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KING KONG
From worm rides to wide-open highways…
DUNE: PART TWO ★★★★★
Even by his own outsized standards, Hans Zimmer’s return to Arrakis is an extravagantly inventive and emphatic career peak. Splicing the duduk with Loire Cotler’s ecstatic voice, the love theme is as beautiful as Harkonnen Arena (Queen’s Ming’s Theme made steroidal?) is bodyslam brutal. And after extraordinary feats of Vangelis-grade worldbuilding, unleash-hell action cues and spice-tripping mystique, the pay-offs are immense: triumphant yet ominous, Kiss the Ring leaves you longing for Dune: Messiah.
DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS ★★★★★
Coen brother Ethan’s LGBTQ+ road movie bundles up a scattershot but spry mix of onmessage pop and classy scoring. Carter Burwell does the latter honours, mixing lively blends of guitar twang, noir-ish mood-crafting and dreamy send-offs (Hers and Hers). Songwise, The Liverbirds and Le Tigre set a brisk pace, psych-rockers Kennelmus and queercore punks Longstocking add colour, and Linda Ronstadt’s Long Long Time remains – after The Last of Us – a welcome travelling pal.
The way composer Max Steiner told it, filmmakers saw music as a ‘necessary evil’ in the late 1920s. Happily, it was a necessity that producer/director Merian C. Cooper embraced. When RKO Pictures suggested Cooper save money and use library music for King Kong (1933), he offered to pay for Steiner himself.
For $50,000, Cooper landed a score that maxed Kong’s cultural clout and changed scoring history. If Steiner was the ‘father of film music’ (as he is often described), then Kong was the daddy of scores, drawn from the influences of classical music and opera via a 46-piece orchestra, whose players multitasked furiously. Steiner’s outsized achievement wasn’t the first film score, or even his first, but his efforts crystallised what a symphonic score for a major movie could be.
Besides writing music around dialogue, Steiner seeded character themes that thread through the film, securing audiences’ investment and amplifying viewers’ responses. Kong gets a three-note theme, which opens the film ominously and then shifts according to the ape’s frankly wayward mood swings: majestic or aggressive, romantic or broken.
Ann’s theme is dreamy, though at times it clashes with Kong’s to amplify the tension.
Elsewhere, frenetic tribal tunes and a jaunty adventure theme for the sailors can be heard – though not for the film’s opening stretch. Ingeniously, Steiner didn’t score the prologue: the music only arrives as Skull Island looms into fog-shrouded view, with rolling harps and suspenseful strings reeling us in as if by hypnosis.
From here, Steiner executes enthralling exercises in lavish world-building and action, weaving his main themes around primal cues for stand-offs with sundry prehistoric creatures. The Snake – The Bird – The Swimmers is exemplary, ranging from playfulness to dread, horror and rage over seven tumultuous minutes.
Back in NY, Steiner sets Kong’s capture, escape and rampage to fanfares and crescendos of thrilling intensity. By the time of Aeroplanes, Kong and Ann’s themes have tightly merged; as he scales the Empire State Building, his cue ascends thrillingly in sync with his progress. In helping audiences feel Kong’s transition from a creature of terror to pity, Steiner’s music works miracles.
That aptitude for emotional grandeur would lead to further glory in scores for Gone with the Wind, Now, Voyager and beyond. Steiner’s use of leitmotifs was much-adopted, too, just as Kong himself would be revisited. John Barry and James Newton Howard scored the 1976 and 2005 remakes respectively - and respectably. But in terms of impact and majesty, there can be only one king.
BACK LOT MUSIC, WARNER BROS., WATERTOWER MUSIC