Chapter 5

The Changing of the Guard

1960–1969

Prelude

In many ways the decade of the 1960s was one of the twentieth century’s most turbulent, a time that began with the optimistic ascendancy of John F. Kennedy to the White House and ended with the horrifying reality of Vietnam. In between there were several assassinations of political and religious leaders, plus racial tensions in America’s largest cities that led to full-blown riots in the summers of 1964 through 1967. In this decade there were tumultuous developments in the world of entertainment, not only in popular music but also in the TV and film industries.

Popular Music

In popular music the 1960s can be characterized as the decade of the “British Invasion.” When the Beatles arrived in New York on February 7, 1964, the four Liverpudlians were greeted by thousands of screaming young fans, who caused riotous outbreaks at the sites of their first American concerts, including one at Carnegie Hall. The notoriety of the Beatles was enhanced by two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. With Beatles songs broadcast live into millions of American homes, parents found themselves on the opposite side of the generational fence from their teenage children. The Beatles craze grew to even greater proportions with the release of the film A Hard Day’s Night that summer.

Although Beatlemania continued throughout the decade, the Beatles themselves remained a group for only a few years. Their last live concert took place in 1966, and by 1970 John, Paul, George, and Ringo went their separate ways, never again to reach the level of acclaim that they had achieved together as the “Fabulous Four.” Other English rock groups like the Rolling Stones, The Who, and Led Zeppelin gained millions of loyal fans; but no matter how successful these groups became, none ever eclipsed the Beatles.

Even the Broadway stage was not immune to the sounds of rock-‘n’-roll. Despite the popularity of such traditionally conceived musicals as Hello, Dolly! (1964) and Funny Girl (1964), which made Barbra Streisand a major singing star, one of the most influential stage musicals of the 1960s was Hair, with music by Galt MacDermot, which was advertised as “an American tribal love-rock musical” when it first opened off Broadway in late 1967. Six months later, a revamped and enlarged production reached the Broadway stage and caused a sensation because of its rebellious attitude toward the war in Vietnam, its frankness about sex, and a nude scene. Hair included a number of songs that became popular, especially “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In,” both of which became hits through a recorded medley made by one of the decade’s most popular singing groups, the Fifth Dimension.

In the late 1960s, the Beatles as well as other performers got caught up in a countercultural phenomenon based on such drugs as heroin and LSD. By 1969, when the first Woodstock music festival took place on a farm in New York State, millions of young people were part of the drug culture, which accompanied the anti-war protests then going on. Such dynamic performers as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors’ Jim Morrison, all of whom eventually succumbed to their drug addiction, were among the icons who rebelled against American entanglement in an unpopular war.

Television

With the war in Vietnam continuing to escalate throughout the 1960s, several news telecasts began to run coverage of major events in the conflict. The most successful of these programs was CBS’s 60 Minutes, which debuted in 1968 (and is extant as of this writing). This Sunday evening news hour featured top news correspondents, some of whom reported from locations in Southeast Asia.

In addition to network news programs, TV viewers were often subjected to strong doses of political satire during the 1960s. Two shows in particular dared to ruffle the feathers of corporate sponsors. The first of these was the short-lived That Was the Week That Was, which ran from January 1964 to May 1965. This provocative show was followed in February 1967 by the even more irreverent Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which included so much unbridled spoofing of everything from politics to religion and beyond that CBS executives suddenly cancelled the show in June 1969.

TV comedy during the 1960s began to reflect a broad spectrum of cultural attitudes. In contrast with such pioneering sitcoms of the ’50s as I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, many of the newer comedies concentrated on fantasy; this was the case with Bewitched (1964–1972); Gilligan’s Island (1964–1967); and I Dream of Jeannie (1965–1970). Homespun humor was represented by The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968) and The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971). Some 1960s sitcoms were aimed at a more sophisticated audience; this is especially true of The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966), which introduced one of TVs most enduring comediennes, Mary Tyler Moore. This show also set a standard for strong ensemble casts, with support from Morey Amsterdam, Rose Marie, and Carl Reiner, who created the series.

The most successful comedy show at the end of the decade was Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in, which brilliantly spoofed everything in America and beyond through a quick series of blackouts and short skits. With its rampant one-liners and nonstop gags, this show’s irreverence was in stark contrast to the dire events being reported in the nightly news.

The Carol Burnett Show, though not politically motivated, provided viewers with diversion from newscasts through a variety of entertaining skits and musical numbers. One of TVs finest comedy ensembles, which included Carol Burnett herself, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence, and Lyle Waggoner, created great hilarity.

Although comedy seemed to dominate prime time TV during the 1960s, a few dramatic programs were successful. In addition to the Westerns such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and The Virginian, ABC’s The Fugitive (1963–1967) offered an engrossing series of episodes in which Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen) attempted to elude capture as he hunted for a one-armed man whom he believed to be his wife’s murderer. Two series with hospital settings, Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey (both 1961–1966), also furnished viewers with something more substantial than comic relief. In both shows the dramatic content was enhanced by strong background musical themes, provided in the first instance by a neophyte (Jerry Goldsmith) and in the other by a veteran (David Raksin).

The most influential sci-fi series in TV history is Star Trek, which began in 1966 and lasted for three seasons in prime time. Following its cancellation the show began to attract a cult following. “Trekkies” held nostalgic conventions, and by the end of the 1970s, Paramount would launch several feature-length films that reunited most of the original cast members. Additionally, four syndicated TV series would eventually be spun off from the original show.

A major development in TV broadcasting during the 1960s was the gradual conversion to color. Although programs in color had been introduced during the previous decade, it was in the ’60s that a growing home audience of TV viewers began to view prime time shows in color (provided that they could afford the very expensive color TV sets). Even though only 3.1 percent of U.S. households had color TV sets by 1964, that number would increase drastically by the end of the decade.1 The rise of color TV broadcasting was enhanced greatly when NBC announced in mid-1965 that its upcoming fall schedule would primarily be in color. By 1967 the other two networks joined the conversion.

Two other major developments included the transition from live broadcasts to either filmed or videotaped shows and the scheduling of theatrical films in prime time programming. Because of the high cost of buying broadcast rights to major films, movies began to be made specifically for television. By the end of 1966, NBC had struck a deal with Universal to produce a series of original films, which were to be broadcast without prior theatrical showing. By early 1967 all three networks were broadcasting two nights of movies per week.

With the rise of made-for-TV movies, a greater amount of work became available to film composers who could work within the tight time lines and budgets of these productions. Only on rare occasions would musicians be granted the time and the budget to create works on a scale as elaborate as their scores for theatrical films. Even within the restrictions required by this hybrid film genre, many composers contributed some genuinely fine work.

Movies

As the 1960s began, the major movie studios had already started to divest themselves of almost all their production facilities. They remained as corporate entities to oversee the financing of films and often acted as releasing companies for independently produced movies.

Without the rigid controls of the old studio system, feature films made in the 1960s often cost more than $10 million apiece. Because of the impressive box-office returns of such 1950s epics as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, Hollywood producers often fell victim to a belief in “the bigger, the better.” A number of expensive 1960s films drove movie studios to the brink of bankruptcy. Especially ruinous was 20th Century Fox’s production of Cleopatra, which cost about $40 million and failed to show a profit until its TV rights were sold.2

The 1960s may be regarded as the beginning of the end for the screen musical; but, even though song-and-dance films were pretty much a thing of the past, four of the Oscar-winning pictures of the ’60s were musical films. The fact that all four were adapted from highly acclaimed and long-running stage musicals may have contributed to their success. In any case, West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), and Oliver (1968) were all big hits at the box office, with The Sound of Music becoming the all-time box-office champion (until The Godfather surpassed it in 1972).

So few movies were being shot in black-and-white that the Oscar categories were changed in 1967 to remove any distinction between color and black-and-white filming (which affected the areas of cinematography, art direction, and costuming). Meanwhile, CinemaScope and other processes were replaced as the favored wide-screen technique by Panavision in the early part of the decade. The Cinerama process, used by MGM for two feature films in the early 1960s, was subsequently simplified to a single-projector technique, but was still phased out of existence by the end of the decade.

The 1960s are noteworthy for the arrival of adult films which presented a challenge to the old motion picture production code. When Mike Nichols directed the film version of Edward Albee’s controversial play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, the code was already outmoded. In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America replaced the old code with a system of self-regulation, which gave ratings to all forthcoming films. Once this new policy was in place, films with bold, adult themes could be released without fear of being suppressed. Thus, another weapon in the ongoing media war was put in place, as Hollywood began making films that could not be shown uncut on network TV.

For film composers, the 1960s represents the changing of the guard, with some of the noted film pioneers—in particular the three godfathers—composing their last scores during those years. Max Steiner’s declining health, including failing eyesight, forced him to retire in 1965, after thirty-five years of film scoring. His last scores did little to enhance his reputation, and when he died on December 28, 1971, he would be chiefly remembered for the scores of the many exceptional films of the 1930s and ’40s that had given him the opportunity to develop the technique of film scoring to such a high level of artistry. Dimitri Tiomkin composed his last original film score in 1968, for the forgettable comedy Great Catherine. His last involvement with film scoring was arranging the music for the biographical movie Tchaikovsky (1971), which he coproduced in Russia. He lived in retirement for the last years of his life, and died on November 11, 1979. Meanwhile, although Alfred Newman never officially retired, he reached the final chapter in his illustrious film career with the score of Airport whose release coincided with the composer’s death on February 17, 1970.

Franz Waxman, younger than these three pioneers of film scoring, nevertheless preceded all of them in death. Having composed several masterful film scores in the first three years of the decade, including the powerful music of Taras Bulba (1962), he was not much in demand from 1963 on. He succumbed to cancer in 1967 at the age of sixty.

Two other composers, Bronislau Kaper and André Previn (b. 1929), whose film-scoring careers came to an end in the 1960s, had both been affiliated with MGM for most of their Hollywood years. Although Kaper wrote a magnificent score for his last MGM picture, the expensive remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), he began to lose interest in the profession in which he had been involved for almost three decades. He composed six scores between 1964 and 1968, but then turned his attention to other musical pursuits. Although he lived on until cancer claimed him on April 25, 1983, he would make no further contributions to film music.

André Previn’s disdain for the Hollywood atmosphere has been well documented in a number of books, including his own No Minor Chords, an often witty 1991 memoir in which he vividly describes the lack of musical insight shown by Hollywood producers. The title itself alludes to a frequently repeated anecdote about Irving Thalberg, who, having been informed by an assistant that the problems with his newest film stemmed from the composer’s use of minor chords, sent an interoffice memo to the MGM music department in which he instructed all of that studio’s music employees henceforth to avoid the use of minor chords in their scores.3 Despite his increasingly negative attitude, Previn still managed to create some masterful scores for films made in the ’60s, including Elmer Gantry (1960) and Dead Ringer (1964). Previn did four scores for Billy Wilder films between 1961 and 1966, but during this period he began to concentrate on orchestra conducting in the concert hall.

A few efforts in the jazz vein appeared in the 1960s, by composers as divergent as André Previn (The Subterraneans, 1960), Elmer Bernstein (Walk on the Wild Side, 1962), Quincy Jones (The Pawnbroker, 1965), Chico Hamilton (Repulsion, 1965), Herbie Hancock (Blow-Up, 1966), and Michel Legrand (The Picasso Summer, 1969). Because of an increasing tendency toward scores of a jazz or pop sound, the majority of film scores of the 1960s no longer needed composers with a symphonic background. For this reason such masters of the art of film music as Bernard Herr-mann and Miklós Rózsa found themselves being employed less often as the ’60s progressed. Alfred Hitchcock hired Bernard Herrmann for several films in the early ’60s, but by 1965 their relationship ended abruptly with a rift that led Herrmann to leave Hollywood altogether, though he subsequently composed several excellent scores for films made in Europe.

1960

Elmer Bernstein: The Magnificent Seven

The rousing music that Elmer Bernstein composed for The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges’s Western adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Seven Samurai, established a sound that energized the scores of many Western films during the 1960s.

Elmer Bernstein (1922–2004)

Bernstein was born in New York on April 4, 1922. As an only child, he was raised with an appreciation of the arts, and took up painting, dancing, and piano playing. At twelve he received a scholarship to study the piano with Henrietta Michelson at Juilliard and remained her private student until 1949. After graduating from the Walden School in 1939, he went to New York to become a concert pianist. With encouragement from Aaron Copland, Bernstein progressed as a composer by studying with Israel Citkowitz, Roger Sessions, and Stefan Wolpe.* Bernstein also enrolled in composition classes at New York University, but World War II intervened. During a stint in the U.S. Army Air Corps Bernstein was assigned to compose music for radio programs; he also worked as an arranger for Glenn Miller’s Army Air Corps Band.

