of this is the ending, where Kazan chose to bring the action to the close with the sound of the haunting polka music rather than the upbeat jazz indicated by Williams, which encouraged sympathy with Blanche as she is led away by the doctor and matron and implicitly linked her demise to the suicide of her husband, the loss of Belle Reve and the fragmentation of her identity that followed.
This sense of the music being used to comment on characters was fairly innovative for music accompanying a play in the theatre and this active engagement with the characters and narrative was retained in the score for the film. Alex North’s score has been described as ‘the first functional, dramatic jazz score for a film. Up until then, jazz had been generally used only as source music’ (Lochner 2006: 3). Davison argues that the score of the film challenged the notion that music for a film should guide the audience towards a particular interpretation (sometimes called Mickey Mousing), maintaining that it retained the play’s ambiguity towards its characters (2009: 84). Butler on the other hand argues that the film score operates within dominant Classical Hollywood norms, by using jazz music to aurally point to what is deemed seedy and immoral (2002: 98). He references handwritten notations on North’s original score, where the words ‘sexy, virile’ appear alongside the instrumentation for muted trumpet whereas Blanche’s dreams of her previous, seemingly unsullied life are underscored by a more classical soundtrack involving violins, and cello, with the note that it should sound ‘magic-like, shimmering’ (Butler 2002: 98). What is certainly clear is that the music blurs the boundaries between the diegetic and the non-diegetic in terms of whether it is internal to the plot or used to underscore the dramatic action from outside of it. For instance, in the opening scenes, the rolling blues piano that accompanies the images becomes the music heard by the characters in the bowling lanes, where Blanche meets up with Stella.
North also expanded the music for Blanche by developing two themes that worked as leitmotifs. The first is the polka theme that is associated with Blanche’s memory of dancing with her husband before he shot himself. Whenever he is referred to in the film, however obliquely, the tune comes in and snaps off at the sound of a shot. The only exception to this is at the end when Mitch comes round to break up with Blanche. The music does not stop after the shot but goes on, perhaps indicating that Blanche’s relationship with Mitch is as doomed as that with her former husband. However there is another theme, which North called ‘Belle Reve Reflections’, that is used not only to indicate that traumatic loss of the estate for Blanche, but also at other points in the film. For instance, it plays when Stanley breaks the news of Stella’s pregnancy to Blanche. This might not seem on the surface to impact Blanche but by linking this to Blanche’s music of ‘loss’, the music comments on the action, suggesting that this will be another nail in the coffin for Blanche, by being cut out of the new family unit, as indeed happens at the end.
There was also more than one score for the film as North’s original music suffered from cuts made in the film by the producers to satisfy the Catholic Legion of Decency, precisely because of the perceived ‘carnality’ of some parts of the score (Davison 2009: 68–72). This was the score that played during what has been termed the ‘staircase scene’, which comes about halfway through the film. Blanche and Stella are upstairs having been driven out of the apartment by Stanley’s violence towards his wife after the card game. After a ducking in the bath by the other men to sober him up, Stanley comes outside and wails up to Stella to come down. To Blanche’s surprise, Stella walks as if spellbound out of the upper flat and down the staircase into a passionate embrace with her husband. As Davison has painstakingly analysed, even though the original film passed the Production Code with a few minor changes, the Legion of Decency objected to the music scoring the scene precisely because it indicated Stanley and Stella’s relationship was primarily based on lust. Therefore a replacement cue was written for the scene that avoided this connotation and was attached to the print of the film until in 1993, when in a less febrile moral climate, Warner Brothers released the Original Director’s version that restored North’s original music. This points to a key social and historical factor shaping adaptations between stage and screen, namely the far stricter codes of censorship for the cinema that affected what could be shown and heard on screen. North’s score then expanded on the music for the stage production to explore more intently ‘the characters, the setting, main motifs, crucial events and states of minds. The film soundtrack could thus be denoted as integral to and harmonised with the dramatic action’ (Onič 2016: 59).
This chapter has argued that understanding of stage-to-screen adaptions can be expanded by looking at material aspects of performance, such as costume, acting, design and sound, and thinking about how they operate on stage and how they are configured in the screen adaptation. This distinguishes them from the adaptation of novels as both plays and films dramatize situations and involve actors performing written dialogue, interacting with settings and sound to make meaning. However, medium-specific conventions mean that these elements are reconfigured between adaptations. In the next chapter, I will reverse the focus on stage-to-screen adaptation to look at how the stage has adapted films and created performance events for audiences. Whilst some aspects such as questions around acting, design and sound are the same for screen-to-stage as they are for stage-to-screen adaptations, I shall also discuss what their staging strategies reveal about their relationship to the source film.
NOTE
1.Due to the limitations of length, I have omitted to discuss more broadly the very different identification processes that operate in film and theatre in relation to the actor and how this is facilitated by different perspectives on the action. Baron is particularly good on looking at how mise en scène helps to construct performance on film (Baron and Carnicke 2011: 11–31).
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