Music Composed by Mark Isham
Rating: ****

A woman is found brutally murdered in Los Angeles, her death the catalyst for the collapse of a number of lives peripheral to the slaying, including both the investigating cops and their paramours. Brian DePalma’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia is surely the most frustrating film of 2006, winning over such confounding competition as M Night Shyalaman’s Lady in the Water, Merchant-Ivory’s The White Countess and Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies. What makes these films so frustrating – and Dahlia in particular – is that they are riddled with quality, but lack any credible narrative conviction, adding up to a smorgasbord of good craft, some memorable sequences, and the general impression that something failed. DePalma’s film is mystifying at times in its choices. His lenser and designer – the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond and Dante Ferretti respectively – poured their hearts into turning Bulgarian backlots into heightened nourish post-war Los Angeles, the most credible conceit of the film. DePalma’s own instincts for mise-en-scene and blocking an action are always intriguing, and frequently arresting. And this being a DePalma film, the music is both participative and engaging – more on that in a moment.

Mark Isham

What a shame then that Josh Friedman’s script tries to force Ellroy’s dark tale into the ultimate noir homage at the expense of any spontaneous action. What a shame that nearly the whole story is told in retrospect by a lifeless voiceover that makes Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner narration sound like Winston Churchill radio pep talks. What a shame that an impressive troupe of supporting performances is demeaned by miscasting in three of the four central roles (John Hartnett, Scarlet Johannson and Hilary Swank - especially grievous in the latter case), and that the remaining central role (Aaron Eckhart) loses all sense of continuity, the further into the film we move. DePalma can knock our socks off with his sterling direction all he wants – there are very few films that can recover from poor scripting and miscasting, and Black Dahlia is not one of them. The project’s original champion, David Fincher, appears to have made the film this might have been with Zodiac. (And what an interesting alternate history exercise – what would a Fincher-directed, David Shire-scored Black Dahlia look, sound and feel like?)

Back to the music. DePalma’s back catalogue of scores is one of the most acclaimed in the history of film scoring, including collaborations with Ennio Morricone (Mission to Mars, The Untouchables), Bernard Herrmann (Obsession), John Williams (The Fury), Danny Elfman (Mission Impossible), Pino Donaggio (Carrie, Dressed to Kill) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (Snake Eyes, Femme Fatale). Replacing a seemingly-miscast James Horner early in post-production was acclaimed jazz and film composer Mark Isham. Isham seems to be one of the most reliable film composers around – ably navigating territory as diverse as serious drama (Crash, Bobby, Quiz Show), action-thriller (Twisted, Blade), romance (The Cooler, At First Sight), and child-targeted adventure (Running Stripes, Miracle, Eight Below).

His strongest scores have always been the ones where his talent for folk and jazz-based composition could come to the fore. With the exception of the great (but sadly unreleased) score for David Mamet’s Spartan, his scores in the action-thriller genre have never made nearly as much of an impression as gems like The Cooler or The Education of Little Tree. Scores like Twisted and Kiss the Girls are always functional of course, but one senses in these scores the restraining hand of directors who don’t like overly expressive music for their films. What a pleasure it is then, to hear Isham’s considerable gifts given a DePalma film to play with. For me at least, Mark Isham’s score is his best to date, and certainly the best of his thriller scores, comfortably sitting on the shelf – if not always equal to – DePalma’s previous collaborations.

The score plays to Isham’s strengths as a composer of jazz and performer of trumpet. The instrument that opens the film with a performance of the foreboding Dahlia theme in ‘The Black Dahlia – Zoot Suit Riots’, before it is overtaken by an incredibly satisfying accelerating passage for percussion, brass variations on the Dahlia theme, and sawing strings. It’s reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith’s ‘Bloody Christmas’ from Ellroy adaptation LA Confidential – the solo trumpet already an homage to Goldsmith’s Chinatown. While in the film the boisterous action cue is uncomfortably mixed under Josh Hartnett’s uninspired voiceover reading, it’s a great start to the album.

What follows this fantastic introduction is one of the few score albums I’ve heard in recent times that runs the gamut of action, intrigue, suspense, romance and general dramatic underscore with near complete success. I could with ease discuss any of the cues in this album, how they mostly manage they enviable triple-feat of: (i) being compelling music for those who like this sort of thing; (ii) generally supportive of the moment when they appear in the film; and (iii) arising from an interesting decision process about the music’s contribution to clarifying the film’s convoluted narrative.

