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Carl Davis
by Kevin Brownlow
In August of this year, we buried one of the best friends the Silent Film has had in modern times: Carl Davis, who composed unforgettable scores for television, for feature films such as Karel Reisz’s French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), and for silent films including, most memorably, Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927).
Carl was responsible for several of the most dramatic moments of my life. The first was when my co-director, David Gill, and I attended a recording of the music for the chariot race of the silent Ben-Hur (1925). We were creating a sample sequence at Olympic studios for the still slightly doubtful American distributors of our unfinished series Hollywood.
I had always longed to hear what a live orchestra would sound like up against a silent film. The sole example I’d already heard, a few years earlier at London’s Royal Festival Hall, had been awful and I was very worried.
But from the moment Carl lowered his baton, tears came to my eyes. His music could not have been more exciting nor more dramatic. I also realised we had found one of the few who understood: He came from America and show business culture was second nature to him. And he loved and respected silent films.
Carl was known for his music for the Jeremy Isaacs commissioned epic documentary, The World at War, which ran to 26 episodes, so we were confident he could handle the 13 episodes we planned for Hollywood. No sooner had he accepted the assignment, than he left for the USA to track down and interview the few musicians surviving from the pre-talkie era. I was amazed at this display of enterprise and dedication.
On his return, full of ideas and enthusiasm, he suggested for the benefit of those working on the series that we have a weekly silent film screening which he would accompany on the piano. The final version, of course, would have full orchestra. Before the first of these screenings, he played his suggestion for the series’ theme tune. It was so romantic, and so evocative, that when he asked us what we thought, I was lost for words. It felt wrong to analyse it; David just said, “Perfect”.
As a journalist put it, writing about the three of us, “it was a marriage made in heaven.”
David Gill’s presence as a co-writer and co-director on the Hollywood series was a great relief because I had done little in television, and he was a veteran documentary director. He was a former ballet dancer whose first contact with silent films was, like me, at school. He was such an appreciator of music and dance that he was exactly the right man for Carl and on the rare occasion he disagreed with his work, he had enough tact to explain why. He was also a damned good film editor.
I had been in documentaries and features and had served as supervising film editor on Tony Richardson’s Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). I had also published The Parade’s Gone By… (1968), a book about the silent era. I thought a television series on the subject would be popular and proposed it to – let’s call them ‘Routine TV’. They juggled with the figures, decided it couldn’t be done, and departed.
Jeremy Isaacs, Director of Programmes at Thames TV, was a greatly admired figure in television. He had already made an epic on the 1926 General Strike, and we felt had achieved the impossible by making The World at War. He knew about my book and told me that he thought there was a series in it. David Gill took advantage of the situation and ensured that Jeremy gave us his favourite composer – Carl Davis.
The second time Carl was responsible for one of the most dramatic moments of my life was when a 1927 silent film called Napoleon, which I had been restoring with the help of the BFI, received a modern ‘premiere’ – appropriately, at the Empire, Leicester Square. Even though my confidence had been boosted by the tremendous job Carl had done for Ben-Hur and Hollywood, this silent film was not being shown in extract form but as far as it could be then, at its full length of nearly five hours.
I first saw a fragmentary version of Napoleon on 9.5mm as a teenager and as soon as I could, had begun a restoration on 35mm, since it then existed only in a jumbled and much reduced version. I was encouraged by meeting its director, Abel Gance, a pioneer who had made his first film in 1911 but had not been active in the film industry for more than a decade.
In a conversation with Carl, David Gill brought up the idea of having him write a full score for a silent film and showing it with live orchestra – as was then standard in first run cinemas – in a West End theatre. His first suggestion was D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919).
Jeremy Isaacs thought the basic idea excellent for he needed a sure-fire silent to be shown at the BFI’s London Film Festival that year, 1980, as part of the Thames TV sponsorship deal. But since another producer at Thames felt that Broken Blossoms was not the right film – being too sentimental – I tentatively suggested my pet silent. After consulting with Carl, Thames agreed to finance a score for Napoleon as well as sponsoring its ‘premiere’.
And at last, I met Carl Davis.
Being rather snobbish about television at the time, I was surprised at how knowledgeable he was – across the board. He was about my sort of age, seemed to know everyone in the business, and was quite astonishingly efficient. Example: When it came to writing the theme tune for this Hollywood series, he wrote it in the back of a London taxi in five minutes.
He had a strong family life with two daughters, Hannah and Jessie, both now working in the film industry. His widow Jean Boht was the star of the TV hit sitcom, Bread. He was still close to his family and parents – Russian and Polish Jewish emigrés in Brooklyn, New York. Carl was a great entertainer, with a fund of hilarious industry anecdotes. Jean in turn was a marvellous hostess, and when we worked at their home in Barnes, food was never far out of reach. Did I mention that Carl was a major gourmet?
He was a lovable man. Being a perfectionist, he could also occasionally, very occasionally, be difficult to deal with. I once had to chase after him from a Teddington restaurant and down the street because David and I had managed to upset him. (A minor financial matter.) When I called his name, Carl stopped, listened for a few minutes, and returned to the restaurant, and thus to The Work, without a further word. I think he found our dedication matching his own, and from then on, he was the perfect partner.
