The Music, Just the Music: Dennis the Menace

    So much to talk about — too much — when it comes to Dennis the Menace (said nobody ever). I could talk about the iconic casting, the flawless comic timing, the razor sharp editing, the polychromatic cinematography, the picturesque compositions, the dynamic camerwork, the Demme-esque close-ups and inserts, the fact that it’s the best movie Nick Castle was ever involved with, but I wanna focus on the music — just the music — which may very well be the movie’s one towering strength above all others.

   In general, I don’t often dwell on all-time favorite performances, cinematography, editing, etc. Partly because I can’t, in good faith, abstract those things from their intended contexts and compare them to one another. And it’s also partly because, frankly, I just don’t find it to be an interesting intellectual exercise. But I think about favorite scores quite often — more often than almost anything else in movies. This is due, obviously, to the fact that movie music takes on a life of its own outside the film in question, and it’s also because, well, music is arguably the most cinematic thing about cinema. If you ask Brett Easton Ellis he’ll say that cinema is defined by cinematography and story structure; if you ask(ed) Kubrick, he’d say it’s defined by editing. Me? I say movies are defined by music, which is such a nonsensical and paradoxical statement that it must be true.

   Favorite Film Scores is a topic I’ve revisited over and over again throughout my life, usually unconsciously. Before I ever made a single “Favorite Movies” list, I was already in the habit of instinctively crafting “Favorite Movie Music” lists. At various points in my life, my favorite film score was Terminator 2, or The Thin Blue Line, or The Conversation. Recently, it’s Dennis the Menace.

   I said I’d steer clear of talking about directing, editing, etc, but the reality is that this movie demands a comprehensive, holistic assessment when singling out any one element; like all great cinema, everything in the film has a life of its own, yet can’t be abstracted from anything else. In other words, the movie is a dance, not unlike Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love, except that it’s better (yeah I said it). It moves at such a rhythmic pace that it might as well have a time signature, comparable to Scorsese’s output at the time, as well as a lot of other lesser movies. The overall aesthetic of the film is a (literally) surreal timewarp, a seamless blend of modernity and old Hollywood affectations, situating it as the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed nephew to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. And that’s where Jerry Goldsmith comes in...

   What Goldsmith did here, as far as I’m concerned, is at least as good as anything John Williams has ever produced, if not better. Compositionally, it falls somewhere between Midnight Cowboy and the Imperial March, and is just as instantaneously recognizable: the mischievous-yet-innocent harmonica paired with the playfully sinister horns, anxious strings, and plucky woodwinds. I can’t imagine a more timeless evocation of a breezy summer day in white suburbia. In particular, the theme for Switchblade Sam is a tightrope balancing act of villainous and funny. Whimsy this potent could’ve single-handedly saved Little Rascals from itself or made me into a Macaulay Culkin fan. Instead, Mason Gamble will forever be my Kevin McCallister.