As Brody crosses the
beach he fiddles awkwardly with his crackling walkie-talkie, and has a brief
exchange with Hooper, who is off-shore with the shark spotters. From the bandstand
comes the sound of a waltz, reminiscent of a fairground carousel, reflecting
the holiday mood of the crowd. The use of source music to underscore a scene was
a technique favoured by Alfred Hitchcock. The danceband number that accompanies
the reveal of the twitching killer’s face in Young and Innocent, the party music playing against the search of
the wine cellar in Notorious, the
children’s song that counterpoints the tension of the gathering crows on the
climbing frame in The Birds, the Storm
Cloud Cantata conducted by Bernard Herrmann that drives the narrative during the
climactic assassination attempt in the Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much – these are just some of the examples of
the technique at work in Hitchcock’s films. It is, however, the use of the waltz
‘The Band Played On’ from a fairground carousel during the stalking and murder
of a woman in an amusement park in Strangers on a Train that is perhaps the director’s most ambitious manipulation of
source music. Professor Jack Sullivan’s provides an exegesis of the scene in
his book Hitchcock’s Music (2006,
Yale University Press):
“In one of
Hitchcock’s most explicit operatic gestures, the characters at the fateful
carnival sing the score, giving it full dimension as part of the drama. In a
conventional movie, the tune would play in the background as a clever ironic
backdrop. But Hitchcock takes the music to another level. […] The band plays on
through Bruno’s stalking of his victim and during the murder itself, blaring
from the front of the screen, then receeding into the darkness as an eerie
obbligato when the doomed Miriam enters the Tunnel of Love […] Hitchcock allows
this waltz to play on unembellished, with terrifying indifference, as we watch
Bruno strangle Miriam in a relection through her glasses.”
In her BFI study of Jaws, Antonia Quirke notes the fact that in the Fourth of July beach scene the “eerie fairground waltz …is apparently emanating from the Amity bandstand, but it really has no source. It isn’t presented as incidental music, although that’s precisely what it is.” Indeed, the music is spotted just as a film score would be. It is absent from the soundtrack as Peter Benchley in the role of the TV journalist delivers his to-camera address, but is heard again as Larry Vaughn picks his way gingerly across the sand in his expensive shoes. When, at the mayor’s insistence, the elderly selectman leads his wife and their grandchildren into the water, the music is accorded the prominence of an orchestral score, and manages to stike an almost elegiac note as the sacrificial victims walk down to the water’s edge.
Of the three Oscars
awarded to Jaws in 1976, one went to the Sound Department, and the Fourth of July beach scene is an exemplary
masterclass in how an aural mix can help build atmosphere. It is obvious that
the primary purpose of background noise in a scene is to create a naturalistic environment.
We hear the kind of things we would expect to hear on a crowded holiday beach: the
playful shrieks of children, the splashing of bathers, the tinny sound of music
from transistor radios, snatches of conversation. Yet, as the spotting of the
carousel music demonstrates, the placement and manipulation of sounds can serve
to comment on the narrative, and provoke certain – often subconscious – feelings
in the viewer. A ball-by-ball play of a baseball game comes from a transistor
radio as Larry Vaughn walks past the beach cabins. It provides a totemic aural
signal that all is seemingly right with the world. America’s
national sport is being played out on America’s national holiday, and it
is telling that the brief snatch of commentary we hear includes a moment of euphoria
(‘Flyball! Deep left field!’). The thrumming rotor blades of the coastguard
helicopter are first heard as Peter Benchley pronounces the word “shark” at the
end of his florid to-camera address. The Mayor glowers at the yellow chopper as
it passes overhead, its buzzing presence a constant irritation to him, like a
wasp at a picnic. In the absence of the shark, the helicopter becomes an emblem
of the threat, its appearance announced by the pulsating sound of its rotor
blades, just as the shark itself is associated with a pulsating figure in the
film score. Wisely, Spielberg and Williams agreed to hold back the music until
the real shark makes its appearance, beginning with an ominous beat at the
initial sighting of the giant fin in the mouth of the estuary and culminating
in a savage ostinato as Brody races
along to causeway to save his son.
