I caught 1973’s The Sting on TV recently. By now, I’ve seen it often enough that the kick of the plot has pretty much evaporated, leaving behind the not inconsiderable on-screen pleasures of watching the cast at work. (Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan, I just learned from Wikipedia, did not have to fake his limp: “Shaw had slipped on a wet handball court at the Beverly Hills Hotel just a week before filming began and had split all the ligaments in his knee.”)
To which I’d have to add, always, the textural pleasures provided by the soundtrack.
It’s hard not to like Scott Joplin’s ragtime music, which — though already out-of-date in the real-world 1930s — somehow “sounds” right to our ears for that period. It’s so… so… so bubbly, y’know?
But one song always stood out in my mind as the best of the lot — and although Joplin wrote it, it didn’t even sound like ragtime, to my uneducated ears: “Solace.”
[Below, click Play button to begin Solace. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:34 long.]
The complete title of the song is “Solace: A Mexican Serenade”; published in 1909, it was, says at least one source, “the only work by Joplin to employ a tango rhythm.” Which caught me completely by surprise — not that my ears are any smarter about tango than about ragtime. But when I heard “Solace,” I just couldn’t picture a couple of sleek and smoldering Spanish dancers clinched together, eyes locked, as they swirled about on a dance floor.
According to the All Music Guide to Classical Music, however, the “Solace”-as-tango story isn’t quite that straightforward:
[Solace] is a four-minute gem of a habanera, which, as one might divine from the word, has roots in Havana. There is also in Solace something of the tango form, which, though distantly related to an African folk dance tradition, is more recently of the same Latin extraction as the habanera. Solace is, then, a true musical mish-mash…Fans of George Bizet’s Carmen are invited to sit back, listen to Solace, and enjoy the same gently rocking habanera rhythm as is heard throughout the Frenchman’s famous Habanera.
So, since you, too, may wonder about that comparison… here’s Bizet’s “Habanera”:
[Below, click Play button to begin Habanera (from ‘Carmen’). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:11 long.]
How about that?
[At the time this posts on Wednesday morning, I’ll be in mid-air, en route to a four-day reunion with my sisters and brother. If all goes as planned between now and then, though, another of these magically pre-created missives will appear on Friday. I will be checking in online “for real” from time to time, too, both here and via email.]
Froog says
Is that really Marvin Hamlisch on the piano? I grew up with the Joshua Rifkin versions, and they’ve become definitive for me (like Aldo Ciccolini for Satie, and Rubinstein for most of Chopin).
It’s uncanny how much our tastes coincide: Solace has always been my favourite piece of Joplin too.
The Sting is a classic ‘Christmas movie’ – and was on the top of a pile of DVDs I’d been meaning to re-watch a few months ago, but somehow didn’t get around to. You make me think I should do it this weekend.
John says
Froog: Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s Hamlisch. Like a lot of Americans of my generation, sadly, for all I knew the Joplin pieces in the soundtrack might have been composed just for The Sting.
The movie is one of those which doesn’t bear frequent repeated watching, I think — primarily because after you’ve got the surprise the first time, follow-ups no longer have the same kick. But I’ve always gotten great pleasure from watching it.
(And for some reason, it occurs to me now that the tracking shot early on, taken a few inches off the ground and following Redford’s striding feet, rather foreshadowed the opening shot of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.)
John says
Froog: gotta love the Interwebs. Here’s Travolta:
But, dang — I can’t find The Sting‘s counterpart ANYWHERE… (Perhaps a casualty of overzealous copyright protection.)
Froog says
I wonder how many movies have used that trope of ‘following the feet’? I noticed Tarantino did it with one of the girls going up a flight of stairs during the opening credits to Death-proof.
In The Sting (I just watched it again last week), it’s actually the bookie’s runner – the guy who’s about to get duped – whose be-spatted feet we follow. I think that’s a key part of the gag – that we’re naturally assuming it’s got to be Redford (or Newman), one of the main characters being introduced, and it’s toying with that expectation – an expectation that ‘s so strong, we easily convince ourselves in retrospect that it was Redford.