Drive-Away Dolls

A new Ethan Coen film is released in the UK today.

The Coen brothers have produced a string of mostly excellent movies for more than forty years. I didn’t know about Drive-Away Dolls until I read a good review in The Times this morning. So it is a coincidence that I had been planning to write about the Coens because I watched Barton Fink yesterday.  It’s hard to categorise their films but I can try; wry, quirky, understated comedies might do it – but then there’s their magnificent Western, True Grit, so I give up.

Other auteurs have a distinct style often aided by their composers. Ennio Morricone wrote the music for more than four hundred films but is particularly associated with Sergio Leone and Giuseppe Tornatore. The former made all those spaghetti westerns featuring long pieces of Morricone music whilst Clint Eastwood hangs around being Clint. Apparently Leone liked the music so much he made scenes even longer to play more of it. Tornatore is an acclaimed director but I have only seen one of his films: Cinema Paradiso with Morricone’s score.

Alfred Hitchcock made almost fifty films and in seven of them used Bernard Herrmann’s music. These were some of his greatest: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Marnie and Psycho stand out. The collaboration between director and composer was dramatised on Sunday evening in a play on Radio 3 – “Cinema Sunday” on R3.

Bennie & Hitch is about “the explosive relationship between Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock brought to life by Andrew McCaldon with the BBC Concert Orchestra, starring Tim McInnerny and Toby Jones”; says the R3 website. To be honest Andrew McCaldon didn’t have much material to go on and the BBC Concert Orchestra rode to the rescue with plenty of excerpts from their cinematic collaborations. That stretched it out for two enjoyable hours.

The Coens’ films typically run for less than two hours and Ethan’s latest comes in at just 84 minutes, something more prolix directors should take note of. At least if Drive-Away Dolls palls, it is short.