The Dawn of Film Music, Part II: The Other Four

This entry is going to be at least a little, if not quite a bit, longer than the Max Steiner article. During his career, Steiner was nominated 24 times for some version of an Oscar for Best Score, and he one on 3 occasions: The Informer, Now, Voyager in 1942, and Since You Went Away in 1944. Obviously, Gone with the Wind losing is looked upon as a major misstep by the Academy in 1939. That it lost to Herbert Stothart’s greatly deserving score for The Wizard of Oz makes the loss no less unbelievable.

The other 4 composers I’m going to talk about were no worse composers necessarily than Steiner, but their work was decidedly less influential. The other four composers I’ll focus on had a combined 76 nominations and 16 wins (I think I added that correctly) for some variation on the Oscar for Best Score. One was born in German-controlled Poland, one in Hungary, one in Austria, and one in Connecticut, but all ended up in Hollywood.

Franz Waxman:

Born a Jew in Silesia in modern day Poland, Waxman probably would’ve ended up in Hollywood eventually, but not nearly as soon as he did if not for being attacked by a group of Nazi sympathizers in 1934. His first major work was for James Whale’s horror classic, Bride of Frankenstein, in 1935:

This is a composite of some of the different themes of the film’s great score. What strikes me, much in the same way Steiner’s did, is how well Waxman is able to combine different feelings into the same combinations of notes. Listen for yourself and see if you can hear the stretches during which Waxman expresses both love and uncertainty and a little fear. Waxman’s ability to make something out of very little, which came to be his trademark, is evident here. All throughout his career his variations on the use of single notes or of seldom-used composition techniques earned him acclaim.

Waxman stayed out of major composition until he composed the score that made him famous in 1940, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca:

This rather short, 2 minute main theme is so haunting, even while it’s grandiose. It’s large and loud orchestrations are made all the more powerful because they’re all in minor keys. The music almost becomes the subconscious saying, “Be careful what you let yourself get caught up in. It might not be what you think.” And then it becomes your own response, “But it’s so beautiful and wondrous that it couldn’t be all that bad no matter what.” Simply masterful work.

Waxman composed quite a bit during the rest of the 40s, garnering 5 total Oscar nominations. His work in Sorry, Wrong Number in 1948, though not nominated, is great work. I won’t go into detail on it as I couldn’t find a video of it, but the climax of the film is incredibly interesting in its usage of seldom-used musical techniques.

Along with Rebecca, Waxman’s greatest score was for 1950 release, Sunset Boulevard, a brilliant film only enhanced by Waxman’s wonderful talents.

This was his first score to win an Oscar. The poster on the video says, “A Most Unusual Picture,” and indeed the film is. It’s also a most unusual score. The beginning is wonderful in how excellently it plays up the Hollywood angle of the film, giving an over-the-top, bombastic portrait of the establishment. A few minutes in, Waxman then gives us the strangely haunting, but simultaneously enchanting nature of Norma Desmond, encompassing who she is, what she has become, and what she wishes to rise again to become.

The next year, he received another Oscar win for his wonderful score for A Place in the Sun.

The score is beautiful in many ways, and only adds to this largely underappreciated film. I particularly enjoy how quickly he changes from piano to fortissimo and then all the way back down to pianissimo in the span of 2 or 3 measures. His interesting and uncommon orchestrations are evident here as well if you listen closely in certain places.

His 1954 work on Rear Window, though unrewarded, still stands as a testament to his great talents as a composer:

Waxman’s jazzy main title to this Hitchcock thriller is very interesting to me. The jazz is fun and playful and upbeat, just the way Jimmy Stewart played his role as the potentially despicable, but ultimately endearing Jeff Jeffries. At the same time, his submelodies are all devoted to showing the suspense/thriller aspects of this excellent film. It’s an incredibly interesting and ultimately quite affective approach to this fantastic film.

His final great work was the 1959 Audrey Hepburn film The Nun’s Story:

His last great score, The Nun’s Story showcases Waxman as a man moved by the film for which he’s writing. As such, his score is beautiful in every sense of the word.

Miklós Rózsa:

Born in Budapest, Rózsa achieved fame in actual classical composition in Europe, before moving to Hollywood and gaining fame for his scores of one of it seems like thousands of adaptations of The Four Feathers in 1939 and for his enchanting work on 1940’s The Thief of Bagdad:

I find this rest to be perfectly fitting for everything I’ve heard of the film. It’s a beautiful score that evokes the fantastical elements of the film wonderfully.