First some of the highlights. ‘Death at the Olympic’ accompanies what is for me one of the best staged-setpieces in any DePalma film, and is the highlight of the score’s action material, though perhaps it benefits the most from seeing the associated scene. ‘Mr Fire and Mr Ice’ introduces (in the film) the boisterous brass-and-percussion theme for the Cops during a boxing match, and is also the album introduction of the soulful trumpet-led theme for Bucky (Hartnett), as the character endures the humiliation of throwing a boxing match. (In the film, Bucky’s theme is introduced via cor anglais in a softer cue sadly left off the album.) Bucky’s theme returns, laden with grief courtesy of Isham’s string accompaniment, in the cathartic ‘No Other Way’: male romance at its best. Special mention should be made of cues like ‘Hollywoodland’ and ‘Men who feed on others’: what would normally be uninteresting suspense and transitional cues are lent considerable interest by interesting use of the core themes and unusual orchestration. (Both cues include a theremin, presumably as a nod to Rozsa, and also as a cheeky way to characterise the extremely unusual revelations in the film’s final reels).

I’m going to focus attention on one cue in particular, because while I think there’s been a lot of reviews about how great this album is, there isn’t a lot of talk about what an interesting film score it is, probably due to the film’s deficiencies. ‘At Norton and Coliseum’ scores the film’s most acclaimed setpiece, the discovery of the Dahlia corpse. It opens with a performance by the jazzy love theme for Bucky and Kay (Johannson) on flute and vibraphone, with gentle string backing slowly growing in volume and turning dissonant as the love theme approaches resolution, before a segue to a secondary theme for the Cops (0:50 – accompanied by one of the film’s many ‘wipes’) as Hartnett and Echkart’s cops stake out a brothel, (apparently) expecting an appearance by a wanted child murderer.

As they wait through the night, and the sun rises, Isham maintains suspense with interesting effects – percussion doubled with brass, a distant violin hint of the Dahlia theme, a not-so-distant brass reading of the same theme, a suggestive piano line. As one of DePalma’s remarkable crane shots rears above the street where the cops are waiting, the audience is made privy to a distant macabre sight in a field in the next street: a dead naked woman, and a living one running from it, screaming. Isham’s cue (1:33) acknowledges the discussion of the distant body with a sudden darkening of the Cops theme – a scratchy percussion instrument suggests brutalisation, low string and bassier percussion spell out the seriousness of the what audience has seen relative to the more matter-of-fact violence that has come before. The implication is clear: although the camera is unsympathetic to the body of the woman – panning back to the street where the cops wait and the ‘real’ story is – what we’ve glimpsed will overtake all else. (When the cops discover the Dahlia corpse in ‘Hollywoodland’, this darker reading of their thematic material is reprised, and the importance of this crime re-affirmed.)

Percussion fades for a moment as the Dahlia corpse leaves sight (if not mind) (1:55) and DePalma’s shot puts us back on the street where the cops wait. A lone brass voice forebodingly recites the Dahlia theme, counterpointed with a secondary theme for the Dahlia in the flute and strings. (These two themes are presented independently of each other as standalone melodies in ‘The Dahlia’.) The tension of the counterpoint builds as a man and a woman of interest to the cops approach the brothel. It’s an interesting choice. All these characters are unaware of the Dahlia, and yet as their confrontation approaches, the music is both servicing the suspense needs of this impending confrontation, and warning the characters – via the use of the Dahlia themes – that the real story is in the street behind. It’s an idea that Isham plays with a lot in this score – even when the plot seems far from the eponymous corpse, her theme is always there. (See also the violin reading of the Dahlia theme in the final percussive moments of ‘Death at the Olympic’, a setpiece that seems to have nothing to do with the search for the Dahlia’s killer.)

When DePalma’s editor can hold off a confrontation no more, a roll of timpani and a dissonant doubling of high strings and brass (2:50) set off a thrillingly orchestrated action cue based on the Cops theme. A gunfight leads into a chase, and Isham introduces an echoing idea into his composition (3:30), where each gesture in the orchestra seems to carry ripple effect. Crucially, a pan down to the dead body of a seemingly unimportant character is scored with what sounds like an acoustically-accomplished version of the echoplex trumpet effect Jerry Goldsmith used in Patton. It’s about as strong a hint Isham can give of the significance of that apparently-insignificant character’s body, and something of a running motif in the film. (When the location of the Dahlia’s killing is discovered by Dwight late in the film in ‘Men who Feed on Others’, the echoing effect – half Patton, half Herrmann’s ‘vertigo’ effect from Vertigo – is reprised.)

Isham’s music for the film complex triangles of relationships is also satisfying, with nods to classic work by Jerry Goldsmith (Chinatown), David Raksin (Laura), Bernard Herrmann (Vertigo) and Miklos Rozsa along the way. There are three relationships, each acknowledged differently by Isham. For the lead character’s obsessive relationship with the Dahlia herself (Mia Kirshner, in the film’s best performance) – whom he sees through footage of her unsuccessful screen tests, Isham explores the fragile, vulnerable heart of the Dahlia theme, always so foreboding elsewhere in the film. Cues like ‘The Dahlia’, with childlike vibraphone reading of the Dahlia theme against a tense violin backdrop; and the violin-led elegiac ‘Betty Short’ represent this material on the album, probably the score’s most affecting writing.

