(no subject)

[ivyfic]

I rewatched The Sting last night. Still a fantastic movie. But this time I couldn't help noticing--the soundtrack, which started a Scott Joplin revival ("The Entertainer" hit #1 on the Billboards in 1973), is completely wrong for the era of the film. The movie's set in 1936. Joplin wrote his rags in the aughts and teens. He was pretty much obscure in the thirties--the first big revival of his music was in the sixties. Yet through the magic of film-making, that music is now permanently grafted on to our idea of the thirties.

(Also, apparently, a lot of people were pissed when Hamlisch, who arranged Joplin's music for the score of the film, got an Oscar for it, since Joplin wrote the music and Hamlisch's orchestrations were arguably direct lifts from other people's work. People who had turned down the offer to work on the film.)

Comments

[ealgylden.livejournal.com]

Random drive-by comment here, sorry, but I can never resist "the music in The Sting" discussions (and they come up a lot in film music places, heh). It's true that the ragtime isn't contemporary with the setting, but it's not supposed to be (IMO). The whole movie turns on the fact that, for Henry and JJ and Kid Twist and even the ghost of poor, dead Luther, conning Lonnegan is likely to be the capper to their careers. None of them are young anymore, the world is changing, and they'll most likely never have a chance to do a con this big or dangerous or improbable again. This is the last gasp of their glory times, right down to the fact that they're pulling something out-of-fashion since they were starting out. Johnny, the next generation, isn't just in the wings anymore; he's right on stage. Here's their chance to say goodbye to their salad days and go out on top, if they choose to, or at least have one big moment to look back as they pull smaller, simpler cons. So it makes sense (to me, at least) that the out-dated con men and their outdated con should be accompanied by outdated music. It's the soundtrack of their youths recaptured one last time.

It's basically Scott Joplin's Grosse Pointe Blank, come to think of it.