It’s nice to be able to look forward to a three-day weekend, when nobody expects you to get your butt in gear. Unless you’re Charlie Chaplin, that is.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll have music from films about the working stiff, for Labor Day.
“The Molly Maguires” (1970), set in and around the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania, illustrates the unfair labor practices imposed on immigrant workers there, which led to violent strikes and acts of sabotage. Sean Connery is the ringleader and Richard Harris the Pinkerton detective brought on to infiltrate the gang.
The film was directed by Martin Ritt, a number of whose projects deal with labor, intimidation, and corruption, and his own experiences living through the era of the Hollywood blacklist – among these, “Edge of the City,” “The Front,” and “Norma Rae.”
The music is by Henry Mancini, a far cry from his work on “The Pink Panther,” “Peter Gunn,” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” with a decidedly Celtic lilt.
Charlie Chaplin was a brilliant comedian, of course, but his perfectionism could manifest itself in uncomfortably close supervision over every aspect of his films. The young David Raksin found this out the hard way, when he accepted the job of assisting Chaplin in the writing of the score to “Modern Times” (1936).
Chaplin, a violinist and cellist himself, would whistle tunes and then stand over Raksin’s shoulder as he figured out how to make them fit the action. Alfred Newman, a much more seasoned hand, stormed out of the recording sessions. Raksin was actually fired once, after only a week and a half, though he was quickly rehired. Despite the creative friction, the two men became friends, and Raksin recollected his work on “Modern Times” as some of the happiest days of his life.
The film begins with an iconic factory scene, with Chaplin working an assembly line at an increasingly hectic pace, finally being put through the gears of the machinery. He suffers a breakdown, goes berserk, and throws the entire mechanized dystopia into chaos.
Speaking of dystopias, few can match the OSHA-flouting nightmare of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927). One of the landmarks of silent cinema, “Metropolis,” unfortunately, is eerily prescient of a world divided between the haves and the have-nots. Once seen, the subterranean hell of the workers’ hive is not soon to be forgotten.
Lang’s vision continues to resonate in more ways than one, with its iconography shamelessly recycled by dew-eyed fans and film students down the generations. Similarly, Gottfried Huppertz’s influential, Straussian score led the way for the opulent symphonic canvases of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and John Williams.
Finally, we’ll accept a helping hand – as well as claw, tail, beak, and tongue – from the benevolent woodland creatures of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937). Frank Churchill and Larry Morey’s songs are justifiably immortal.
Whistle while you work, even as you look forward to a long weekend, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.