the list of 9 for april 14, 2003:
NINE AMERICAN MOVIES WITHOUT SOUNDTRACKS
Now that my talented composer Christopher Farrell is finishing up the score forClaustrophobia - over 45 minutes of music for a 78-minute film - I find it hard to believethat at one time I didn't plan on using any music at all. It's only when I researched forthis list that I truly realized how rare it is to find a film without a score. I decided to makemy search even harder by limiting myself to American cinema (some of today's art films from Iran,Taiwan and Denmark are soundtrack-less). I could find shockingly few American movies that neitherhad a composer nor, as with Scorsese pictures, a soundtrack of "source music" (rock songs,Beethoven, what have you). This proves once and for all how much an indispensable part offilmmaking music really is.

  1. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. The absence of music was part ofthe film's "This is real, undoctored footage" put-on.

  2. THE BIRDS. Alfred Hitchcock's only film without a musicalscore (this includes Lifeboat), the director decided to use only the sound of hismenacing birds as his "soundtrack."

  3. DOG DAY AFTERNOON. Sidney Lumet's re-enactment of a famousNew York bank heist cemented Al Pacino's star power; Lumet decided to keep his film music-free inkeeping with his isolated setting and short time span (the story plays out across about 7hours). The sort of film that, like The Birds, made me think I could get away with notusing music myself.

  4. FAIL-SAFE. Lumet again! Boy, once upon a time he was agreat filmmaker, wasn't he? Anyway, using a real-time scenario in Fail-Safe, the director must havesimply found it inappropriate to include a score in such a claustrophobic setting.

  5. THE CHINA SYNDROME. Famous 70's nuclear shocker predictedthe Three Mile Island disaster by mere days. Like Lumet, writer/director James Bridges must havefelt that his pressure-cooker storyline would be best served unaccompanied.

  6. SLACKER. Though I distinctly recall some sort of tuneduring the last couple of minutes of Richard Linklater's groundbreaking - if boring - debut, it'sthe chatter of its titular blabbermouths that provide the real soundtrack. I believe his laterfilm Tape also eschewed a score, but I didn't dare see it.

  7. THE TALL TARGET. Little-known 1950's thriller about an imagined assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln - not to be confused with the actual assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln.

  8. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. The notorious 1970's exploitation film's lack of music may have more to do with its lack of budget.

  9. MAROONED. As with many of the other movies on this list,the music-free soundtrack to 1969's Marooned was motivated by its story's suffocatingphysical environment - in this case, astronauts Gregory Peck, David Janssen and Richard Crennatrapped in deep space. Ron Howard couldn't match it in his similar Apollo 13 decades later- he even had to throw in lame spacy "vocal stylings" by Annie Lennox. Doesn't Howard know that in space, no one can hear you sing?

Copyright © Mark Tapio Kines 2011