did the score for a wonderful French film known in America as "Elevator to the Gallows." In England it is something like "Lift to the Scaffold" or "Bonnet" or "Boot" or something. The original "Ascenseur pour l'chafaud." Louis Malle. Black and white, 1958, Paris, cool cars, very Hitchcock-style plot, crime drama.
What Miles Davis knew how to do that many film scorers do not know how to do was to SHUT UP. Several minutes pass with no cues, and then you get some gorgeous early Miles notes to bring out the emotional content of what is happening in the plot. In many ways this is a near perfect movie. Oh, and it stars Jeanne Moreau who appeared about the same age in every film I've seen her in.
My son had a local gig with one of his groups this weekend and his band assembled from around the country, and everyone stayed in our house. These are fun kids, 20 somethings, and one of them does film scoring. Lots of kids at Berklee take courses in film scoring, I think few of them get the chance to actually do it. Eli is scoring a movie about down and out people in San Francisco, and what struck me was that he was rather sparse with the music -- I told him he was being like Miles Davis and he was pleased but had not known about the Elevator flick. Of course I can also be pleased by a film with constant music in the score but when it's right to be minimal you have to have that available as an option.
I could go on at length about this but I won't. Just one more thing. American films in the 1940's seemed to suffer from the impression that they had to have a "theme song" so you would hear some chosen song, say "Turkey in the Straw" and the composer would write endless variations on "Turkey in the Straw" so that you could hear it during love scenes, car chases, fight scenes, when people are sleeping, riots, kids standing in line for Santa Claus, etc etc etc etc etc. Constantly! The phenomenon didn't seem to affect European movies in that same period.
F