After the war he tried again to be a concert pianist, but a series of fortuitous events soon paved his way to Hollywood. According to Tony Thomas:

In 1949 [Bernstein] was offered the job of writing a score for the United Nations Radio Service for a program concerning the armistice achieved by the UN in Israel. The program was carried by NBC and was heard by the writer-producer Norman Corwin, who engaged Bernstein to write a score for one of his dramatic productions.†

Sidney Buchman, who was then vice president of Columbia Pictures, heard these shows and invited Bernstein to score two films, Saturday’s Hero and Boots Malone (both 1951).

In 1952, Bernstein produced an unusually modernistic score for Sudden Fear. This score would have cemented Bernstein’s Hollywood career, but his leftist political views proved problematic, due to the ongoing HUAC hearings. Bernstein found himself unable to get big-studio scoring assignments, and in 1953 he wrote music for a pair of films that marked the low point of his career. Ironically Robot Monster and Cat Women of the Moon have both achieved cult status. Fortunately, Bernard Herrmann recommended him for the 1955 20th Century Fox drama The View from Pompey’s Head, which in turn led Cecil B. DeMille to choose him to replace the ailing Victor Young as composer of The Ten Commandments. DeMille’s film rescued Bernstein’s career, which then began to soar with the jazz score of The Man with the Golden Arm, which won for Bernstein his first Oscar nomination.

By the end of the 1950s Bernstein started working with such esteemed directors as Delbert Mann, Anthony Mann, Robert Mulligan, and Vincente Minnelli. In 1960 his work for John Sturges’s Western remake of The Magnificent Seven elevated him to the front ranks of Hollywood composers. Bernstein then achieved great success with To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Escape, and Hawaii. In the late 1970s he became known for comedy films beginning with National Lampoon’s Animal House. Airport and Ghostbusters also featured Bernstein’s lighthearted music. In the 1980s he started writing small-scale scores such as My Left Foot and Da, which featured the eerie sounds of the ondes Martenot. In 1993 Bernstein wrote one of his finest scores for Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. He died in 2004 at age eighty-two.

Photo: D’Lynn Waldron

*Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art & Craft of Movie Music (Burbank, Calif.: Riverwood, 1991), p. 239.

†Ibid., pp. 239–40.

When Sturges decided to adapt Kurosawa’s film, for which he paid a small fee for the rights and received the Japanese director’s blessing, he obtained backing from the Mirisch Brothers at United Artists, but with the provision that he cast a known star in the lead role. Despite his middle-European accent, Yul Brynner was perceived as being a strong, silent presence and thus suitable for the role of Chris, who aids the villagers against a small army of bandits that continually pillages their supplies. Sturges began filming The Magnificent Seven, with its setting shifted from medieval Japan to late-nineteenth-century Mexico. Once Bernstein was hired to do the score, the obvious question was whether there should be a Tiomkin-style ballad. Tiomkin was then the accepted master of the Western genre, having scored High Noon and Sturges’s own Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). The decision to eschew a song as a vocal background was wise because of this film’s episodic structure. Bernstein’s main-title music sweeps the viewer into a world of roisterous adventure. After some boldly syncopated opening chords, the main theme is heard, with a rising pattern of fifths that is used several times over a continually hard-driving rhythmic accompaniment. This theme, which is heard periodically throughout the film, is associated with Chris and the other six gunmen who have been hired to ward off the bandits. The second most prominent theme is a dramatic idea for brass and drums which begins with three repeated tones, followed by five more that move in a confined melodic range. This music is associated with Calvera (Eli Wallach), the bandit leader.

Though most of the score is up-tempo, especially during the many riding scenes where Bernstein’s music purposefully plays at a faster tempo than the leisurely movement on-screen (another example of the DeMille lesson), there are also moments of a quieter and calmer nature. One especially effective moment occurs when one of the gunfighters, Vin (Steve McQueen), engages Chris in a philosophical discussion of the latter’s motives for helping the villagers. Here the main theme is played more slowly, with an oboe carrying the melody over a background of strings and harp. Elsewhere there are dance pieces for the villagers, as they celebrate moments of respite from Calvera’s attacks. Guitar music can be heard prominently in some of the film’s quieter moments. Tony Thomas’s evaluation of the film is particularly apt:

The Magnificent Seven should not be made the subject of academic discussions. It’s an adventure yarn with some fine action sequences, good color photography by Charles Lang, Jr. of rugged Mexican settings and most conspicuously a music score by Elmer Bernstein that is not so much background as up-front. The music is an integral part of the spirit of the picture and its rhythmic, lilting main theme—later used on television commercials as the Marlboro Country music—remains one of the most popular tunes ever written for the movies, and deservedly so.4

Elmer Bernstein wrote scores for three other films in 1960, each different from the others. These include a score for the documentary Israel with strains of Jewish music, which was written and produced by Leon Uris, author of the best-selling novel Exodus, and the jazz-flavored music for Robert Mulligan’s Rat Race, in which Bernstein was able to further his interests in contemporary jazz sounds for which he had shown so much flair in The Man with the Golden Arm and Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Last, Bernstein composed the romantic background music for the film version of John O’Hara’s From the Terrace. Curiously, the sweepingly lyrical main theme begins with a melodic pattern that is similar to the beginnings of both Jule Styne’s title song from Three Coins in the Fountain and the love theme of Bernard Herrmann’s score of North by Northwest. Despite the similarities, Bernstein’s theme soars in a romantic direction that is all its own. Taken together, these scores indicate Elmer Bernstein’s enormous talent as a film composer, and also show him to be one of the most versatile musicians in Hollywood.

Scores for Historical Epics

The year 1960 was a big one for lavishly produced wide-screen historical dramas that contain memorable background music. For The Alamo, John Wayne’s sprawling epic about the ill-fated Texan stand against a Mexican attack, Dimitri Tiomkin produced a beautiful score with a lot of choral backgrounds. The song “The Green Leaves of Summer,” which Tiomkin wrote for this film, is heard toward the end of the film in an extended arrangement for a cappella voices. Considering the bombastic nature of much of Tiomkin’s music, his understatement in this sometimes meandering but always watchable film is laudable.

Another lavish film is Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, in which Alex North’s music brilliantly depicts the notable slave revolt against the Roman Empire in 73 BC. Kubrick later disowned his work on Spartacus; but what cannot be denied is the astonishingly detailed action sequences, such as the scene wherein Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) brings together hundreds of fellow ex-slaves in a march to the sea and a final escape from the pursuing Roman army. Alex North’s dramatic score, one of his finest, combines moments of classical beauty with elements of contemporary dissonance. The brilliant piling up of brass tones during the march-like main-title theme provides a strong hint of the overall quality of this score. Two additional pieces of exceptional beauty are the love theme for Spartacus and Varinia (Jean Simmons) and a lyrical serenade for strings and mandolin, which is heard during a peaceful interlude in the camp, where ex-slaves and their families have congregated. This score is arguably the pinnacle of North’s career, though he would continue to write excellent film accompaniments for almost three more decades.

André Previn: Elmer Gantry

Richard Brooks’s dramatically compelling adaptation of Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis’s provocative novel about Bible-toting evangelists during the 1920s, features a powerful performance by Burt Lancaster in the title role. For Gantry, composer André Previn produced one of the most modern of film scores in terms of its dissonant harmony. The dramatically charged main theme, which is based on a seven-note motif, appears throughout the film in a variety of guises. Previn’s music mainly serves to sum up Elmer’s hyperkinetic personality and his impact on the crowds that flock to the tent to hear him preach. The harmony is especially dissonant during the film’s opening credits, where the seven-note idea is accompanied by a series of powerful brass chords.

Among the score’s other original themes, especially noteworthy is the blues tune that is associated with Elmer’s former girlfriend-turned-prostitute, Lulu Bains (Shirley Jones). For the revival meeting scene, old gospel songs such as “Stand Up for Jesus” and “At the River” are sung by Patti Page, who plays Sister Rachel. Finally, when Elmer makes romantic advances toward the evangelist Sister Sharon (Jean Simmons), his motif is slowed down to become less bold and, at the same time, more lyrical.

Short Cuts

Ernest Gold. The Academy Award–winning score of 1960 was Ernest Gold’s dramatic music for Otto Preminger’s lengthy modern epic Exodus. Based on Leon Uris’s novel, Exodus presents a fictionalized version of the events that led to the formation of the modern state of Israel. Its soaring main theme permeates the score with its heroic melody, which is associated with Ari (Paul Newman), Uris’s fictional hero. There is also a lovely theme for the tragic Karen (Jill Haworth) and an occasional reference to “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem.

The Apartment. Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning movie The Apartment includes one of the year’s most popular musical themes. The score’s composer, Adolph Deutsch, cannot be given credit for this theme since it is based on the 1949 piano piece “Jealous Lover,” by British composer Charles Williams. According to the film’s star, Jack Lemmon, Wilder had a great memory for old songs, even though he couldn’t carry a tune. He remembered this music when The Apartment was being shot, and suggested that it be used as the romantic background theme. It took United Artists some time to track it down. Both The Apartment and the Exodus themes became enormously popular in 1960 through a pair of recordings made by the piano duo of Arthur Ferrante and Louis Teicher for United Artists Records.

Bernard Herrmann. For Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, with Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Bernard Herrmann’s often imitated “black-and-white” music, written for strings only, begins with a rhythmically charged idea associated with Marion (Janet Leigh), who flees Phoenix with a bundle of money and drives to California, where she winds up at the Bates Motel. In the film’s most famous sequence, the shower scene, Herrmann devised a series of screechy violin sounds that suggest repeated stabbings with a butcher knife, as Marion is brutally attacked by a shadowy figure. This same music is also used for the second murder, when the investigator, Mr. Arbogast (Martin Balsam), goes snooping around the old house on the hill behind the motel. High-pitched violin harmonics are heard as Arbogast ascends the stairs. When Mrs. Bates jumps out of her bedroom armed with a butcher knife, the screechy sounds return.

Manos Hadjidakis. A new sound in film scoring that became immensely popular in the early 1960s emanated from the background score of Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday. The film features Dassin’s wife, Melina Mercouri, as Ilya, the fun-loving prostitute of Piraeus, who takes Sundays off so she can read the great Greek plays. The Oscar for Best Song went to the vocal version of this catchy tune, which made Manos Hadjidakis (1925–1994) a composer to be reckoned with. With this infectious score, the Greek bouzouki became an established film-music instrument; it would be heard from several more times, especially in 1964, with Hadjidakis’s music for Topkapi and his fellow countryman Mikis Theodorakis’s flavorful score for Zorba the Greek.

1961

The Henry Mancini–Blake Edwards Collaboration

Of the many long-term collaborations that have existed in the movie business between composers and directors, few have lasted longer nor resulted in more film scores than the thirty-seven-year partnership of composer Henry Mancini and director Blake Edwards.

Henry Mancini (1924–1994)

Mancini was born in Cleveland, where his parents had emigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Mancini grew up mostly in West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, where he attended local schools. His father introduced him to the flute at age eight, and he also took piano lessons. Mancini decided at an early age that he wanted to compose film music. He described the very day of his decision in his memoir, Did They Mention the Music? After seeing Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades in Pittsburgh at age eleven, his already fertile musical imagination was fired.* Subsequent studies at Carnegie Tech and Juilliard involved his taking up the flute as a performance instrument, plus courses in composing and arranging. In 1946, after serving in World War II, he landed a job as a pianist and arranger with the newly reformed Glenn Miller Orchestra led by Tex Beneke.

In 1952 he landed a job at Universal as a member of the music staff. He described the many tasks assigned to him and to others on the staff by Universal music director Joseph Gershenson, who would farm out sections of films to different people.

The music department consisted of Joe Gershenson; his assistant, Milt Rosen; composers Frank Skinner and Hans Salter, who were given complete pictures to score; and, at my level, composers who were assigned the overflow, several of us working on various parts of the same picture. It also included an excellent orchestrator named David Tamkin, who in working on our scores gave us all lessons in orchestration, and a music librarian named Nick Nuzzi.†

Mancini describes the method by which he and fellow staff member Herman Stein were assigned their film-scoring projects:

I would get my five reels and Herman his five. If the love theme fell in his half of the picture, he’d write it, and if he used it in the first half of the picture, I would use it in the second half, and vice versa. The theme, whichever of us wrote it, would be just a melody line, which we would then arrange and give to David Tamkin for orchestration.‡

Mancini admitted that many of the studios’ low-budget films included scores that were compiled by cribbing the music of earlier Universal pictures. Since the studio owned the rights to its movie scores, the original composer had no say in the matter. He indicated that the music librarian would hand off a stack of scores by various composers; the assigned musician would then proceed to make a new score out of them. One score that stands out from Mancini’s days at Universal is the music for Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). Even though the film was taken away from Welles and reedited, with the music shifted around, Mancini regarded it as one of his proudest moments in film scoring.§

Toward the end of his six-year stint at Universal, Mancini worked on three pictures made by Blake Edwards, including Mister Cory (1957) with Tony Curtis. Edwards and Mancini got on well together, and when Edwards went to NBC with his Peter Gunn project, Mancini scored the series with swingy, jazz-inflected background music. The series debuted in the fall of 1958 and became an immense hit; the music itself became an even bigger success. Mancini produced two albums of Peter Gunn music and won the first of several Grammys. In 1959 Mancini scored Edwards’ second TV series, Mr. Lucky, which won for Mancini two more Grammies.** In the 1960s Mancini scored feature films again, including several directed by Blake Edwards, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Days of Wine and Roses, and The Pink Panther. Mancini continued working with Edwards for the next thirty years; he also scored dozens of films for other directors and recorded many successful albums of film music for RCA Victor. Mancini’s career came to an abrupt end with his death from cancer in 1994.

