Music For Low Comedy and High Romance: Malcolm Arnold’s Score for Hobson’s Choice (David Lean, 1954)

Abstract

Malcolm Arnold combines music in a comic and serious mode in his score for Hobson’s Choice (1954, dir. David Lean). This chapter analyses the way the film combines music and image to create its comic effects. It examines how the film exploits cinematic techniques to amplify its comic potential. By turns the film employs audio-visual techniques to satirise Lean’s Dickens’ adaptations, it uses mock-serious music for comic effect, and it harnesses cinema’s ability to synchronise music with action to create comedy. It amplifies comic reversals, subverts cinematic clichés in the use of music and subtly acknowledges its theatrical provenance through moments of musical self-reflexivity. Arnold contrasts comedic music with poignant romantic strains in a score that demonstrates how effective the understated approach to film music taken in the British industry of this era could be.