the main theme. It should be pointed out that monothematic film scores can be dull and repetitive - for obvious reasons. It is difficult for a composer to draw anywhere from forty to sixty minutes of music from one melody and still keep the score musically viable and interesting.

There are several reasons for the aesthetic success of the monothematic score to Laura. First is the haunting quality of the melody. (...) A second, and perhaps more important, reason is the dramatic purpose for which the theme is used, namely to evoke the quality of the (presumably) murdered girl that drew others to her. In the course of the first five reels, where she is seen only in flashbacks, it is this quality that makes the hard-boiled detective fall in love with her. The theme is not used in the traditional "Love Theme" manner, in scenes between Laura and the detective. Film composer Elmer Bernstein's comment on the evocative aspect of "Laura" is worth repeating here because it expresses very succinctly the effective thematic use of Raksin's score: "The single theme can identify a character, as in David Raksin's eternal 'Laura'. A technique that can be - and nowadays usually is - a boring cliché had its classic expression in Laura. The film portrayed a man falling in love with a ghost: the mystique was supplied by the insistence of the haunting melody. He could not escape it. It was everywhere. It was there when he was in Laura's apartment. It was there when he turned on the record player. It was never absent from his thoughts. We may not remember what Laura was like, but we never forgot that she was the music and in that music she has of course come into our lives to stay. In that instance, the music and its insistence was the most compelling feature of the film".

(...)

When asked how the original tune for Laura carne about, Raksin recalled: "I am not going to recount the entire story, which would bring a blush to readers of 'True Confessions', but what happened was roughly the following: Otto Preminger wanted to use as the theme a beautiful Duke Ellington song called "Sophisticated Lady" (not "Summertime," as is occasionally said). I saw my chance to compose a score of my own in my first major assignment at 20th-Fox vanishing, and I genuinely believed that the tune was wrong for the picture. Preminger defended his choice, saying, 'This is a very sophisticated girl.' When I pretended not to understand how he meant that, he said, 'My dear boy, this girl is a whore!' I replied, 'By whose standards, Mr. Preminger - by whose standards?' He turned to Al Newman and asked, with asperity, 'Where did you get this fellow?' Newman, who was much amused, said, 'Maybe you ought to listen to him, Otto.' Preminger, who - despite his fearsome reputation, was always wonderfully generous to me (after he understood that I was really a composer), said in his brusque way, 'Well, today is Friday; you come in with something on Monday or we use 'Sophisticated Lady!' Well, Monday I arrived with 'Laura'".

(Roy Prendergast in Film Music/A Neglected Art)

(2007)