Photo: Photofest

*Henry Mancini, with Gene Lees, Did They Mention the Music? (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), p. 75.

†Ibid., p. 63.

‡Ibid., p. 70, 71.

§ Ibid., p. 82.

**Jon Burlingame, TV’s Biggest Hits (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), pp. 32–33.

The most successful result of their collaboration was Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was planned as a vehicle for Audrey Hepburn in the role of Holly Golightly, a free-spirited young woman living in New York City. The film’s success was largely based on the song “Moon River,” which was intended for a scene in which Hepburn was to sing while seated on a window ledge strumming a guitar.

The first problem Mancini faced in scoring the film was to convince the producers that he should be allowed to compose the song himself. At that time it was customary to farm out such songwriting jobs to more experienced musicians, but Edwards managed to talk his producers into letting Mancini write it himself. Since Audrey Hepburn was not a trained singer, there was the built-in problem of composing something that she could handle. In his book Mancini tells how he skirted this issue:

Audrey was not known as a singer. There was a question of whether she could handle it. Then, by chance, I sat watching television one night when the movie Funny Face (1957) came on, with Fred Astaire and Audrey. It contains a scene in which Audrey sings “How Long Has This Been Going On?” I thought, You can’t buy that kind of thing, that kind of simplicity. I went to the piano and played the song. It had a range of an octave and one, so I knew she could sing that. I now felt strongly that she should be the one to sing the new song in our picture—the song I hadn’t written yet. . . . It took me a month to think it through. . . . One night at home . . . [I] sat down at the piano, and all of a sudden I played the first three notes of a tune. . . . I built the melody in a range of an octave and one. It was simple and completely diatonic: in the key of C, you can play it entirely on the white keys. It came quickly. It had taken me one month and half an hour to write that melody.5

This was the genesis of “Moon River.” Johnny Mercer’s lyrics, with the enchanting line “Waitin’ ’round the bend, my huckleberry friend,” made the song even more memorable.

The score of Breakfast at Tiffany’s depends mightily on the melody of “Moon River,” which is first heard in an instrumental version during the opening credits, where it is played by a solo harmonica, with guitar, strings, and wordless voices. It is also used in a couple of dramatic scenes to add an emotional quality, especially when Holly tells her upstairs neighbor Paul (George Peppard) how she left home at fourteen. Later it comes in again to underscore the emotional scene where Doc Golightly (Buddy Ebsen), who still thinks he’s married to Holly although the marriage was annulled long ago, gets on a bus to go back to Texas. She tells him that she’s not Lula Mae anymore (that’s her real name!), and that she has a new life in New York. The most crucial use of “Moon River” occurs in the scene, to which Mancini alludes in his book, where Holly is sitting on her windowsill; while accompanying herself on the guitar she sings a serenade for Paul, who listens from an upstairs window.

There is much more to the music, such as the up-tempo jazz numbers and a cha-cha tune for the extended party scene in Holly’s apartment, which ends abruptly when her Japanese landlord Mr. Yunioshi (Mickey Rooney, in a hilarious role) calls the police. Then there’s the “walking” theme, a catchy tune for wordless voices, strings, and xylophone, which accompanies Holly and Paul as they traipse around Manhattan. First they go to Tiffany’s, then to a library, and finally to a dime store, where they shoplift a pair of Halloween masks, put them over their faces, and then slowly walk out of the store without being detected.

One of the score’s most noteworthy features is a stinger chord (one that draws the viewer’s attention) which punctuates several scenes, with a vibrato effect created by the use of vibraphone plus several other instruments, including piano and harp. The score of Breakfast at Tiffany’s succeeds in capturing the many moods of New York, with an instrumentation that would lead to other scores in which the conventional orchestration would be replaced by a jazzier, swing band type of sound. This aspect of the score was illuminated in 1987 by Gene Lees in his preface to Mancini’s book Did They Mention the Music?

In Breakfast at Tiffany’s Mancini was revealed as an inventive and original writer who enormously expanded the vocabulary of modern orchestration. An awareness of classical orchestration was wedded to a fluency in American big band writing, to sometimes startling effect. This combination made Mancini the first film composer to emerge from the anonymity of that profession and become a public figure, a man known worldwide.6

The two Oscars Mancini won, for the film’s score and for “Moon River,” guaranteed him a long-lasting career in Hollywood. He continued to write film scores for the next three decades, during which he collected two more Oscars (for the 1962 title song for Days of Wine and Roses and for the song score of the 1982 Victor/Victoria). Perhaps the most successful fruits of the Mancini-Edwards collaboration began with The Pink Panther (1964), which spawned a series of films featuring Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. In all, Mancini composed the scores for eight Pink Panther films.

Miklós Rózsa: Scoring Samuel Bronston’s Epics

Because of the slow but steady decline of the studios during the 1950s, combined with the gradual dissolution of the studio music departments, the selection of composers to score films became the independent producer’s responsibility by the beginning of the 1960s. This development would ultimately hurt film scoring because those holding the purse strings were often not musically informed. One master composer who still did get called on was Miklós Rózsa, who scored King of Kings and El Cid, both produced by Samuel Bronston released in 1961. The music of King of Kings is marked by a direct, emotional approach to the Christ story, with a stirring main theme that ties the various episodes of the picture together. Unlike Rózsa’s earlier Ben-Hur score with its spectacular brass scoring, this film score primarily features strings.

For El Cid, starring Charlton Heston as the legendary Spanish hero, Rózsa traveled to Madrid to do research. He later described this experience:

There was research to do, because I knew nothing of Spanish music of the Middle Ages. The historical adviser on the film was the greatest authority on the Cid, Dr. Ramon Menendez Pidal, aged ninety-two. It was he who introduced me to the twelfth-century Cantigas of Santa Maria, in one of what must have been at least ten thousand books in his vast and beautiful library. . . . I spent a month in intense study of the music of the period. I also studied the Spanish folk songs which Pedrell had gone about collecting in the early years of this century. With these two widely differing sources to draw upon, I was ready to compose the music. As always, I attempted to absorb these raw materials and translate them into my own musical language.7

The finished product is a masterpiece of symphonic film music that harks back to the Golden Age. The prelude, used for the opening credits, is a showcase for two of the score’s principal themes. The first is an upward-arching melody that conveys the heroic character of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known in legend as “El Cid,” or Cid Campeador (Lord Conqueror). The second is an inspired love theme, which compares with the many lyrical themes Rózsa composed for his earlier epic scores, such as for Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur. Scattered throughout the film’s background music are several majestic fanfares, played by an expanded brass section, and dramatic marches, including the “El Cid March” and “Entry of the Nobles.” With this epic score and the dramatic King of Kings music, Rózsa rightfully regarded 1961 as “the climax and watershed of my film career.”8

Elmer Bernstein: Both in and out of the Saddle

Continuing in his Western vein, Elmer Bernstein created a rousing background for Michael Curtiz’s last film, The Comancheros, with John Wayne as a Texas Ranger. While this score’s principle melodic idea resembles the Magnificent Seven theme, it avoids being a carbon copy.

Bernstein’s other film-music accomplishments in 1961 include a romantic-styled background for By Love Possessed; the rhythmically driven modernistic music for the potent hospital drama The Young Doctors; and his best score of the year, the Oscar-nominated music for Peter Glenville’s film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke.

This last film, a colorfully produced period drama set in a small Mississippi town in 1916, concerns the sexual frustration of Alma Winemiller (Geraldine Page), a minister’s daughter who cannot openly express her feelings for her neighbor John Buchanan (Laurence Harvey), a restless medical student who feels pressured to follow in his physician father’s footsteps. Bernstein’s main theme features a melody that defines the character of Alma. Over a restless harmonic background Bernstein designed a widely arching melodic line which features tones that leap upward, only to fall back down in pitch. The prevailingly downward spiral of this melody conveys an unavoidable sense of melancholy—a key to the underlying tragedy of the frustrated love that causes the destruction of Alma’s fragile personality. A series of solemn brass chords with accompanying pairs of soft woodwind tones is also featured as punctuation for this theme, the various elements of which add poignancy to Williams’s story. The depth of Bernstein’s perception of Alma may be heard throughout this emotionally moving score.

Short Cuts

Bernard Herrmann. The Charles Schneer–Ray Harryhausen film Mysterious Island features a turbulent Bernard Herrmann score. Although the resulting music isn’t as tuneful as his 7th Voyage of Sinbad, there are stunningly dramatic moments featuring an expanded brass section of eight horns and four tubas, plus lots of percussion. The prelude is a bombastic piece consisting of long, sustained chords played by brass and woodwinds, with punctuating drums and cymbal crashes. The opening scene, in which a small group of fugitives escapes from a Confederate prison in an observation balloon, features a wildly rhythmic piece, with swirling woodwind figures in triplet rhythm accompanying heavy brass chords and percussion effects.

The most ingenious parts of the score accompany scenes on an uncharted island in which gargantuan species are encountered: for a giant crab, the music features the eight horns plus more pounding chords by brass and percussion; for a giant bee, the orchestra becomes a buzzing machine, with string tremolos, woodwind trills, and flutter-tonguing in the brass; and for a giant bird there is a Baroque-style fugue that begins in the low woodwinds and eventually features several different instrumental colors in a wildly inventive orchestral romp.

Dimitri Tiomkin. One of the biggest box-office hits of 1961 was the World War II action adventure The Guns of Navarone, the first and best of several films based on stories by Alistair MacLean. Dimitri Tiomkin, in a respite from Western films, gave this score a very driving beat, as in the main-title music, known as the “Legend of Navarone,” in which the trumpets boldly proclaim an emotionally stirring march-like melody, followed by a second theme of heroic character featuring soaring strings.

Hugo Friedhofer. The troubled Marlon Brando film One-Eyed Jacks emerged as a major disappointment in 1961, despite some fine acting moments, but Hugo Friedhofer produced one of his finest scores on its behalf, with a main theme of noble character played by trumpets over a background of strings. Friedhofer, one of the most underrated of all film composers, would write only six film scores in the entire decade.

Laurence Rosenthal. One of the younger composers in films, Detroit native Laurence Rosenthal (b. 1926), wrote a fine score for Daniel Petrie’s memorable film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s stage play A Raisin in the Sun. Rosenthal produced a highly sympathetic accompaniment for the plight of a proud black woman, Lena Younger (Claudia McNeil), who wants to use the insurance money left behind by her late husband to move her family from their cramped Chicago apartment. Rosenthal’s principal theme features a melody of noble simplicity, which climbs upward by thirds (C–E–G–B flat) before returning down the scale. The upward reaching of the pitches is an indication of Lena’s dogged determination to make a better life for her family.

1962

Maurice Jarre: Lawrence of Arabia

At the end of the 1950s, a group of young French filmmakers, known as La Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave), including François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Louis Malle, favored a more personal, free style of filmmaking, as opposed to the older, more formally structured films. By the early 1960s, many of these films were being shown on American screens.

Maurice Jarre (1924–2009)

Maurice Jarre, who was born in Lyon, did not come from a musical background; his father was a technical director for a local French radio station. Maurice’s formal introduction to film music came at age sixteen when he played percussion instruments in a music ensemble. He enrolled at the Paris Conservatory as a percussion student, and numbered Louis Aubert and the renowned Arthur Honegger among his teachers.* During military service Jarre played percussion in a naval band, and he later became a timpanist with a Paris orchestra.

Jarre’s composing career began with music for the stage. In 1950 French actor Jean Vilar relaunched the Théatre Nationale Populaire, and asked Jarre to compose scores for such plays as Richard III, Don Juan, and Macbeth. In 1952 film director Georges Franju hired Jarre to compose a score for his short documentary film Hotel des Invalides. Franju retained Jarre’s services for the rest of the decade, by which time Jarre had composed music for several ballets and concert works, including his Concerto for Percussion and Strings (1956).

