Williams Refuses to Let Sleeping Movie Characters Lie

Did you ever consider what happens to movie characters when the film ends and the projector is turned off?

One person who apparently hasn’t is John Williams, the prolific composer of sound-track music for “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “E.T., The Extraterrestrial,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Superman” and countless other blockbusters of supernatural proportions.

Williams came to Orange County last week for the first time to lead the Pacific Symphony in a pair of concerts featuring music from the movies--mostly his own, but also a few selections by others.

We all know that film music can spark mental images in the listener even when divorced from the visual source material. Who can hear Rossini’s “William Tell” Overture without envisioning the Lone Ranger galloping across the countryside on his gleaming white steed Silver?

And who that has seen “2001: A Space Odyssey” can ever hear Johann Strauss’ “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” waltz and not conjure up images of a graceful wheel-shaped space station turning slowly, silently in the outer-space void?

What fan of “A Clockwork Orange” can listen to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” ever again without wanting to kick someone’s face in?

I think Williams ignored this peculiar psychological phenomenon in putting together a program of music ranging from “The Cowboys” to “Star Wars” to “The Witches of Eastwick.”

What happened was that similarities permeating his work produced some alternately disquieting, bizarre and comical effects.

The concert began uneventfully enough with Williams’ shimmering “Olympic Fanfare,” written for the 1984 Olympic Games. Memories came flooding back of athletes standing at attention, international flags waving in the wind and the ABC logo blazing at every commercial break.

Next, Williams moved on to excerpts from “The Cowboys,” a 1972 John Wayne western, which had all the brassy bravado and sweeping strings required to suggest the wild frontier.

But just for a second there, during a melodic passage that would appear again later in Williams’ career, I could have sworn I caught a glimpse of Indiana Jones riding shotgun with the Duke.

The setting switched suddenly to 19th-Century Britain for segments of Williams’ score from the 1971 TV version of Charlotte Bronte’s gothic novel “Jane Eyre.”

We heard a rousing chase scene underscoring a frantic coach ride across a Scottish moor--and again, musical memory began to play tricks. In all the excitement, wasn’t that Chewbacca in the coach next to Bronte’s fragile orphan girl?

And during the closing “Jane Eyre” love theme, something that sounded an awful lot like the music from “Superman” magically transported Lois Lane into the arms of the novel’s amoral, passionate and otherwise thoroughly un-Supermanlike hero, Rochester.

Things settled down during a slice of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but some comparably discordant and moody textures heard later in the Devil’s Dance from “The Witches of Eastwick” proved unsettling: There was Richard Dreyfuss, waiting for the mothership to reveal its secrets, and who strolls out but Beelzebub, looking a lot like Jack Nicholson.

By the time the concert drew to a close, with stops along the way for a Judy Garland tribute, “Fiddler on the Roof” tidbits and an encore from John Barry’s “Out of Africa” score, the evocative melodic flourishes, rhythmic contortions and harmonic weavings melted into an indistinguishable orchestral stew.

The visual images went wild. At the helm of a saucer-shaped mother-coach rocketing across an interstellar moor was Isak Dinesen hand-in-hand with Luke Skywalker and Tevye, valiantly trying to escape the clutches of a thoroughbred Great White shark piloted by Darth Vader and the Wicked Witch of the West. Williams’ music has been immensely popular with the public and undoubtedly will continue to be great box office in movie theaters and concert halls.

But somewhere in the ether where fictional characters reside, I’ll bet a lot of spirits are shuddering at what they will go through the next time John Williams takes the podium.

During a melodic passage there was a glimpse of Indiana Jones riding shotgun with the Duke.