In 1944, he received a nomination for his score of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity.

This is simply a gorgeous and powerful score that underscores everything dark and devious about the film to wonderful effect. It doesn’t necessarily come across that way on its own, but even then it’s still worth listening to.

The next year he won his first of 3 Oscars for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound:

While the film certainly is not one of Hitchcock’s better 1940s films, but Rózsa’s score is lovely and certainly was deserving of its Oscar. Just listen to the video and see why it’s such a great soundtrack for a psychological mystery thriller with romantic touches like this. It should be incredibly obvious. Rózsa never gives you time to relax. Instead, he piles on more and more and more stuff. It’s a lesson in going as close to beating someone over the head with something without ever coming close to doing it. I love it far more than the film itself, which could have benefitted from someone more convincing than Gregory Peck. I didn’t listen to the entire thing, but another interesting part of the score is his use of the theremin, an early electric instrument that controlled pitch using a sensor that sensed where the player’s hands were moving.

Rózsa’s score for the underseen 1946 film The Killers is quite good, as well. In 1947, Rózsa received his second Oscar victory for A Double Life.

This was a film noirish kind of film in which Anthony John, played to perfection by the underrated Ronald Colman, goes crazy because he begins to have increasing trouble separating his real life self from the self of the Othello he plays on the stage. I think this suite excerpt shows all of this quite well. Plus, it has great Renaissance-style composition for when Colman’s actually onstage. It’s really something.

During the 1950s, Rózsa became MGM’s go-to composer for their epics. First the overlong, overrated Quo Vadis; then Ivanhoe. Julius Caesar was the last of his 3 straight Oscar nominations. Rózsa’s crowning achievement came with his tremendous work on William Wyler’s 1959 classic epic Ben-Hur. Every bar of Rózsa’s score is arguably of equal grandeur and excellence as Steiner’s score for Gone with the Wind. Obviously the most well-known is the Parade of the Charioteers.

Ignoring how funny the guy sounds since he’s speaking German, this is absolutely recording of Rózsa’s astonishing work. Above all, this is just supposed to be a grand display of power and that makes this song an unqualified success. The rest of the score is probably just as influential as Gone with the Wind’s in some respects. Rózsa finds incredible nuance in his composition for this oftentimes undernuanced film. Also, I couldn’t find a clip of the film with the parade itself, so instead here’s a video of the astronomically expensive and awesome race itself.

My favorite part is and forever will be the sequence from 6:15 through 7:00, but especially at 6:54 or 55.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold:

Another Jewish composer, Korngold was born into music, being the son of an eminent Austrian music critic. He was described as a “musical genius” by Gustav Mahler and composed a ballet that received acclaim at just 11. He composed his first orchestral work at 14 and two operas by 17. In an earlier time, Korngold would have been the next big thing on the court composer circuit. But being 17 in 1914 meant that, at some point, composition for film was the place to be at some point. After completing his 4^th opera at the age of 26, he did some more composition before going to Hollywood and arranging some Felix Mendelssohn for the 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring such actors as a young James Cagney. His first major success was his Oscar-nominated original score for 1935’s Captain Blood, as swashbuckler starring the dashing Errol Flynn in his first starring role.

The upbeat, brass-heavy, exciting composition style found here is highly characteristic of Korngold’s film music, and that makes him a favorite of mine. I love how, even during the non-brass sections, there is still this sense of action and excitement.

The next year, Korngold won an Oscar for his score for the epic costume drama Anthony Adverse starring Fredric March.

The score is quite a bit better on the whole than the incredibly overlong film itself. It’s gorgeous, but Korngold makes sure to include the brassy, brazen touches that always endear him to me. The over-1200-page novel had absolutely no business being adapted in the first place as it’s not really all that engrossing and rambles for much of the time (at least it did for the few pages I read). From Here to Eternity, on the other hand, despite being almost 1000 pages as well, definitely was worth it.

Two years later in 1938, Korngold won his 2^nd Oscar for another Errol Flynn adventure film, The Adventures of Robin Hood, a fantastically entertaining and colorful film about Abraham Lincoln. I’m kidding.

I simply love this and every other second of this gloriously entertaining film and score. There’s really nothing left to say.

