If you're like me, you really appreciate the music in movies, and the many great composers of film scores. So, imagine my surprise when I happened across the American Film Institute's 25 greatest film scores of all time and saw that in their opinion, number one was the John Williams score for Star Wars. (AFI's 100 YEARS OF FILM SCORE)Seriously? I can't help visualizing the age and sex of the average voter. But, besides the limitations in taste of this rating, there is also a limitation of imagination, the imagination to consider the whole 100 years of film and not just the ones that voters had personally experienced in the theater. It reminds me of sports writers and commentators who anoint the player they are watching as the greatest of all times, without seriously considering the great athletes of the past.
In fairness, there were some on the list from previous decades of film history, and some modern day composers that are actually among my favorites: Nino Rota, John Barry, Bernard Herrmann. In the end, it really is a personal thing -- which music lingers with you and is inseparable from the film in your memory. So I would remind you of some scores that fit that description in the classic film category and hope that you seek them out, if only to check out the music.
Meaning no disrespect for John Williams, Max Steiner's music for Gone With the Wind, the number two on the list, is the more enduring. After eighty years, many people could identify the theme, I believe. Not so sure that eighty years from now, there will be anyone who recognizes actual music, let alone the Star Wars theme.
Max Steiner had an extraordinary career. He came to Hollywood from Vienna where he was a child prodigy completing his music studies at the age of 16. As a child, he received piano instruction from Johannes Brahms and studied conducting with Gustav Mahler. He started writing music for films just at the advent of talkies and quickly made a name for himself for developing specific motifs for characters or scenes instead of the generic background melodies that were common with silent films. His score for King Kong in 1933 changed the way American films were scored. He wrote the music for an astonishing number of films over three decades, Gone With the Wind being one of the most difficult.
He was nominated for 18 Academy Awards and won 3. The first was for John Ford's The Informer (1935), haunting music which pulsed with the desperation of the main character, played by Victor McLaglen.
The second was for the 1942 Bette Davis drama, Now Voyager, where a troubled and dominated young woman is transformed by a good wardrobe and a cruise-ship romance.
The third Oscar was for the 1944 film about life on the WWII home front, starring Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple, Since You Went Away.
But, recently I was watching another Bette Davis film, from 1940, one that I think rates among her best, The Letter, directed by William Wyler. I was so aware of the atmospheric effect of the score by Max Steiner that I was inspired to write this post. The score for The Letter was one of Steiner's 18 Oscar nominations. (The winner that year was the original score for Pinocchio byLeigh Harline, Paul Smith & Ned Washington, which was pretty good, too.)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, another Austro-Hungarian child prodigy, who conducted his own work at the Hamburg Opera at the age of 23, was invited to score his first Hollywood film in 1935. Not having any desire to return to Austria after it was annexed by Hitler, Korngold stayed in Hollywood and composed an Academy Award winning score for the 1936 epic story of the orphan, Anthony Adverse , starring Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland.
He won again for the well-known, rousing score of The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, starring Errol Flynn,
followed by another Flynn vehicle, the swashbuckling gem, TheSea Hawkin 1940.
One of his finest compositions and what some have contended is a very obvious inspiration for the above-mentioned John Williams and his theme for Star Wars, is the music he wrote for King's Row in 1942.
Co-starring Ann Sheridan and Robert Cummings, this, in the opinion of many, also happens to be Ronald Reagan's best film performance. Take a listen and see what you think.
But, before the first Academy Award, and before The Sea Hawk, he composed my particular favorite: the music for Captain Blood in 1935, the original and the best pirate story, naturally starring Errol Flynn, and a nineteen-year old Olivia de Havilland.
Yet another young musical talent fleeing Hitler's Europe and landing in Hollywood, Franz Waxman, had an early success with The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) in which he introduced some odd and discordant sounds that were thereafter a staple of the horror genre.
He also had a successful artistic collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in two films in the 1940s. In these films, the music is able to switch from romantic themes to ones that alert us to danger. In his music for Rebecca from 1940,
and Suspicion from 1941, Waxman seems to embellish Hitchcock's expertise with suspense.
By 1954, Hitchcock's style for Rear Window had a more contemporary style, with a more subtle Waxman score, leaving silence at the most nail-biting moments.
Before his work on Rear Window, Waxman had won Academy Awards two years in a row. In 1951, he won for the score for the Billy Wilder film noir, Sunset Boulevard .
For anyone who remembers the final scene where Gloria Swanson is walking down the staircase, the music matches the imaginary 'Salome' that Swanson's character thinks she is filming.
The next year, he won the award for his music for the George Stevens (Academy Award for Best Direction) adaptation of An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters.
One might ask why so many child prodigies born in the first decades of the twentieth century found their way from Europe to Hollywood. It is not so difficult to understand: first, being a child prodigy doesn't pay much, and second, the rise of fascism and the very real threat of staying when their homelands are occupied.
Consequently, you should not be surprised that another great film composer was -- yes, a child prodigy! Miklos Rozsaobtained a doctorate of music from the Leipzig Conservatory and had his own music performed in Europe in the thirties. While in London, he was hired to score a film, a discipline he claimed to know nothing about, and learned the hard way. Eventually relocating to Hollywood, he had a distinguished career there for four decades.
There are many that are noteworthy, but the score for the Hitchcock film, Spellbound in 1945, starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, was innovative in his use of the theramin for a dream sequence that is illustrated by Salvador Dali images of a nightmare.
He also collaborated in 1945 with Billy Wilder on the powerful film Lost Weekend. Ray Milland painfully portrays an alcoholic who battles his habit over two days. He used the theramin again to produce odd sounds that signify the distortion of the alcoholic's state of mind.
Also with Wilder, the great noir classic, Double Indemnity from 1944. The opening theme seems to reflect the doomed path that star, Fred McMurray, is on from the moment he sees co-star, Barbara Stanwyck.
After his success with Ivanhoe (1952), Rozsa was given assignments for scoring other epics, Julius Caesar (1954),
Ben-Hur (1959),
for which he won the Academy Award, and El Cid (1961).
Dmitri Tiomkin was born in Kremenchug, Russia to a distinguished family. His father was a well-known doctor and his mother was a pianist and teacher. His uncle was a rabbi and the first president of the World Zionist Union. He studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and as a young man, was part of the artistic crowd in St. Petersburg. He was friends with Sergei Prokofiev. He became well-known on the concert stage as a pianist in Europe and New York. In 1929, MGM offered him a five-film contract.
He then found a productive relationship with Frank Capra, collaborating on four pictures, using innovative sounds for Lost Horizon (1937), for which he received his first Oscar nomination,
and You Can't Take it With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), also nominated for an Oscar, and Meet John Doe (1941). In all, Tiomkin garnered 13 nominations and four wins.
He did two other rather notable scores, one from 1943: The Hitchcock thriller, Shadow of a Doubt, in which the Merry Widow waltz is a leitmotif for the menacing uncle, played by Joseph Cotten,
and in 1946, the epic western/soap opera, Duel in the Sun, starring Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck as the bad brother to Joseph Cotten.
His scores for High Noon (1952) and The High and the Mighty (1954)both won Academy Awards, but I admire the score for The Thing From Another World (1951) an influential scifi classic that is given the creepy, alien sounds which established what 'alien' sounds like.
*FYI:If you are interested in refreshing your memory or are intrigued to hear for yourself, most of the above mentioned soundtracks can be found in whole or in part on You Tube.
Watchingwell 
