Heigh-ho! This week on “Picture Perfect,” we celebrate Labor Day with music from movies about the working stiff.
“The Molly Maguires” (1970), set in and around the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania, illustrates the unfair labor practices imposed on immigrant workers there, which triggered violent strikes and acts of sabotage. Sean Connery is the ringleader and Richard Harris the Pinkerton detective brought in to infiltrate the gang.
The film was directed by Martin Ritt, a number of whose projects deal with labor, corruption, and intimidation, 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 often resulted 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, resented the micromanagement and stormed out of the film’s recording sessions. Raksin was actually fired once, after only a week and a half, but he was quickly rehired. Despite the creative friction, Chaplin and Raksin 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, Chaplin working an assembly line at an increasingly hectic pace, literally 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 dewy-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.
The “picks” are all “mine” for Labor Day. Whistle along to music from movies about work, on “Picture Perfect,” this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