Through the 1950s Jarre scored films by several prominent French directors; in 1960 he wrote the music for his first English-language film, Richard Fleischer’s Crack in the Mirror, which starred Orson Welles. Shortly thereafter, Jarre scored the film Sundays and Cybele, which led to an invitation to compose the score for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.

After winning the Oscar for this score Jarre became one of the most in-demand composers in Hollywood. He wrote music for all of Lean’s subsequent films, including Doctor Zhivago, and scored many other prestigious films throughout a career that extended almost a half century. In the 1980s he pioneered in the use of multiple synthesizers to score films; the Maurice Jarre Synthesizer Ensemble is credited with performing his music for such films as Witness and Fatal Attraction. His last film score was for the TV movie Uprising, made in 2001. Jarre died in 2009.

Photo: Private collection of Laurence E. MacDonald

* Ann Mills, liner notes, Maurice Jarre at Royal Albert Hall, Milan CD no. 73138 35793-2.

One of the side effects of the New Wave was the creation of musical scores by several French composers, some of whom had scored documentary short subjects in the early 1950s, but by the end of the decade had made the transition to scoring feature-length films. Among these were four who became internationally famous during the 1960s: Georges Delerue (1925–1992), Michel Legrand (b. 1932), Francis Lai (b. 1932), and Maurice Jarre (1924–2009). All of them eventually won Oscars for English-language films. Jarre won a total of three Academy Awards, including one for Lawrence of Arabia.

In 1962 Maurice Jarre scored the French film Sundays and Cybele, which won the 1962 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. His music for this film so impressed producer Sam Spiegel that he invited Jarre to take part in composing the score for Spiegel’s epic saga about T. E. Lawrence that was being directed by David Lean.

During the filming of Lawrence of Arabia, with newcomer Peter O’Toole as the enigmatic hero, Spiegel informed Jarre that three composers were going to contribute music to the film. Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian was to write the Arabian music while Benjamin Britten was to compose the British music. Spiegel wanted Jarre to compose the dramatic music for the balance of the film. Jarre was perplexed by this arrangement and was relieved when he learned that neither Khachaturian nor Britten was available.9

Spiegel had yet another composer up his sleeve—Richard Rodgers, with limited dramatic underscoring experience. When the film had been edited down from the forty hours of rough cut to its final running length of just less than four hours, Spiegel gathered together Lean, Jarre, and a pianist, who was called upon to demonstrate some of Rodgers’s themes. When Lean expressed his dislike for this music, Jarre was asked to demonstrate his own music. Lean was so pleased with the grandiose main theme for Lawrence that he urged Spiegel to give Jarre the entire scoring job. There were only four weeks remaining before the premiere. Jarre remembers the exhausting task of completing the project: “Working like crazy, day and night, I barely survived this experience, having to do everything in such a short time. I was only sleeping two or three hours per night.”10

The most obvious thing about Lawrence of Arabia’s music is its sheer size. To construct a score which would have a sense of grandeur comparable to the wide-screen images of the desert vistas, Jarre employed an enlarged orchestra, plus the electronic ondes Martenot, the eerie sounds of which were used to suggest the eternal mystery of the Arabian desert expanse. He also used an old string instrument called the kithara, which is a type of lyre, the string tones of which contribute an exotic flavor to the score.

The main theme, which makes repeated use of a descending fourth (C–G), lends a romantic aura to Lawrence’s adventures as a British soldier sent into the Arabian desert in 1916 in order to organize the Arabs against the Turkish army. Although Robert Bolt’s script never quite solves the riddle of who Lawrence really was, Jarre’s music, with its combined British and Arabic elements, indicates that he had divided loyalties. The British flavor is brought out in the “Home” theme, which suggests his British roots. The Arabic flavor comes across in the “Arab” theme, which suggests Middle Eastern music through the use of scales with lowered tones. As a nod to the British flavor, Jarre was persuaded to incorporate a borrowed march theme, “The Voice of the Guns,” written by Kenneth J. Alford.

Spiegel insisted on using famed conductor Adrian Boult to lead the London Philharmonic in the recording sessions for the film, but Boult conducted only the overture, with Jarre doing the rest. In the film’s credits, Boult is listed as the conductor of the entire score, whereas, on the film’s soundtrack recording, Jarre is listed as the sole conductor.

Even before the release of Lawrence, Jarre became involved with another wide-screen epic, Darryl Zanuck’s meticulously staged re-creation of the D-day invasion, The Longest Day, which at the time was the most expensive black-and-white film ever made at a cost of $8.5 million.11 Although the main march theme is based on a song composed for the film by one of its costars, Paul Anka, Jarre was commissioned to compose additional music and to do the orchestral arrangements of Anka’s tune. The result was an appropriately patriotic score.

Because of the combined box-office successes of The Longest Day and Lawrence of Arabia, plus Lawrence’s seven Oscars (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Music Score—Substantially Original), Jarre was virtually assured of more scoring projects. And because of his friendship with David Lean, one of these projects was one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the decade: Leans’s epic version of the Boris Pasternak novel, Doctor Zhivago.

Two by Elmer Bernstein

One of the finest scores of the 1960s is from Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s autobiographical Pulitzer Prize–winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Elmer Bernstein’s lyrically inspired, often gentle music reflects the childlike wonder that is at the heart of this story of two small children in Alabama during the Depression and their reactions to the dire events that occur around them. Especially serious is the trial of a black man, falsely accused of raping a white woman. He is defended by the children’s father, Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck).

Although there are some melodramatic plot turns, including an assault on the children by one of the white townspeople, the score is filled with charming moments. The main-title theme is a lilting tune first played by solo piano, and then by a flute with a repeated harmonic motif on the accordion, followed by strings which swell up in a full thematic statement. For the scene in which Scout (Mary Badham) is curled up in an old tire and rolls up to the porch of the house where the feared Boo Radley lives, the music has a Coplandesque flavor, with many syncopated chords and sudden pauses. The music conveys a great sense of compassion for the children in this film, which is narrated by Scout as an adult (with the voice of Kim Stanley). This is a film full of wondrous things, not the least of which is Bernstein’s memorably eloquent music.

Bernstein also composed a noteworthy score for a film set in New Orleans, Walk on the Wild Side, the main theme of which (with lyrics by Mack David) received an Oscar nomination as Best Song. It is most memorably heard in a bluesy instrumental version played over the film’s clever opening credits, during which several cats are seen slowly prowling about. The music of Walk on the Wild Side is a worthy companion to such earlier jazz-inflected Bernstein scores as those for The Man with the Golden Arm and Sweet Smell of Success.

Two Scores by Bernard Herrmann

The music in J. Lee Thompson’s thriller Cape Fear invites comparison with much of Herrmann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock films. In the main-title theme, Herrmann utilized a dramatic four-note melodic idea that recurs throughout the film—an ominous series of brass tones that descend through the octave. These tones suggest the menacing presence of Max Cady (Robert Mitchum). Cady is stalking the family of his defense attorney (Gregory Peck), whose purposely botched defense of the dangerous Cady caused him to be imprisoned. The score overall is taut and compelling, filled with tensely dramatic chords.

Herrmann’s other 1962 score is also one of his most romantic. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night was made into a handsomely produced film by veteran director Henry King, who had earlier made The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which includes another eloquent score by Herrmann. This time, Herrmann’s creativity was impaired somewhat by the use of a title song composed by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster. Herrmann’s cues feature a few references to this melody along with several of his own lyrical ideas. Overall, the romantic qualities in Herrmann’s music suggest that he excelled in a genre far different from the thrillers with which he is so often associated.

Short Cuts

André Previn. One of the most dramatic scores of 1962 was André Previn’s lushly orchestrated music for MGM’s expensively mounted remake of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Despite the many deficiencies of this film, the main-title theme, with a pounding drumbeat accompanying the full orchestra, creates a powerful impact. The other principal musical idea is a rhapsodic love theme, with a solo violin sounding above sustained orchestral chords.

Bronislau Kaper. MGM’s other mammoth 1962 movie was another remake, Mutiny on the Bounty. Like Four Horsemen, it required a big orchestral score. The main theme is a magnificent musical tapestry that conjures up the drama of the sea, sailing ships, and the expectancy of setting sail for the South Pacific as Captain Bligh prepares an expedition to find the tropical breadfruit plant and take specimens of it back to England.

Although the film itself is thrown off course by Marlon Brando’s bizarre interpretation of Fletcher Christian as an English dandy, Kaper’s score remains a work of superbly dramatic eloquence, with a terrifically dynamic accompaniment for the storm sequence, plus a lyrically exotic melody for the scenes on Tahiti. The melody is called “Love Song from Mutiny on the Bounty (Follow Me),” with words by Paul Francis Webster. One of the most memorable uses of this theme occurs when a group of Tahitian natives sings it as a native chant in a cappella style.

Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith, who had been writing film music since 1957, began to show significant signs of artistic growth with the scores of two films made by Universal in 1962. He demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt his style to whatever genre seemed appropriate for the film at hand. For example, in Lonely Are the Brave, a compelling drama of a cowboy (Kirk Douglas) at odds with modern technology, Goldsmith’s music seems to emulate the Western style of Elmer Bernstein’s Magnificent Seven, whereas in Freud, one of his most dissonant scores, he chose to flavor the film with Herrmannesque sustained brass chords accompanied by faster-moving strings. This score, for which he received his first Oscar nomination, is uncannily vague in terms of tonality. It seems to mirror the atonal works of Arnold Schoenberg, which emanated from the time when Sigmund Freud was upsetting the medical community in Vienna with his revolutionary theories about the subconscious.

Franz Waxman. Nearing the end of his career, Franz Waxman contributed fine scores for the 1962 films Taras Bulba and Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. The former is distinguished by a romantic large-scale orchestra score, which flavors this Nikolai Gogol story of a Cossack family. Especially memorable is the scene in which the Cossacks gather a fighting force as they ride en masse to the city of Dubno. The “Ride to Dubno” music begins softly, but soon grows to a wild, full-orchestra tumult.

The Hemingway score is smaller in scale, but has some compelling dramatic moments, including the theme for Billy Campbell (Dan Dailey), whose alcoholic character is musically accompanied by a piece called the “D. T. Blues,” featuring a bizarrely out-of-tune piano set against the harmony of strings. For the soundtrack recording, the piano part was played by John Williams, who at the time frequently found employment recording film scores by other composers.

Henry Mancini. Two of the scores that Henry Mancini composed in 1962 continued his collaboration with Blake Edwards. Experiment in Terror employs tense, stark background music; Days of Wine and Roses is an early example of the monothematic score, that is, a score built on a single melodic idea—that of the song Mancini wrote for the film with lyricist Johnny Mercer. This melancholy ballad went on to win for Mancini and Mercer their second consecutive Best Song Oscars. Throughout this engrossing drama, the melody is heard in a variety of tempos to accompany the story of Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon), who introduces his wife Kirsten (Lee Remick) to drink. Eventually they both become alcoholics. While Joe learns to handle his dependency through Alcoholics Anonymous, Kirsten refuses to stop drinking and they become separated, with Debbie, their younger daughter (Debbie McGowan), in Joe’s custody. In the final scene, when Kirsten visits Joe in a hotel room where he and Debbie reside, Joe tries one more time to convince Kirsten to get help, but she refuses the offer. Here Mancini’s slow-moving melody contributes an almost heartbreaking poignancy to this tragic story of a marriage that is destroyed by alcohol.

Mancini also produced a memorable score for Howard Hawks’s Hatari!, in which he accompanied the adventures of big-game hunters in Africa. Most notable is the music entitled “Baby Elephant Walk,” which features a boogie-woogie bass accompanying a tune played on an electric calliope.

Laurence Rosenthal: The Miracle Worker. Following his emotion-charged music for A Raisin in the Sun, Rosenthal produced another memorable score for the film version of William Gibson’s award-winning play, The Miracle Worker. Director Arthur Penn allowed Rosenthal’s music to set the mood at the very opening, as young Helen Keller (Patty Duke) is first seen meandering blindly among rows of sheets hanging on an outdoor clothesline. Here the folk tune “Hush, Little Baby” is cleverly interwoven with Rosenthal’s original theme; this blended music provides an emotional quality to many ensuing scenes as the Keller family entrusts a teacher named Anne Sullivan (Anne Bancroft) with the arduous task of educating their terribly impaired daughter.

In the film’s climactic scene, as Helen discovers a way to say “water,” with Anne reacting with great amazement, the music crescendos to a highly intense level. Rosenthal’s music is also very effective in the film’s quieter moments, especially at the end, when Anne holds Helen in her lap and assures the child of her love.