Anyway, you could hardly blame him for the odd tantrum. After all, we had given him a positively Napoleonic task; a mere three and a half months to write the longest score in film history – oh, and one which had to be conducted personally by him; a physical feat that regularly had him go through a whole series of shirts. As he said at the time, “Thank God for the intervals”.
Before Napoleon was given its modern premiere at the Empire, Leicester Square, a 1300-seat theatre, I heard a BFI employee say. “This will only sell a couple of dozen seats”. As I left the tube station to walk to the Empire that Sunday morning, I was not just nervous; I was terrified.
How on earth could the musicians stay in sync with the picture? How could Carl keep accurate timing across 290 minutes? And what about the mechanics of bringing in two more projectors to interlock with the existing one – and two more screens! – in order to achieve, thirty years before Cinerama, a similarly astounding panorama in the final triptych?
I was sure we’d lose half the audience by the second interval, as long as we even had an audience – and no one could be sure of that. Then I spotted a substantial line waiting patiently outside the Empire – with several wrapping their sleeping bags, having been there all night. And a hand-written placard: TICKETS FOR NAPOLEON WANTED – ANY PRICE PAID.1.
Later, I was told who among modern directors were attending: Satyajit Ray, Wim Wenders, Alan Parker, Nicolas Roeg, David Lean.2,
Carl’s Eagle theme, accompanying the main titles, was adapted from Beethoven, who had dedicated his Eroica to Napoleon – until he appointed himself Emperor – an episode Gance intended but was never able to include in the film. The theme Carl adapted from it, however, was mesmerising.
There came a moment at the end of the cadet school sequence in which I realised we were watching a phenomenon: A film already half a century old which many in the audience were ready to mock (most silent films were tittered at in those days, even when they weren’t comedies), but this audience was stopped by the music.
Carl told me he had taken great pride in looking for pieces by composers working in France at the time of Napoleon – Gluck, Cherubini, Monsigny, Grétry – giving the film a powerful authenticity. He quoted what Napoleon is known to have said: that he could listen to an aria from Paisiello’s opera Nina every day of his life. (The melody now accompanies the picnic scene in Corsica.) Carl brought in an original hurdy-gurdy for the sinister qualities it imparted to conspiratorial scenes with Robespierre, Saint-Just, etc., made even more so by the fact that even though a silent film, it was simultaneously playing on screen and in the orchestra pit.
But it was not solely the original music that gave the score such impact. Carl proved that his music could hold its own alongside that of the great names.
I was aware that people around me were profoundly moved, several wiping their eyes. A number of them later told me it had been the greatest film they had ever seen, with the most incredible score. David Robinson, film critic of the London Times, wrote a three-column rave which greatly impressed Gance, who had been too ill to attend, but was observing from Paris. Its headline was, “Masterpiece of Cinema Triumphantly Reincarnated.”
When the standing ovation for this “gala premiere” was finally over, Jeremy Isaacs, who would soon head Channel 4, said, “If this isn’t on Channel 4, there won’t be a Channel 4.”
The experience was even more emotional when we repeated it at Le Grand Palais in Paris, for this time several veterans of cast and crew were attending, later telling us how their enthusiasm had been rekindled.
This was just the beginning of Carl’s association with silent pictures. Without him and the all-important sponsorship from Thames TV and later Channel 4, the revival of silents might never have happened. David Gill and I were constantly amazed at the quality, the sheer brilliance of his scores when we heard them on the piano at Teddington Studios. But that was nothing compared to the electric atmosphere when the full Carl Davis parade went into action with vast theatres, packed houses, and magnificent orchestras.
Carl was an enthusiastic supporter of what we called Live Cinema. He showed Napoleon all over the world, followed by other half-forgotten silent films awaiting resurrection.
When we accompanied him to Purchase, N.Y., to do Ben-Hur (1925) at a college supported by the Pepsi Cola company, executives swarmed round him when the film was over, full of congratulations.
“What’s next?” they asked.
“Intolerance?” suggested Carl.
“What happens in that?”
Carl took a deep breath and told them the Modern Story: “The workers go on strike and the National Guard are called out. They set up their weapons and cold-bloodedly machine-gun the strikers. Thanks to John D. Rockefeller, this actually happened at Trinidad, Colorado in 1914…”
His words were followed by a brief silence, and then, as if in a film editor’s dissolve, the executives of Pepsi-Cola melted away. And we never did Intolerance in the United States. The rare occasion where enthusiasm got in the way of a performance.
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When I heard the news about Carl’s death, I was very shaken. How could we continue without him? On the other hand, what an amazingly fulfilling life Carl’s has been. How deeply grateful we should be for all he was able to do.
And we should not forget either that he had a strong sense of humour. He particularly appreciated what the French cultural attaché, who attended Napoleon at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival special screenings in 2010, said to us afterwards: “I am speechless, in both languages.”
1. One man I spoke to had travelled all the way from Yugoslavia.
2. Alan Parker was filming The Wall at the time and was so impressed he reshot a swimming pool scene with the camera-on-a-trapeze effect that Gance had used for the Storm in the Convention.