Korngold received a 4^th Oscar nomination for yet another Errol Flynn film, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Korngold’s last Oscar-nominated score is also the last I will talk about for him. The Sea Hawk, also starring Errol Flynn, isn’t as good as Adventures of Robin Hood, but it’s still entertaining.

Though I think Adventures of Robin Hood is an altogether better score, I do enjoy the main theme of The Sea Hawk the most of all of Korngold’s work. It’s a ubiquitous melody that most people have heard and either don’t know it or have absolutely no idea where it comes from.

Alfred Newman:

The only American of the bunch, Newman is a member of the Newman musical family. His brother Emil was best known for conducting The Best Years of Lives, and his other brother, Lionel, received 11 Oscar nominations and was musical supervisor for all 3 of the original Star Wars trilogy films. Alfred’s two sons are David Newman, a composer best known for his score of the animated 90s film Anastasia, and Thomas Newman, a wonderful composer who wrote The Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Finding Nemo, WALL-E, and Skyfall. Moreover, Alfred’s nephew is Randy Newman. During his career, Alfred himself received 43 Oscar nominations for Best Score and won 9 of those times, both of which are the records. Anyway, Newman first won an Oscar for his Scoring of the musical film Alexander’s Ragtime Band in 1938, but it really was nothing special. He really hit it big with his nominated score for 1939’s Wuthering Heights. This is Cathy’s Theme.

Much like the film itself, this is just a gorgeous embodiment of the melodramatic, romance imbued nature of the film. (I’ve always thought Merle Oberon had a fascinating sort of enchanting beauty about her (see 1:35).)

His work on the Charles Laughton version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is also quite good, but Laughton’s tremendous work completely steals the film. Anyway, much of his work in the 40s was lauded, but nothing has ever struck me as much as other stuff.

His work on All About Eve is simply wonderful. The film itself is absolutely masterful and is my 2^nd favorite film of all time, what with Bette Davis, my favorite actress, giving her best performance, and George Sanders’ peerless turn as Addison DeWitt, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s astonishingly brilliant script. Also, I just find Celeste Holm to be incredibly charming, though I know some don’t. Anyway, this video is of the main title sequence of the film and the early few scenes of the film. It isn’t entirely representative of the entire score, but it functions well enough in that regard.

He won some more Oscars and received several more nominations before, in 1955, composing the score for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, a truly horrid melodrama starring William Holden, in my opinion a great actor who was, in virtually every case, an absolutely incompetent romantic lead, as a newspaper writer from America, and Jennifer Jones, a perfectly good actress from Oklahoma, as a Chinese doctor. It’s laughable and terrible and I yelled at the TV about how bad the film was and even almost got off my couch and left the room it was so pathetic.

Despite how much I hated the film and everything it stood for, the score is remarkably beautiful and exemplifies everything the film was at the time. It’s romantic and beyond gorgeous.

In 1959, Newman received another nomination for his work on The Diary of Anne Frank.

The score really is beautiful with hints of the heartbreaking nature of the film.

Newman’s score to How the West Was Won earned him another Oscar nomination in 1963.

It’s the prototypical Western score and I absolutely love it. Though it’s may not be one of my top 5 favorite Western themes ever, it’s certainly up there in the top 10 somewhere. It’s catchy and brassy and completely impossible to hate.

The l970 film Airport, for which he received his final Oscar nomination, was, I’m pretty sure, his final score overall as well.

This film marked the beginning of the disaster film trend of the 1970s continued by movies like The Poseidon Adventures, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno. The score shows Newman keeping up with the times but not forgetting about what made him so successful earlier on. His score still has the classical Hollywood feel somewhat, but it most certainly feels updated. There’s just something about his orchestrations and the instruments he chooses to inhabit each specific part that makes it sound more modern. Plus, it just sounds like something bad is going to happen, which it is.

My next post will be a series of miscellaneous other scores and tracks I enjoy from the 30s, 40s, and 50s that weren’t composed by one of these 4 men. I might also include a TV theme, a TV theme that is heard all over the place but is almost never identified as the theme of a specific TV show. After that, your guess is as good as mine as to what I’m going to post about.

To end, in order to continue the trend started last time with the Bette Davis videos, here are two videos with Elsa Lanchester on The Dick Cavett Show.

Talking about Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester

Talking and being hysterical about Isadora Duncan