Footnote To 1962

In 1962, the first film based on the spy novels of Ian Fleming appeared. Although the music for Dr. No is credited to an English songwriter named Monty Norman, there is controversy about the authorship of the now-famous James Bond theme. The difficulty stems from Norman’s guitar melody, which was turned over to John Barry (1933–2011) for a makeover. Barry shifted the melody down an octave and added both a rhythmically driven accompaniment and a brash countermelody for trumpets. Norman subsequently demanded sole credit for this theme and received a legal ruling in his favor. Despite Norman’s claim, Barry deserves much of the credit for the effectiveness of this theme, which has been featured in almost every James Bond movie.

1963

John Addison: Tom Jones

In 1963, the relatively obscure John Addison (1920–1998) became the third English composer to win an Oscar (after Brian Easdale in 1948 and Malcolm Arnold in 1957)—for Tom Jones.

John Addison (1920–1998)

Addison is one of the most prolific British film composers of the twentieth century, with a résumé of over sixty scores for films and TV shows written over a period of more than forty years. As the son of a British Army colonel, the young Addison received his basic education at Wellington College, a school for sons of the military. At sixteen he enrolled in the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Gordon Jacob, oboe with Léon Goossens, and clarinet with Frederick Thurston. His studies were interrupted by World War II, in which he served with the British XXX Corps in the 23rd Hussars. He was a tank commander in the Battle of Normandy and wounded at Caen.* He then took part in Operation Market Garden, a failed military deployment that was commemorated in the film A Bridge Too Far (1977), which features Addison’s music.

After the war he returned to college, received his degree, and taught composition at the Royal College. A chance meeting with a war buddy, Roy Boulting, led to his first film score, which was written for the Boulting Brothers’ production Seven Days to Noon (1950).

During the 1950s Addison divided his composition time between writing film scores and composing concert pieces. In 1959, not only was his ballet music for Carte Blanche performed at the Edinburgh Festival, but he scored the film version of Look Back in Anger, produced by the newly formed Woodfall Film Productions, which was spearheaded by playwright John Osborne and director Tony Richardson. For the film The Entertainer (1960), Addison created the score by adapting the songs he had written for the stage production. Subsequent Woodfall productions included A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both of which featured Addison’s music. These projects led to the film that elevated all of these creative people to celebrity status: the 1963 Oscar-winning film based on Henry Fielding’s bawdy novel Tom Jones.

This film paved the way for many other popular films; in 1965 Addison was chosen to replace Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. His lyrical saxophone theme was a far cry from Herrmann’s bombastic French horn music. He also filled in for Herrmann as composer of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), which was in production when Herrmann died. Addison achieved late recognition as composer of many episodes of the TV series Murder She Wrote. He retired a few years before his death in 1998.

Photo: Gay Goodwin Wallin

*Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art & Craft of Movie Music (Burbank, Calif: Riverwood, 1991), p. 134

Although the novels of Henry Fielding (1707–1754) have been widely read for several centuries, until the Woodfall production of Tom Jones, no film adaptation of Fielding’s work had ever been attempted. Part of the problem may have been the lusty sexual humor in Fielding’s stories, which satirize eighteenth-century society and its social conventions. The new openness of the cinema in the early 1960s convinced the makers of Tom Jones that they could adapt this story without emasculating its substance. The finished film proved them to be right: as directed by Tony Richardson from John Osborne’s script, and with John Addison’s richly textured musical score, Tom Jones became the movie sensation of 1963. All three of these individuals were rewarded on Oscar night in early 1964, when Tom Jones collected a total of four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Screenplay, and Best Music Score.

In the film, Tom (Albert Finney) grows up as an illegitimate child who has been raised by the prosperous Squire Allworthy (George Devine) at the latter’s country estate. Tom’s prospects, which are limited because of his dubious background, seem to take a turn for the better when he falls in love with Sophie Western (Susannah York), but her father, Squire Western (Hugh Griffith), objects to the match. Tom then sets out to see the world, and after many adventures (and misadventures) he is found to be of noble birth and can take Sophie as his bride.

What ultimately makes Tom Jones work so well is that Addison played along totally with Richardson’s freewheeling directorial style. Addison tried such novel ideas as the combination of an out-of-tune piano with a harpsichord for the opening silent sequence. After establishing the main theme, a rapid-paced idea full of repeated notes, Addison introduced the film’s love theme, a lilting idea for piano in the style of a waltz. In addition to the score’s two primary themes, there is a jaunty idea for saxophone, guitar, and various woodwinds, which appears several times. There is also a comical reference to the hymn “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” Overall, Addison’s music is an eclectic mixture of styles, but it works wonderfully in this rollicking film.

There would be further film adaptations of eighteenth-century novels, including The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), based on Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and directed by Terence Young, the first James Bond director, and Joseph Andrews (1977), based on the Fielding novel, which Richardson himself directed. Despite the physical beauty of these productions, and despite John Addison’s witty music for them, they do not compare favorably with Tom Jones, which remains a cinematic romp.

Alfred Newman: How the West Was Won

By 1963, few Hollywood producers were inclined to utilize the talents of composers who had been around since the early days of the talkies. Fortunately, when MGM launched its wide-screen production of How the West Was Won, the second Cinerama film to feature a continuous scenario rather than a travelogue format, Alfred Newman was chosen to do the scoring. The movie covers several generations of pioneers who braved the elements to move westward across the American frontier. The resultant score is definitely old-school in its design, but still makes a powerfully dramatic contribution to this episodic but entertaining film.

Newman’s main theme is a heroic melody, which is first stated by French horns, with support by the full orchestra. This is followed by a variety of themes, both new and borrowed. Debbie Reynolds, one of the film’s stars, sings a number of songs, including “Home in the Meadow,” with a melody based on the English folk song “Greensleeves.” Additionally, there is a lot of choral singing, provided by the Ken Darby Singers. For the initial reserved-seat showings of this film Newman and Darby collaborated on two extended choral pieces, an overture and an entr’acte, in which such old American songs as “Shenandoah,” “I’m Bound for the Promised Land,” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” are incorporated. Several references are also made to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”; it is used in the film’s central episodes, which are devoted to the Civil War. This score is a collage of many parts, which fit together nicely to make a stirring musical portrait of the American West.

Short Cuts

Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann wrote powerful music for Jason and the Argonauts, his fourth and last score for the production team of Charles Schneer and Ray Harryhausen. To accompany this grand mythological fantasy, Herrmann employed a huge brass section, which is heard most splendidly in the majestic main-title theme, with an accompaniment of woodwinds, harp, cymbals, and pounding drums. (Herrmann used no orchestral strings at all in his scoring of this film.) This music is yet another fine example of the composer’s fertile imagination let loose on a cinematic fantasy that demanded colorful scoring.

Dimitri Tiomkin. As a follow-up to his exciting music for The Guns of Navarone, Dimitri Tiomkin was hired in place of Miklós Rózsa to score Samuel Bronston’s epic, 55 Days at Peking, an entertaining if highly fictionalized account of the Boxer Rebellion in China. Amid much spectacular pageantry and battle music, Tiomkin contributed a beautifully melancholy love theme for the American major (Charlton Heston) and the Russian baroness (Ava Gardner), heard both as an instrumental waltz and as the melody of the song “So Little Time,” which, along with the score, was nominated for an Oscar.

Miklòs Ròzsa. Miklós Rózsa, underemployed as a film composer during the 1960s, produced only his fourth score of the decade in 1963 when he composed the memorable music for MGM’s multi-star drama The V.I.P.s, for which he returned to the expressive style of scoring that he had used so effectively in such earlier films as Lydia and Madame Bovary. The main-title theme of The V.I.P.s is a sweepingly romantic piece played by soaring strings and French horns. For Margaret Rutherford, who won an Oscar in a hilarious supporting role as a dotty duchess, Rózsa wrote in a rare comical vein. This theme, which features a recorder playing a jaunty tune accompanied by harpsichord, is one of his cleverest bits of orchestration. This music also has a decidedly Scottish flavor, with a middle section that sounds like an imitation of bagpipes.

Riz Ortolani and Nino Oliviero. The year’s most unexpected success, both as movie and as theme music, is the Italian documentary Mondo Cane, with a musical score by Riz Ortolani (b. 1931) and Nino Oliviero (1918–1980). When the film was released in America with a narration that was dubbed into English, a vocal rendition of one of the background themes, entitled “More,” with English lyrics by Norman Newell, was recorded for the English soundtrack. “More” was nominated for an Academy Award and became the top song of the year, with a stint on the Billboard charts of twenty-five weeks, eight of which the song was number one. This song helped the film reach a wide film-going audience that might otherwise have ignored it.

Elmer Bernstein. Although the scoring of some of the films Elmer Bernstein worked on is sparse, including Martin Ritt’s Hud and Robert Mulligan’s Love with the Proper Stranger, he once again had a rich scoring opportunity with Hall Bartlett’s mental hospital drama The Caretakers. Beginning with a brassy main-title theme that evokes his earlier jazz-flavored scores, such as for Sweet Smell of Success, this score has quite a variety of styles; at times it is reminiscent of Summer and Smoke, at other times it has the gentler sound of To Kill a Mockingbird. The most noteworthy scoring effect is the use of string harmonics in a bit of the nursery tune “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Altogether, this is an effective scoring achievement.

Bernstein’s most memorable score of 1963 came with the military-flavored music of The Great Escape. The main theme is a jaunty march tune, which begins simply and gradually builds up until it reaches a heroic level. In the later stages of the film, in which several American and British POWs dig their way out of a German prison camp, Bernstein capitalized on the opportunity to produce some rhythmically charged chase music.

Jerry Goldsmith. Of Jerry Goldsmith’s six scores for 1963 films, Lilies of the Field deserves mention for its clever orchestration, which includes harmonica, banjo, and strings played in the manner of country music. For this touching story of Homer Smith, an itinerant black man (Sidney Poitier) who gets conned into building a chapel for a group of German-immigrant nuns in a desert area of Arizona, Goldsmith borrowed the old spiritual “Amen,” which is heard several times in the film. It provides moments of humor, as when the nuns are taught to sing the word “amen” repeatedly while Homer sings a text about Jesus. Although Poitier’s singing voice was dubbed by famed black singer and choral director Jester Hairston, he looks very believable in the musical scenes. The “Amen” melody is also used as background scoring; a banjo, a harmonica, and other solo instruments are heard in melodic variations on the tune.

André Previn. The film version of the hit musical Irma la Douce is a bit of a curiosity. Billy Wilder decided to discard the songs from the stage version and instead hired André Previn to compose a background score that would incorporate bits of the musical’s song melodies. The result, about ninety percent original music, is some of the most tuneful work of Previn’s career. The main-title theme is in the style of a cancan, filled with boisterous rhythmic vivacity, while Irma’s theme is a charming waltz for accordion, flute, and strings. The originality of this score might lead one to ponder why Previn’s work won an Oscar in the category Scoring of Music—Adaptation or Treatment.

Footnote to 1963

The most unusual-sounding background “score” of the year consisted of electronically produced bird sounds, which were utilized in providing a sonic atmosphere for Alfred Hitchcock’s chilling movie The Birds. Bernard Herrmann served as a sound consultant on the film, but refrained from writing musical backgrounds. Ordinarily, the avoidance of music in a thriller would be a mistake, but in this film the eeriness of the bird sounds conveys a great deal of tension.

1964

Laurence Rosenthal: Becket

Although Laurence Rosenthal has composed scores for fewer than thirty theatrical films in a career that spans almost fifty years, much of his music is outstanding, especially the score of Becket.

Laurence Rosenthal (1926–)

Born in Detroit in 1926, Rosenthal exhibited musical talent at a very early age. He began piano lessons with his mother at the age of three. As a teenager he appeared as a piano soloist with the Detroit Symphony. He went to the Eastman School of Music, where he studied piano and composition. He then went to Paris, where he studied for two years with Nadia Boulanger, and then went to Salzburg, where he studied conducting at the Mozarteum. While serving in the U.S. Air Force he got his start in film composing by joining the Air Force Documentary Film Squadron. As chief composer for this unit, he worked on several films, including one narrated by Henry Fonda.*

After his stint in the military Rosenthal went to New York, where he started writing incidental music for Broadway plays, including Rashomon, Jean Anou-ihl’s Becket, and John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me. He also wrote ballet music for Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. He composed a ballet score for The Wind in the Mountains, produced by Agnes de Mille’s American Ballet Theater, and composed several symphonic works that were premiered by such noted conductors as Leonard Bernstein and Erich Leinsdorf.

Rosenthal’s first efforts in feature film scoring took place in the 1950s with a pair of low-budget films, Yellowneck (1955) and Naked in the Sun (1957). While neither of these films garnered much attention, Rosenthal started to climb the ladder of success as a film composer with two films adapted from the stage, A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and The Miracle Worker (1962). He also scored the film version of Rod Serling’s teleplay Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). These three films represented a prelude to the film version of Becket, which became one of 1964’s most acclaimed films, and the winner of several Oscar nominations, including one for its score.

