Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s Ashgate Screen Music Series

Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s theorises the connections between film acting and film music using the films of the 1950s as case studies.

Closely examining performances of such actors as James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Marilyn Monroe, and films of directors like Elia Kazan, Douglas Sirk, and Alfred Hitchcock, this volume provides a comprehensive view of how screen performance has been musicalised, including examination of the role of music in relation to the creation of cinematic performances and the perception of an actor?s performance. The book also explores the idea of music as a temporal vector which mirrors the temporal vector of actors? voices and movements, ultimately demonstrating how acting and music go together to create a forward axis of time in the films of the 1950s.

This is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers of musicology, film music and film studies more generally.

Introduction

Chapter 1: Musicalising Montgomery Clift

Chapter 2: Kazan, Brando, and Mélomania

Chapter 3: Hitchcock’s Time Vectors of Acting and Music

Chapter 4: Day, Monroe, and Gendered Music

Chapter 5: Dissonance and Consonance in James Dean’s Films

Chapter 6: Waters, Poitier, Music, and Race

Chapter 7: Musical Characterisation in the Melodramas of Sirk and Minnelli

Conclusion

Gregory Camp is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland School of Music, New Zealand.