Elmer Bernstein, one of Hollywood’s most versatile and prolific composers, was born in New York City on April 4, 1922. Not long after beginning his studies at New York University, America entered World War II. Bernstein joined the Army Air Corps, and worked as a composer, arranger, and conductor for the Armed Forces Radio Service. After the war, he studied under composer Roger Sessions (1896–1985) at the Juilliard School of Music.
Bernstein began writing for the cinema in 1950. His first success in Hollywood was his score for a thriller Sudden Fear in 1952, starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance. Three years later, he wrote one of his best-known scores for Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, starring Frank SINATRA. The subject of the film was drug addiction, causing distribution problems in several U.S. states. But the jazz-based score, which featured such celebrated jazz musicians as drummer Shelly Manne and trumpeter Shorty Rogers, established Bernstein’s name in the film business.
One year earlier, Alex North, with his score for A Streetcar Named Desire, had introduced jazz to mainstream cinema. This was an alternative style to the film music of the 1930s and 1940s, which had been dominated by composers such as Max STEINER, Dimitri Tiomkin, Erich Korngold, Alfred NEWMAN, Miklos Rozsa, and Franz WAXMAN—known as the Hollywood “symphonists.” These writers had created scores that usually reflected the musical language of popular classical composers such as PUCCINI, RACHMANINOV, and RESPIGHI. The general public could relate to this, but the more critical view was that their work was overly romanticised and sentimental— modern composers led by STRAVINSKY and SCHOENBERG had left such music behind. With North, Bernstein updated the language of film music, and opened it to broader influences.
Bernstein has gone on to create well over a hundred successful film scores, including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), The Great Escape (1963), and An American Werewolf in London (1981). Bernstein is a skilled orchestrator with a smooth technique, and in addition to his use of jazz, displays a keen knowledge of the various styles of concert-hall and popular music. Like many film composers of his generation, this gives him a wide range of musical styles to draw upon. In his score for the 1961 film Summer and Smoke, for example, there are many references to various composers, among them BARTÃK, HINDEMITH, RAVEL, and Richard RODGERS.
Bernstein’s versatile skills have enabled him to compose and arrange for all film genres. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he wrote several hit scores for comedy films. Three of the most successful were National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), Airplane! (1980), and Airplane II: The Sequel (1982). His score for Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of the suspense thriller Cape Fear was a clever reworking of Bernard HERRMANN’s score for the 1962 original, and demonstrated Bernstein’s abilities as a versatile arranger. On a more ambitious scale, his music for Scorsese’s Age of Lnnocence (1993) was arranged to dramatic effect for a massive 81-piece orchestra.
In 1967, Bernstein won an Academy Award for best original music score for his work on the comedy Thoroughly Modern Millie, starring Julie Andrews. In addition, he was nominated for the scores of The Magnificent Seven (1960), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and three other films.
Richard Tromhley
SEE ALSO:
Marmorstein, Gary. A Hollywood Rhapsody:
Movie Music and Its Makers 1900–75
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1997);
Prendergast, Roy. Film Music: A Neglected Art
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
Cape Fear-, The Great Escape;
The Man with the Golden Arm;
To Kill a Mockingbird; What Is Jazz?