Rosenthal displayed creativity with a number of subsequent scores, especially Hotel Paradiso (1966), The Return of a Man Called Horse (1976), and Clash of the Titans (1981), which included impressive Ray Harryhausen stop-motion effects.

A lot of Rosenthal’s later career has been spent in scoring for TV. Among the many credits are several episodes of Spielberg’s The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles made between 1992 and 1996. In 1999 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Film Music Society. Rosenthal continues to be a California resident.

Photo: Laurence Rosenthal at the 2006 ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards. Photo by Lester Cohen/Wireimage

*Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art & Craft of Movie Music (Burbank, Calif.: Riverwood, 1991), pp. 298–300.

When Peter Glenville, the director of the stage production of Jean Anouilh’s play Becket, was preparing an elaborate wide-screen adaptation of the play for Paramount, Rosenthal, who had written music for the stage version, was called in to compose the score. His work on behalf of this film was acclaimed as among the best of 1964 and won for him his first Oscar nomination.

Although Anouilh’s play is basically a two-character study of friendship and conflict in medieval England, screenwriter Edward Anhalt envisioned the film as a grand historical pageant that would feature actual English locales, with two vivid portrayals at its center: Richard Burton as Thomas à Becket and Peter O’Toole as King Henry II. In order to bring the twelfth century to life, the production was shot on location in some of the very places where Thomas and King Henry had actually lived.

The film remains true to the play in its depiction of conflicting loyalties. When Thomas is appointed Henry’s chancellor, their friendship at first remains intact; but when Henry decides, almost on a whim, to make Thomas the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas resists the idea because he feels that he will have to serve God first and Henry second. This appointment leads to a breach in their friendship that culminates in Thomas’s assassination.

The film actually begins at the end of the story, when Henry comes to Canterbury to do public penance for his complicity in Thomas’s death. After submitting to a lashing, Henry becomes absorbed in memories and thus the film’s flashbacks begin.

The music for the opening credits gives a strong indication of the nature of Rosenthal’s score—an ingenious combination of medieval and modern elements. The medieval part consists of copious quoting of Gregorian chant melodies. A Latin text is heard right at the outset of the main-title music, with brass chords adding a modern harmonic background. At the end of the credits the cellos sound the closing “Pie Jesu” section of the “Dies irae,” from the Gregorian funeral mass. As Henry approaches the cathedral, there is a brass fanfare, followed by male voices singing the beginning verses of the “Dies irae,” again with a modernistic counterpoint of sustained violins, woodwind tones, and timpani. Throughout the film this juxtaposition of elements is present in the score, much of which was derived from Rosenthal’s incidental music for the Broadway version. While many other film scores have featured quotations of the “Dies irae,” few have used Gregorian chant so amply or so creatively.

Certain parts of the score are free of Gregorian quotations. Among the more noteworthy of these is the fast-paced piece that occurs early in the flashbacks, when Thomas and Henry as young men are frolicking through a village during a thunderstorm. It is here that Rosenthal first introduces Thomas’s principal musical motif: a three-note idea in the horns that returns periodically throughout the film.

For the scene of Thomas’s martyrdom, Rosenthal’s music includes several musical elements, including a male choir in the singing of a chant, plus tremolo strings that suggest danger. Brass instruments are then heard in a soft instrumental rendition of the beginning of the “Dies irae.” As the knights arrive and slay Thomas with their swords, the three-note motif is sounded defiantly by the horns and trumpets.

Malcolm Arnold: The Chalk Garden

After winning an Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai, Malcolm Arnold continued to score films until the end of the 1960s. Of his later works none is more emotionally conceived than his music for Ronald Neame’s film version of the Enid Bagnold play The Chalk Garden. A picturesque country home outside of London is the setting for this engrossing story of a troubled teenager named Laurel (Hayley Mills), who resents her mother’s remarriage and lives with her grandmother, Mrs. St. Maugham (Edith Evans). After the mysterious Miss Madrigal (Deborah Kerr) is hired to be the girl’s governess, the mischievous Laurel clandestinely tries to find out the secrets of this woman’s past.

Arnold’s score features two primary ideas, one for each of the story’s two main characters. Madrigal is represented by a romantic-style theme for strings, French horns, and harp that is based on a gently rising melodic pattern; Laurel is accompanied by a six-note motif consisting of pairs of semitones. These two ideas both appear during the opening credits and thereafter are intertwined as the relationship of Madrigal and her young charge develops. The most ingenious use of music occurs in an extended scene in which Laurel sneaks into Madrigal’s room and removes an artist’s case. As she smuggles the case outdoors to examine its contents, the six-note motif is used repeatedly, in a briskly paced setting for woodwinds and muted trumpets, with a dash of dissonant harmony included. This motif often occurs as musical punctuation, such as in the opening scene. As Miss Madrigal and another applicant for the governess position await an interview with Mrs. St. Maugham, Laurel suddenly appears, accompanied by a loud statement of the six-note pattern.

Short Cuts

The 1964 film year featured two major musical films: the movie version of Lerner and Loewe’s Broadway triumph My Fair Lady and Walt Disney’s film of Mary Poppins. André Previn adapted the score for My Fair Lady, with Marni Nixon providing the singing voice for Audrey Hepburn. Richard M. Sherman (b. 1928) and his brother Robert B. Sherman (1925–2012) wrote the Oscar-winning score for Mary Poppins, which includes the sentimental “Chim Chim Cheree” (which also won the Oscar as Best Song), plus the jaunty “Jolly Holiday” and the raucous “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” This is one of the best scores ever written for a Disney film.

Bernard Herrmann. The Herrmann/Hitchcock collaboration continued into the 1960s with Marnie, a sadly underappreciated film based on a novel by Winston Graham. Despite poor reviews and lackluster audience response, this film includes a lyrically inspired score. The principal melodic idea is a nine-note motif that is centered around a single tone and built above a series of chords which contain an unresolved harmonic quality. This entire musical pattern is extended through repetition at successively lower pitch levels. The end result is both romantic and mysterious, with a musical flow that avoids a clear sense of tonal direction. The only other time that Bernard Herrmann achieved such an expressive level of eloquence in his work for Hitchcock was in Vertigo.

André Previn. The Warner Bros. thriller Dead Ringer, featuring Bette Davis in a dual role (and her former costar Paul Henreid as director), contains an extremely dramatic score by André Previn. The main theme, which foreshadows the film’s murder plot, begins with a French horn fanfare, followed by a minor key theme played by solo harpsichord accompanied by horns and strings. Throughout the film, the tinkly sounds of the harpsichord punctuate this story of two sisters; while Margaret has lived in luxury, her twin sister Edith has slaved to make a living as a bar owner. When reunited by chance after a long separation, Edith enacts a deadly revenge on her sister. Previn’s inspired music often raises this film above the level of formulaic melodrama.

Greek Music. Greek music got another shot in the arm from a pair of films released in 1964. Although Jules Dassin’s Topkapi did not duplicate the box-office success of his earlier Never on Sunday, the tuneful score by Manos Hadjidakis is every bit as good as its predecessor. Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek, with a galvanic performance by Anthony Quinn, got American audiences to snap their fingers in time with the infectious dance music of Mikis Theodorakis (b. 1925).

Dimitri Tiomkin. Dimitri Tiomkin invaded Miklós Rózsa territory again in 1964 with his music for Samuel Bronston’s Fall of the Roman Empire. Although both the film and its score seemed overblown when the film was released, time has been kind to both; Tiomkin’s music has a grand sweep to it, with several loud brass fanfares, majestic organ chords, and even bits of Italian folk songs played on mandolins.

Elmer Bernstein. One of the most publicized movies of 1964 was Joseph E. Levine’s film version of Harold Robbins’s steamy novel The Carpetbaggers. Although this expensively mounted film lacks dramatic credibility, the score by Elmer Bernstein succeeds in creating a swingy, bluesy atmosphere for the story, set in Hollywood of the 1930s. Noteworthy is the brassy main theme, which (like so many of Bernstein’s other scores) has a sound reminiscent of that of The Man with the Golden Arm with an insistently driven rhythmic background propelling the music forward. A catchy blues tune in the film features both saxophone and muted trumpet.

A better film is George Roy Hill’s World of Henry Orient, in which two teenage girls (Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth) become obsessed with Henry Orient (Peter Sellers), a vain and womanizing pianist. The main-title music includes three separate musical ideas. The first is a jaunty theme with a descending-scale melodic pattern played by woodwinds, while the second, with a syncopated rhythmic pattern, resembles the Western style of Bernstein’s music for The Magnificent Seven. The third idea is a fast-paced melody that hints at the upcoming comical adventures of the two girls who start spying on Henry. In one of the film’s most hilarious scenes, the girls attend a concert in which Henry performs as soloist in an absolutely wild piano concerto that includes such bizarre sounds as a foghorn. This bombastic piece, written for the film by Kenneth Lauber (b. 1941), can be observed as a parody of some of the more provocative concert music of the twentieth century.

The Beatles. In Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles burst upon the silver screen to the delight of millions of young fans. Among the memorable tunes performed by the Fab Four in this rollicking black-and-white film are “I Should Have Known Better,” “If I Fell,” “And I Love Her,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Tell Me Why,” and the title song. In many ways this was a landmark film; not only did it elevate the Beatles to even greater fame, but it paved the way for more films featuring rock stars. Although many such films were made, including some featuring the Beatles themselves, none would ever be quite as refreshing as A Hard Day’s Night, an almost perfect marriage between rock music and the cinematic medium.

1965

Maurice Jarre: Doctor Zhivago

Three years after scoring Lawrence of Arabia, Maurice Jarre received another Oscar for the music of David Lean’s next film, the wide-screen MGM version of Boris Pasternak’s celebrated novel Doctor Zhivago, for which the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

Although the book was officially banned in the Soviet Union, an Italian publisher in Milan received a smuggled copy of the manuscript in 1957 and printed an Italian translation. An English-language version followed shortly thereafter. The novel’s plot concerns a Russian physician and poet who gets caught up in the Russian Revolution, becomes separated from his wife and family, and winds up writing poetry in the company of a woman named Lara, until they too become separated.

The screenplay by Robert Bolt is a brave attempt to render a complex and episodic story in a cinematic form. Bolt decided that, in order to condense the novel, he had to use the flashback technique. Thus, he developed the idea of Yuri Zhivago’s brother, a respected Soviet official, trying to find the daughter to whom Lara had given birth shortly after Yuri’s death. Despite this framing device, Bolt remained faithful to the basic plot of the novel.

There was some softening of Lara’s character (encouraged by Lean), to make her more sympathetic. Whereas in the novel she seems to be initially enamored of Kamarovsky, who has taken her as his mistress, in the film she is raped by him and then tries to shoot him.

Likewise, the character of Yuri is somewhat more passive in the film than in the novel. This may have to do with Omar Sharif’s performance, which plays on the same melancholy level throughout. In any case, Bolt’s reconstructed version of the story pays increased attention to the triangular relationship of Yuri (Omar Sharif) and the two women in his life: his wife, Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin) and his lover, Lara (Julie Christie). Given the passivity of the main character, the events that unfold around Zhivago seem like personal misfortune. He is both a witness to history and a victim of the time in which he lives. Ultimately, one does not come away from the film caring about him very much; this weakens the film as a whole.

The film was originally slated to premiere in March 1966, but MGM executive Robert O’Brien, after seeing some footage, decided to move up the film’s release date to have it qualify for the 1965 Oscars. Because of the schedule change, Maurice Jarre had only six weeks to complete the musical score. David Lean’s biographer, Stephen Silverman, states that what eventually became “Lara’s Theme” was originally supposed to be a borrowed tune, but the “old Russian melody” that Lean had in mind turned out not to be an old tune at all; since this tune was still under copyright, Jarre was instructed to create his own theme.12

Lean invited Jarre to Spain—where part of the film was shot—to observe the reconstruction of Moscow, and then showed him some of the raw footage. Jarre went back to his hotel room and wrote a theme. When he played it for Lean, he was disappointed in the director’s reaction. He described the subsequent events as follows:

I rushed back to my room and wrote another piece of music. He said it was too sad. After a time, I wrote a third theme. He said it was too fast. I was beginning to get very depressed when David suggested, “Maurice, forget about Zhivago, forget about Russia. You go with your girlfriend to the mountains, because I know you like mountains, and you think about it and write a love theme for her.”13

Jarre took Lean’s advice, spent one weekend in the Santa Monica mountains, and wrote his fourth theme the following Monday. This theme, which turned out to be exactly the kind of music Lean was looking for, consists of a lilting waltz theme that begins with a four-note ascending melodic pattern—the tune that has become known as “Lara’s Theme.” Whenever the theme appears in the film, it clearly identifies with Lara and with Yuri’s thoughts of her.14

Jarre has stated that there is no Russian folk music in the score. He did, however, incorporate the melody of the old Russian anthem “God Save the Czar” into the overture, and he also used a Russian Orthodox melody, the “Kontakion,” for the burial of Yuri’s mother. The revolutionary anthem, “The Internationale,” is sung by a crowd of people gathered in the street outside the restaurant where Yuri is dining with Tonya. In that same scene Lara is seen dancing with Komarovsky (Rod Steiger) to the tune of two Russian-style waltzes that Jarre wrote specifically for the film.

