A SECOND "WIZARD OF OZ:" FANTASTIC VOYAGE
Review for Netflix of the Richard Fleischer Film
Version with Two Commentaries

by Christopher Fulkerson

CF's Composition Desk

CF Conducting Maxwell Davies'
Vesalii icones

 

 

Of course Fantastic Voyage is known to everyone as one of the most fascinating films every made.   In addition to the original movie, this edition has a detailed commentary by a film scholar as well as a version in which three such scholars discuss the film score.    It is amusing that these commentators accept the remark of one of them, to the effect that Leonard Rosenman, who wrote the music, is a “little-known” film composer.    Within the Classical music world, Rosenman is known as one of the only plausible composers to have ever made a career in Hollywood.    Ever since Aaron Copland returned from his experiences there, the verdict has most certainly been against Hollywood as a credible artistic partner for a composer. The film scholars don't seem to know this, so, one strike against them, who conspicuously reveal their Hollywood anti-High Art bias.    They don’t actually know modern music.    Except for this faux-pas, what they say is very interesting.    

The film is about a group of scientists in a submarine shrunk into what we would today call “nanotechnology” in order to effect a brain surgery of another scientist called Benes whom some Cold War-style baddies have tried to assassinate and who lies in a coma with a blood clot in his brain.    The team goes through various adventures, planned and unplanned, and are almost overcome by a traitorous saboteur, Dr. Michaels, played brilliantly by Donald Pleasance, whom for reasons we only glimpse, and must assume have to do with the political situation we have earlier seen, wants to do away with his scientific counterpart Benes and thus the mission, even at the cost of his own life.    Along the way the adventurers (including Raquel Welch, with what was then thought to be a big bosom) are guided electronically by unshrunk wizards such as one General Carter played by Edmond O’Brien as a droll wielder of the slide rule who drinks his coffee with lots of sugar and smokes cigars in the command center: some of the typical images of the day clearly surface in the film (intellectuals apparently take too much sugar in their coffee; generals obviously smoke cigars to show their manliness and confidence; this one must therefore do both).    Just as Benes’s brain clot is being eliminated and the mission completed, Michaels betrays and clubs his Captain and commandeers the submarine, bearing down on the surgery team with his dome lights on.    Sexy Surgical Assistant Cora sees this, points it out, and Grant, the 007 whom we saw extract Benes from the other side, quickly takes the surgical laser to use as a weapon to stop the vehicle.   The pilot is saved and the wicked traitor perishes, consumed alive with the submarine by a white blood cell; to achieve the desired effect, the craft was smothered in foam.  

Isaac Asimov refused to write the novelization without correcting the plot holes, such as how a white blood cell can eliminate a submarine once it’s elements have returned to full size.   But even with such discrepancies, the film richly deserved the ample praise it got and remains a staple of the Science Fiction genre, in many ways transcending it.   The composer of the score, Rosenman, made a structural decision about the use of music that helped the movie immensely.    Just as there are no color images in the film of the Wizard of Oz until Dorothy arrives in Oz, there is no music in Fantastic Voyage until the miniaturized submarine, the Proteus, is injected into Benes’s body.    The world of music does not open up until it is fully integrated into the world of technology.   So the association of music with the magic of technology is superb, and the, for its day, relative strangeness of the music seems quite natural and called for.   

Rosenman and company did a big favor for serious classical composers.   Seldom has music almost modern in its style been used in such an immensely popular environment to depict not the horror stories and shocking moments to which Hollywood usually confines musical Modernism, but in imagery and to a story line that allows it to be expressive of high imagination, adventure, and even elegance and charm, and why not say it, fluidity.    In point of remarkable fact, this mildly Modernist music is used to PREVENT the otherwise potentially gross iconography of the body and its crude components from being anything other than fascinating.    This is Modernist music proposed as the very life of the human body.

The commentary on the score lasts only as long as the part of the film that has no music.   Once the Proteus begins its mission and the music starts, the script is also silenced whenever the score is sounding, so it is possible to hear long swatches of uninterrupted film music, a very interesting and welcome experience.

It is amusing that the film commentators, as well as the composer, all agree on one thing that really isn’t true: that the score is “atonal.”   This is not conventional tonality but there is lots of pitch centricity and the kind of consonant textures that Hollywood always likes, with just a few more chromatic notes here and there.    This music is seldom as “atonal” as for example Schoenberg’s monodrama “Erwartung,” which turns out to be in a murky d minor.   To hear really atonal music, this time with musical icons of the air rather than of this film’s images of musical fluids, you should listen to the Concerto for Orchestra of that other slide rule-wielding Carter, Elliott by name, on which he was working when this film was made, and who did indeed work in a still-classified intelligence capacity for the United States during World War II.

If you would like to hear my own essay on the music of fluids, please listen to my orchestral composition MOYS ICOS.

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First posted 6/22/2011

Copyright c 2011 by Christopher Fulkerson.


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