Once upon a time Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler discussed the essence of the symphony. It must be an exercise in profound logic, opted Sibelius. No, countered Mahler, it must be like the world—it must embrace the whole. Their symphonies reflect those opinions, Sibelius becoming ever more concise as he went along, Mahler continually expanding outwards, seeking yet more kaleidoscopic combinations of instruments and ideas. Both approaches have their virtues, and I would never take up a stance so unyielding as to deny myself the pleasures of Mahler over Sibelius, or vice-versa. My own listening prefers to embrace that whole rather than hunker down and specialize.
That said, temperamentally I’m more in the Sibelius camp. To my mind there is no virtue higher than extracting maximum effectiveness from minimal material. While I enjoy Mahler’s Cinerama-ified orchestral canvases, I’ll admit that I tend to consider him a less polished, less rigorous, and less disciplined composer than Sibelius. That’s true across the board; the composers I admire the most are deep organicists who work with seed materials that then grow and develop. Such a mindset is common amongst those who teach music theory and analysis at the collegiate level. We theory types sink our teeth happily into Brahmsian developing variation or the challenges posed by Haydn’s monothematicism. We’re less likely to tolerate psychoanalytic approaches to music or gestures towards the infinite. However, my career as a public music commentator, as a writer, and as a pianist, has armored me against becoming altogether gimlet-eyed about musical form and substance. I’m not one to sneer at music that doesn’t meet my autocratic standards; fortunately, I’m quite willing to dig into Mahler or Shostakovich or other such wide-angle composers and find out what makes them tick, and on their own terms, not mine.
Still I keep coming back to the virtues of artistic continence. I took the night off recently and watched two movies from the 1930s: Top Hat with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and the original 1933 King Kong. Both of them represent filmmaking without massive bells and whistles, and yet both succeed spectacularly.
To be sure, King Kong was an envelope-buster and a genre-smasher for its day. Yet its limitations were sharp compared to modern films. No digital nothing. Everything had to be done by hand, with patient one-frame-at-a-time movements. King Kong wasn’t a motion-capture subjected to umpty-trillion computational renderings to create lifelike perfection. He was a foam rubber puppet covered with rabbit fur, with a steel armature inside. He was made to move onscreen by tiny motions, one per frame. Willis O’Brien’s fingerprints sometimes show up on the fur, which appears to ripple in odd ways. Closeups were via a big mechanical head. The film was in black and white, no widescreen, and a monophonic soundtrack. But everything got in there nonetheless.
More to the point, King Kong didn’t have time to dwell on exposition. Carl Denham’s trouble finding a female lead for his adventure movie is summed up in about three lines of dialog. Within five minutes Robert Armstrong has spotted Fay Wray stealing an apple from a street vendor, has bought her dinner, and has hired her for the film. A minute later they’re leaving New York harbor. Ten minutes later Ann is on Skull Island; five minutes after that she’s being prepped as Kong’s wife. The movie streaks along with everything inessential stripped out, no doubt for economic reasons, but all the more effective nonetheless. As much as I enjoy and admire Peter Jackson’s mega-techno remake, it took him about as long as the original film just to get his company to Skull Island. Along the way, inessentials and sidelines bloomed—Ann as a struggling vaudevillian, Denham as a flailing director, Jack Driscoll’s career as a playwright, a never-explored mentorship between the ship’s first mate and a cabin boy, some vague references to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, economic problems besetting captain Engelhorn, the personality of the ship’s cook, and a lot more. In short, the Peter Jackson version is cut from the Gustav Mahler cloth: let’s explain it all, fill it all out, have it encompass the whole. The end result was a vast movie of epic proportions, quite impressive and often wonderful fun to watch. But in the final analysis, the Peter Jackson King Kong tells exactly the same story and elicits the same sympathy for Kong as does the Merrian C. Cooper King Kong—and the original does it in under half the time.
Top Hat provides another case in point. As a story, it’s ludicrous. But that’s not the point of Top Hat. The point is music, dancing, and an entrée into a glamorous escapist Art Deco wonderland that must have been a glorious balm to the troubled minds down in the deepest trough of the Great Depression. Fred Astaire generally called the shots for his RKO movies, and an ironclad house rule was that there would be no trickery involved in filming the dance episodes. They would be performed as on stage, in long single takes and without edits to make the dance seem longer, fancier, or more accomplished, than it actually was. What you see in a Fred & Ginger movie is absolutely real, absolutely then and there. When Fred lights up the screen in his first dance number, negotating his way around a room full of furniture to the effervescent jazz beat of No Strings, No Connections you’re watching him do it after some gawdawful number of rehearsals. They probably had to film the thing all day and night before he was satisfied. But there would be no using a bit of this take here, a bit of that take there. He does it real time. If he made a mistake, they redid the whole.
The same held true for the magical dance number to Cheek to Cheek, plagued as it was by ostrich feathers floating off Ginger Rogers’ dress and landing on the floor, not to mention Fred’s immaculate tuxedo jacket. By the end of the number the set is positively dripping with feathers—but the take you see onscreen is the one in which the feathers stay off Fred’s coat. It’s a complex, beautiful dance, and filming must have been utterly exhausting. But they did it.
Top Hat had no fancy technical trappings, just the skill of writers, composers, dancers, and set designers. Producer Pandro S. Berman spent the money where it counted—on costumes, on set design, on Irving Berlin, on long rehearsals—and didn’t worry about the rest. As a result, Top Hat holds together beautifully to this day; we may be long past the Great Depression and Art Deco may be nostalgia rather than current fashion, but there’s nothing outdated or old-fashioned about supreme artistry. And that’s what’s up there on the screen, artistry without fakery. Even the delightful crackpots who make up the Fred & Ginger Repertory Company—Eric Rhodes, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick, Edward Everett Horton—are perfect little comedians, each in his or her own way. The jokes are corny but still funny, the plot delightfully threadbare and flimsy, the performances stylized and stagey, the sets breathtaking, the lighting gorgeous. The music is beyond criticism (well, maybe except Berlin’s ghastly lyrics for The Piccolino) and the dancing is…well….perfect.
And all without digital processing, fancy-schmantzy film editing, widescreen, Imax, color, anything. In technological terms, both King Kong and Top Hat are the equivalent of kids putting on a show in Uncle Harry’s barn. But I can’t keep from feeling that Top Hat will be around long after the latest techno-whiz-bang musical extravaganza has been forgotten, because when all is said and done, it’s artistry that makes for lasting art, no matter how simple the enclosing medium.