The composer’s other original thematic material, besides “Lara’s Theme” and the waltzes, includes a jaunty tune used for traveling sequences, such as the scene in which Tonya and Yuri arrive at the cottage at Varykino. It is in a minor key, but yet has a folklike quality that makes it sound optimistic rather than overly somber.

There is other minor-key music in the score, for the scenes of war in which Yuri gets involved as a physician, with Lara as his nurse. The central portion of Doctor Zhivago, in which the war scenes are shown, is the least melodious part of the film. The music compounds the visual bleakness by conveying a sense of tragedy. The score reflects the hardships that are imposed on the Russian people by the dual agonies of war and revolution.

There are a few happier moments in the film; most of these include renditions of “Lara’s Theme,” with a lush orchestration that was performed for the soundtrack by an expanded MGM studio orchestra, to which were added twenty-four balalaika players. The score also calls for a forty-voice choir, plus several nontraditional instruments, including a samisen (a Japanese flat-backed lute), a koto, a six-foot gong, an organ, a novachord, an electric sonovox, a harpsichord, an electric piano, a tack piano, and a zither. Jarre also had a prototype of the Moog synthesizer brought in by truck to add an enhanced bass sound to his score. In all, there were 110 instrumentalists—the largest orchestra ever assembled up to that time in Hollywood for the performance of a film score.15

Jarre had some misgivings about the final edit of the film. When Zhivago was trimmed to 197 minutes, many of the cues he had written were dropped. Despite these trimmings, Jarre’s music became hugely successful, as did the film itself.

Doctor Zhivago was shown in theaters around the world for more than a year and became the second most successful film in MGM history (after Gone with the Wind). Much of the credit for the film’s box-office success lies with its music. The MGM Records soundtrack album was released in January 1966, and by the end of 1967 it had sold two million copies. The soundtrack album remained on the charts for a total of 157 weeks.16 The popularity of Zhivago was further enhanced by the song “Somewhere, My Love,” a vocal version of “Lara’s Theme” with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster. Ray Conniff’s recording of the song became one of the biggest hits of 1966.

While both Doctor Zhivago and The Sound of Music earned ten Oscar nominations in early 1966, it was the latter film that won for Best Picture. However, Zhivago’s musical score won for Jarre his second Oscar in four years.

Since the days of the film-scoring pioneers in the 1930s, few movies themes have left such an indelible mark as “Lara’s Theme.” In subsequent years, only the music by John Williams for such films as Jaws and the Star Wars films has become as widely known.

Music For Epics

The lavish film version of Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, with Charlton Heston as Michelangelo, has its moments, but the film’s story seems overly burdened by the ongoing clash between the artist and Pope Julius (Rex Harrison). One of the film’s saving graces is its music, which is the combined work of Alex North and Jerry Goldsmith. North did a fine job of creating a background score for the main body of the film. This background score consists of pseudo-baroque orchestrations, with brass fanfares accompanied by organ, and with harpsichord often providing a basso continuo effect. Better than the actual film is a short prologue in which the camera escorts the viewer around Vatican City and Florence to observe the art of Michelangelo in breathtaking close-ups. Goldsmith produced a beautifully understated musical accompaniment for this guided tour, with string trills providing a sweet sound for some of the shots. When the statues of David and Moses are shown, the music builds up in intensity to become wonderfully dramatic.

Another fine dramatic score is that by Alfred Newman for George Stevens’s flawed film about Jesus, The Greatest Story Ever Told. For the most part, Newman’s music stays in the background, with a lyrical string melody that is used as a recurrent theme. For the raising of Lazarus, Newman wrote a wondrous choral piece. However, because of an overruling decision by the director, the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah was used in that scene instead of most of Newman’s original theme. Another musical borrowing (also insisted upon by George Stevens) occurs in the “Via Dolorosa” sequence in which Jesus (Max von Sydow) is forced to carry a cross to Calvary, the hill outside Jerusalem, where he is to be crucified. Here Newman had to blend his original music with the opening portion of Verdi’s Requiem.

Those who have lamented the loss of Newman’s music in the final edit of this film may be somewhat appeased by the 1998 release of a three-CD soundtrack recording which allows listeners to hear all of Newman’s music.17

Short Cuts

Bronislau Kaper. Kaper composed an epic score for Richard Brooks’s ambitious filming of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim with Peter O’Toole in the title role. In the heroic main theme, the horns introduce a rising melodic line that suggests Jim’s noble character (an interesting concept, in view of Jim’s act of cowardice in the opening scene of the film). This theme builds up in the film’s opening credits, with soaring strings and blaring trumpets. Elsewhere in the score, Kaper made use of the metallic sounds of the Javanese gamelan orchestra to provide an exotic effect appropriate for the Southeast Asian locales of the story.

Henry Mancini. Following several years of successes with swingy, up-tempo modern scores for Blake Edwards’s comedies, Henry Mancini got the opportunity to do a period piece for Edwards’s elaborate film The Great Race. The score features a collage of styles, including a Dixieland opening theme, the charming tune “The Sweetheart Tree,” and several other songs in which the old silent comedies are gently satirized by the sounds of an out-of-tune piano. Mancini even incorporated a piano-roll version of “The Sweetheart Tree” in his score.

Jerry Goldsmith. On a much smaller scale is Goldsmith’s charming score for A Patch of Blue, in which a black social worker, Gordon (Sidney Poitier), attempts to help a young blind woman named Selena (Elizabeth Hartman), whose mother (Shelley Winters) treats her shabbily. The most memorable musical moment in the film comes when Selena, who falls in love with her new friend, gets help from him in stringing necklaces. The music cleverly coincides with the stringing of the beads. In addition to a piano, a flute, and a harmonica, Goldsmith used a type of woodblock to create knocking sounds which are synchronized with the beads sliding down the strings.

Elmer Bernstein. Elmer Bernstein scored two Western films in 1965. The Sons of Katie Elder has another rousing theme in the manner of The Magnificent Seven. In contrast, The Hallelujah Trail provided him with the opportunity to create a comic romp of a score. For this lavishly produced Western about a wagonload of booze being transported by the U.S. Army across Indian territory to Denver, Bernstein composed some of his most rhythmically buoyant music. The title theme is actually a choral piece with an exuberant vocal rendition of the word “hallelujah” juxtaposed over Bernstein’s rhythmically syncopated Western-style music. One of the main instrumental themes consists of shifting rhythmic patterns, with quick beats in groups of 3s alternating with groups of 2s, using the formula 1–2–3, 1–2–3, 1–2, 1–2, in which there is always an accented 1.

Ernest Gold. For Stanley Kramer’s engrossing film of Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, Gold wrote a Viennese-style score, in which a variety of waltzes and other dances are played on-screen by a trio consisting of violin, cello, and piano. The main-title theme is a clever combination of Spanish rhythms (reflecting the ship’s embarkation from Mexico), in which Gold incorporated a syncopated rhythmic effect similar to the one Leonard Bernstein used in the song “America” (from West Side Story); that is, patterns of 3s alternate with patterns of 2s: 1–2–3, 1–2–3, 1–2, 1–2, 1–2, with accents on each 1. The pattern always adds up to six short beats in each measure, but the accents occur at differing intervals.

André Previn. For Robert Mulligan’s Inside Daisy Clover, set in Hollywood during the 1930s, André Previn wrote a melodious background score, including a catchy main theme which is first heard on a steam calliope that reflects the milieu of the teenage Daisy (Natalie Wood), who is discovered near her home, a small trailer at an oceanside amusement park. Daisy is invited to meet a movie mogul, Mr. Swan (Christopher Plummer), at his studio for an interview. Previn wrote the song “You’re Gonna Hear from Me,” with lyrics by his wife at the time, Dory Previn, for Daisy’s screen test. While Natalie Wood appears to be singing, the voice one hears is that of Jackie Ward. This production number, which resembles the kaleidoscopic choreography of Busby Berkeley, is the musical highlight of the film.

John Barry. John Barry struck pay dirt again with his third James Bond score, the raucous music for Thunderball. He also scored The Ipcress File, the first of the spy thriller series featuring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, and he wrote jaunty backgrounds for Richard Lester’s film The Knack . . . and How to Get It. His best work of the year, the melancholy score for King Rat, contains a mournful main theme consisting of a melody played by an English horn which alternates as solo with the oboe, while an accompanying four-note idea is repeatedly sounded on the cimbalom. All this is combined with arpeggiated chords which are provided by various instruments over a continuously rumbling tone on timpani.

Michel Legrand. Michel Legrand received three Oscar nominations for his music for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which had already been nominated as Best Foreign Language Film the previous year. For Jacques Demy’s charming but bittersweet love story, Legrand created a contemporary opera in which all the dialogue is sung. The prevailing style of the music is jazz, with an almost nonstop rhythmic background provided by piano, bass and drums that keeps the entire film moving in a musical tempo. Of the several memorable melodies included in the score, two standouts are the love theme (known in English as “Watch What Happens”) and the Oscar-nominated song “I Will Wait for You,” which is first heard during the opening credits as people walk in the rain carrying umbrellas of various pastel colors. The entire film is visually colorful, with hues such as deep reds, blues, and greens that are used for walls of buildings. As a film experiment, Umbrellas may be initially difficult to appreciate, due to its nonstop singing (in French!), but the sheer beauty of its cinematography and its lilting music have the ability to make the steadfast viewer succumb to its many charms.

1966

Jerry Goldsmith: A Composer for All Seasons

In the ten-year span between 1957 and 1966, Jerry Goldsmith demonstrated considerable skill as a film composer, working in a wide variety of musical styles that ranged from the folksy sound of Lilies of the Field to the modernistic Freud. His versatility is shown in the films he scored in the mid-1960s, including the Westerns Rio Conchos and Stagecoach; the thrillers Seven Days in May and The Satan Bug; the James Bond–inspired spy dramas Our Man Flint and In Like Flint; the World War II dramas In Harm’s Way and Von Ryan’s Express; and the lighthearted films Take Her, She’s Mine and The Trouble with Angels. In addition to working in such a range of genres, Goldsmith also demonstrated a seemingly tireless work ethic. From 1963 on, he seldom composed fewer than four film scores per year, and in some years he wrote as many as six.

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004)

Despite his distinction as one of the finest film composers of the latter part of the twentieth century, Jerry Goldsmith did not start out with film music as his primary interest. Born in Los Angeles, young Goldsmith started playing the piano at age six and progressed so rapidly that by thirteen he was studying privately with the concert pianist Jakob Gimpel. Gimpel opened doors for Goldsmith by introducing him to many prominent European musicians who had fled Europe during the Nazi regime. One of them was Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who gave him lessons in composition, harmony, and counterpoint. In the later 1940s Goldsmith took film composing classes with Miklós Rózsa at University of Southern California and also studied at Los Angeles City College.

In 1950 Goldsmith took a job at CBS in the music department, ostensibly as a clerk-typist, but he was soon invited by department head Lud Gluskin to join a workshop to learn the ropes for underscoring radio programs. This led to assignments in scoring episodes of such radio shows as Romance, Escape, and Suspense.

In 1955 Goldsmith moved into TV scoring by writing music for Climax, which was the first live dramatic program produced by CBS at its Los Angeles studios.* Since these scores were performed live, they required skill at improvisation. Goldsmith’s keyboard talents allowed him to fill in as needed. By the time he quit CBS in 1960, he had scored several episodes of The Twilight Zone and had also scored his first feature films.

His first few film scores were of an inauspicious nature, but Alfred Newman recommended him for Kirk Douglas’s production of Lonely Are the Brave in 1962. This modern-day Western led directly to John Huston’s Freud, which won for Goldsmith his first Oscar nomination. He continued to do TV work, especially for the series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but as the decade progressed he became associated with such prominent directors as John Sturges, John Frankenheimer, Robert Wise, and especially Franklin J. Schaffner, whose first film, The Stripper (1963), had a Goldsmith score. Eventually, seven of Schaffner’s fourteen films would have music by Goldsmith, including the award-winning Patton (1970). One of Goldsmith’s most outstanding achievements was the avant-garde score for Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968). With its use of echoplex sound effects, this music was unparalleled in its originality. In later years, Goldsmith distinguished himself with strong music for such sci-fi epics as Alien and several films in the Star Trek series. He won his only Oscar for the horror film The Omen in 1976. Goldsmith continued to score films until a bout with cancer took his life in 2004.