One of the weaker conceits of the film is a resemblance between the Dahlia, Elizabeth Short and bisexual heiress Madeleine Linscott (played by Hilary Swank). This apparent resemblance – the actresses look nothing like each other unfortunately – draws the Dahlia-obsessed Bucky into an affair with Madeleine. While it’s hard to believe any viewer could put aside this crucial piece of miscasting (DePalma could have put Kirshner in both roles, and had the ultimate Vertigo homage on his hands), Isham certainly greases the rails for the viewer with intelligent scoring. Madeleine is introduced on screen during a scene in a lesbian club, with KD Lang performing a source cue as backdrop to the moment where she first catches Bucky’s eye. When she finally gets her own music, in ‘Madeleine’, the mystique of this Dahlia lookalike has grown in the officer’s mind, and with saxophone and strings leading (trumpet following), her sultry theme steps out of the Dahlia’s secondary theme to present an alluring vision of a girl previously thought dead.

The depiction of the affair is surprisingly unsensual for DePalma (who always manages to make the best of lurid opportunity), with most of the lovemaking taking place in the music: the trumpet-led orchestral crescendos of ‘Madeleine’ and ‘Red Arrow Inn’ over scenes of Bucky and Madeleine kissing desperately. Of course, what would a girl who embodies both sex and death be but the ultimate femme fatale, and when the revelation of her part in affairs comes to the fore in ‘Nothing Stays Buried Forever’, her theme blends with the bridge from ‘The Dahlia’ to take on a ruthless menace (2:15-3:30).

The budding relationship between Bucky and Kay also fizzles onscreen, largely down to casting issues. But there’s no disputing the effectiveness of Isham’s scoring choices for this relationship. He lets it grow slowly – not underscoring Johansson’s first appearance in the story – letting it emerge in a jazzy love theme as it becomes clear to Bucky that his partner’s girlfriend has feelings for him in ‘The Two of Us’. (This theme is foreshadowed at the start of ‘At Norton and Coliseum’.) ‘Dwight and Kay’ underscores the climax of the relationship, as the two destroy a kitchen table over grief for a lost friend, another of the film’s beautiful cor anglais solos leading into a trumpet-led crescendo. (The major-key theme here is a nice contrast to the minor-key scoring of Bucky’s love scenes with Madeleine: Kay is a real woman, not the flesh-and-blood likeness of a dead one.) The warm Dwight-Kay love theme closes the film in ‘Nothing Stays Buried Forever’, surviving one last intense orchestral hallucination of the Dahlia’s corpse.

This is a very fine score – a must-have for anyone with a serious interest in film music. While I’ve tried to justify the scoring choices from the perspective of the film, it’s a near flawless album. The music has a satisfying through-composed feel to it, and where cues were too small to be an engaging track on their own, they are combined into composite tracks like ‘Hollywoodland’. Performances by the unnamed ensemble are fine, special mention going to Isham’s trumpet and Jane Marshall’s English horn solos. Simon Rhodes’ mix is a beauty – each element beautifully clear. (One wishes the music itself was always clearly heard in the film’s muddy sound mix – but perhaps the script’s reliance on voice-over is a more significant culprit there.) Credit should go to the three credited orchestrators – Brad Dechter, Frank Bennett and Mike Watts – and the composer of additional music Cindy O’Connor. (Whether any cues on the album are by the latter is unclear.)

Sadly, there was little chance this score would receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, particularly given the critical drubbing the film received. (Even though most reviews of the film praised the music.) This is the antithesis of the kind of spare underdone film music that has for two years now been the toast of Hollywood’s highest film music honour, but all power to Isham – in the end, he contributed more to Brian DePalma’s film than a certain Brazillian guitarist contributed to either of the films that have netted him a best score Oscar. (Though the acclaim given to another fine score rich in homage to music of a bygone era, Thomas Newman’s The Good German, can’t have helped Isham’s case either – organizations like these don’t like to be perceived as too conservative.) One can only hope other directors and producers took note, or even DePalma himself, and call on Isham for more of this sort of thing in the future – it’s truly a composer at his best.

A score worthy of serious respect.

Music Composed and Produced by Mark Isham; Conducted by James Shearman; Orchestrations by Brad Dechter, Frank Bennett and Mike Watts; Recorded and Mixed by Simon Rhodes; Label: Silva Screen (SILCD1221); Availability: In-print; U.S. Release Date: September 5, 2006.

01. The Zoot Suit Riots (2:14)
02. At Norton and Coliseum (4:06)
03. The Dahlia (3:08)
04. The Two Of Us (3:36)
05. Mr. Fire Versus Mr. Ice (3:15)
06. Madeleine (3:05)
07. Dwight and Kay (3:11)
08. Hollywoodland (2:53)
09. Red Arrow Inn (1:35)
10. Men Who Feed On Others (4:24)
11. Super Cops (2:00)
12. Death at the Olympic (3:32)
13. No Other Way (2:06)
14. Betty Short (2:16)
15. Nothing Stays Buried Forever (6:26)

Total Running Time: 47:50