Photo: Thomas Jaehnig

*Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art & Craft of Movie Music (Burbank, Calif.: Riverwood, 1991), p. 287.

Three of the seven films released during 1966 with music by Goldsmith deserve special mention. The heroic music for John Guillermin’s Blue Max has a soaring main theme in which the melodic line keeps climbing ever higher. This score has a grand sound that resembles the orchestral sonorities of Richard Strauss’s tone poems. That is perhaps no accident since, according to Tony Thomas, the film was pre-tracked with Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (an interesting musical usage, considering that Stanley Kubrick would have the same idea just two years later when he was filming 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated score for Robert Wise’s film The Sand Pebbles is immensely brooding, with a theme that is one of the few song-like melodies to emanate from a Goldsmith score, and the only one to become a chart-topping hit (titled “And We Were Lovers,” with lyrics by Leslie Bricusse). This melody, which is heard only instrumentally in the film, is associated with the relationship between an American sailor, Jake Holman (Steve McQueen), and a young teacher (Candace Bergen) who works at a mission in China with her father. Jake spends most of his time on board a U.S. gunboat, the San Pablo (from whence comes the movie’s title, a nickname for the crew members). This theme, which has a wide-arching melody that leaps up an octave at the outset, is used as a motif; its first five notes serve as the film’s principal melodic idea. The somber opening music is based on a two-note pattern that recurs periodically. There is also an assortment of Oriental effects, including a plucked string instrument and several percussion instruments, especially ones made of wood which are struck to make a variety of clacking sounds.

Goldsmith’s music for John Frankenheimer’s Seconds is neither as grand as that of The Blue Max nor as exotic as that of The Sand Pebbles; yet it is among Goldsmith’s most unique creations. During the weird opening-credit sequence (designed by Saul Bass), while distorted close-ups of a human face are seen, a solo violin is heard, accompanied by low, growling string chords. As the title appears on the screen, a pipe organ is heard in a series of jarring minor chords. Then a pounding beat, which accompanies a high violin melody, creates a funeral march effect.

This film, in which a middle-aged man (John Randolph) seeks a new beginning through experimental surgery, from which he emerges looking young and handsome (and played by Rock Hudson), is a trip into the macabre. Though not a pleasurable journey to witness, this man’s solitary odyssey, marvelously photographed by James Wong Howe, makes for an engrossing film, with an immensely effective contribution by Goldsmith. The film suffers from being too pessimistic, but in light of its subject matter, Goldsmith’s musical concept provides an ingeniously eerie effect that is quite unsettling.

The music in each of these films is at the center, even though there are long stretches in all three with no music at all. Goldsmith’s approach was an obvious departure from the wall-to-wall ethic of the Golden Age since in the films with his scores there is such a large amount of open space. This tendency to avoid background scoring as musical wallpaper continued in Goldsmith’s work through more than four decades. Jerry Goldsmith once expressed his philosophy regarding film scoring in these terms:

My main interest in scoring is in examining the characters in a film and making comment on them, and I think you can only do that if you use music sparingly. Patton, for example, is a three-hour film, but it has only about thirty minutes of music. The longest score I have done is The Sand Pebbles, which has about an hour, or one-third of the running time. . . . The composer must wait for those moments in the picture where there is a scene so special, where there is something to be said that only music can say. Then the presence of music will bring that extra element you need, and, if it’s done right, it will elevate the scene.18

That, in a nutshell, is the modus operandi of Jerry Goldsmith, a truly dedicated film composer.

Bernard Herrmann: Fahrenheit 451

There should have been two 1966 releases with music by Bernard Herrmann, but trouble erupted during the recording sessions for Torn Curtain. Herrmann had been instructed to write a rather lightweight score for Hitchcock’s dark spy drama, but Herrmann defied the advice he was given by composing a starkly bombastic musical accompaniment. Hitchcock abruptly fired Herrmann: the two never worked together again, and thus was terminated one of the most creative collaborations in the history of cinema.

By midyear, Herrmann was already at work on another film, but he was now in England, where he spent considerable time in his final years. It was there that FranÇois Truffaut, a Hitchcock fan, engaged him to compose the music for his first English-language film, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s futuristic novel Fahrenheit 451. The resultant score is light-years better than most contemporaneous film scoring, and one of the most creative efforts in Herrmann’s career.

Using an orchestra of strings, harp, and metallic percussion, Herrmann accompanied this story of a bookless society with wondrous music, including the fire truck theme, which consists of a steadily driven chordal idea based on a seven-beat metric pattern. For the scenes in which the firemen ignite piles of forbidden books, Herrmann composed music of a richly romantic quality. This music, which Herrmann entitled “Flowers of Fire,” consists of several overlapping layers of violin lines accompanied by a variety of jingling percussion sounds provided by orchestra bells and celesta.

The final sequence, in which Montag (Oskar Werner) joins the outlawed book people in their hideaway in the woods, consists of a slow, sweetly lyrical accompaniment for strings, as various people walk through the snowy landscape reciting the books that they have memorized in an attempt to keep alive the literature that mankind has been denied. The film’s closing chord, an inconclusive dissonant combination of juxtaposed tones, is a brilliant final touch.

Short Cuts

John Barry. In 1966, John Barry proved that he could do other things besides James Bond pictures. His music for Born Free collected two Oscars, one for the song (with lyrics by Don Black), the other for the background score, which principally features the melody in a variety of tempos, with lots of intriguing African instruments used as atmospheric background.

Elmer Bernstein. Meanwhile, Elmer Bernstein scored Return of the Seven, in which he reprised some of the themes from his 1960 score for The Magnificent Seven. His best work for 1966 was his Oscar-nominated music for George Roy Hill’s film of the first portion of James Michener’s sprawling novel Hawaii. The main theme of the Hawaii score is a soaring string melody built on a rising five-note motif. With exotic instruments used as flavoring, this score builds up at times to marvelously dramatic levels. It proved that Bernstein, although primarily devoted to smaller-scale films, could score an epic with both skill and artistry.

Francis Lai. Francis Lai (b. 1932), a French counterpart of Henry Mancini, made a smashing debut on the international film-music scene with his score for Claude Lelouch’s romantic drama A Man and a Woman. The film became one of the all-time foreign-film box-office hits in the United States. After winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the film’s soundtrack became extremely popular, with a title tune that soared to the top of the Billboard charts in early 1967. The soundtrack eventually became the first album for a foreign-language film to sell a million copies.19 Lai’s pop-oriented score contains several memorable melodies, especially the title song, which is set in a changing meter that fluctuates periodically between groups of two and four beats. French singers Pierre Barouh and Nicole Croisille collaborated on a vocal-duet version of the tune, and also performed several other songs as background music for this stylishly filmed story of a lonely widow and widower who fall in love.

Alex North. The most provocative film of 1966 was Mike Nichols’s film version of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Alex North contributed a small-scale score with a subdued main theme that features a solo guitar and a harp over a background of strings. In striking contrast with the loud verbal abuse being unleashed by the actors, the music maintains an air of controlled melancholia.

Laurence Rosenthal. One of the most charming scores of the year is Laurence Rosenthal’s tuneful music for Peter Glenville’s Hotel Paradiso. Performed by a chamber ensemble of fifteen players, the score features solo strings, woodwinds, trumpet, trombone, harp, piano, and percussion, in music that provides a humorous commentary. Rosenthal’s main theme features a sprightly dance-like tune which is first introduced by clarinet and oboe over a rhythmically bouncy piano accompaniment. The score seems to have been inspired by the charming French music of Francis Poulenc; it succeeds in being a fittingly vivacious and comical background for this handsomely produced Gallic farce.

Franz Waxman. Franz Waxman’s towering music for Mark Robson’s Lost Command represents a fitting musical valedictory for one of the most distinguished careers in the history of film music. Here is a score that is stylistically right out of the Golden Age but is done with consummate skill. It was Waxman’s last contribution to film music (except for one TV movie score) before his death in 1967.

Georges Delerue. French composer Georges Delerue (1925–1992), already renowned in Europe for his scores of such films as Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1961), gained recognition in 1966 for his period-flavored music for Fred Zinnemann’s meticulously crafted (and Oscar-winning) version of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. A number of Renaissance fanfares and dances were incorporated into Delerue’s score, which helped his career to become more international in scope.

1967

Lalo Schifrin: Cool Hand Luke

Once Henry Mancini made such a hit with his Breakfast at Tiffany’s score, composers with a background in jazz and popular music began to create a more contemporary film-music sound. Among these is Lalo Schifrin, who created a distinctive musical accompaniment for a film that takes place at a Florida prison camp in the early 1960s.

Lalo Schifrin (1932–)

Schifrin, born in Buenos Aires in 1932, is the first native of Argentina to receive Oscar nominations for writing film music. He inherited musical talent from his father, Luis Schifrin, who played violin in the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires for three decades. The younger Schifrin started playing the piano at six; his first teacher was Enrique Barenboim, father of Daniel Barenboim. By the age of sixteen Schifrin also developed an interest in jazz. At twenty Schifrin won a scholarship to study music composition at the Paris Conservatory, where he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Charles Koechlin. He was, in his own words, “steeped in classical music.”*

Schifrin lived a double life, since at night he played jazz piano in Paris nightclubs. After graduating from the conservatory, Schifrin returned to Argentina and formed his own sixteen-piece jazz band. This group became part of a variety show on Buenos Aires TV; Schifrin quickly became experienced in arranging music for these televised performances. He also developed a liking for film music and would go to see the same film three or four times just to hear the music.† It was through his band that Schifrin met jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. In 1958 Schifrin completed a jazz suite called Gillespiana and also became an arranger for Xavier Cugat. In 1960 Schifrin came to New York to become the pianist in the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet.

In 1962 he left the Gillespie quintet to concentrate on composing. A year later he was hired by MGM to score Rhino! Schifrin now launched a successful career as a film and TV composer; his themes for Mission Impossible (1966), Mannix (1967), and Medical Center (1969) helped raise his celebrity. For the films Cool Hand Luke (1967) and The Fox (1968) he won consecutive Oscar nominations. Among the highlights of his long career are the five Dirty Harry films and many others that starred Clint Eastwood. Schifrin received another Oscar nomination for The Amityville Horror (1979) and continued to score films into the early 2000s.

Photo: Gay Goodwin Wallin

*Tony Thomas, Music for the Movies, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1997), p. 294.

†Ibid., p. 295.

Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke stars Paul Newman as Lucas Jackson, a troublesome convict whose rebellious behavior forces a guard (played by Strother Martin) to utter the famous words, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Luke is a Korean War veteran who defies authority and gets arrested for destroying parking meters. When he joins the chain gang he becomes a favorite among the convicts for his nonconformist attitude. After several escape attempts, the prison authorities try to break his defiant spirit.

What we have with regard to the musical score is a far cry from the big orchestral sounds that emanated from theaters during the Golden Age. Schifrin establishes the nature of his score during the opening credits. The “Luke” theme is first played by two guitars, one of which lays down a rhythmically steady harmony line while the other adds a tuneful melodic pattern. Only toward the end of the credits do the strings join in, along with a few tones played on a solo harmonica. Later in the film, Schifrin makes use of the gospel song “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” played in a bluesy style by a piano and a rhythm section, with a rock beat. He also features the harmonica in a reprise of the “Luke” theme, and includes, at various times, a solo banjo, a flute, and a trumpet.

There are only a few places in the film where the instrumentation involves an orchestral combination. One is a tarring sequence, in which the convicts are resurfacing a road. There is a rustling sound in the violins, plus a rapidly repeated note on banjo, followed by brass chords. As the piece progresses, Schifrin brings in the xylophone, plus the harmonica once more. Another is a chase scene, following one of Luke’s many attempts to escape. Fast-sounding banjo music is heard, with a driving beat. Brass sounds enter, followed by harmonica and strings. But even in this sequence there is no long, extended use of full-orchestra timbres. Schifrin has almost completely decentralized the score, so that one becomes conscious of individual colors such as banjo or harmonica, rather than a massive orchestral sonority.

Schifrin obviously has the talent to create melody; the “Luke” theme is particularly tuneful, as is also a slow piece called “Arietta’s Blues.” The highlighting of solo instruments, however, makes this score a unique listening experience.

By the end of the 1960s, Schifrin would be recognized as one of the leading voices in film scoring, with about five scores per year. As of this writing, Schifrin has completed over four decades of writing music for theatrical films and TV movies, and has amassed some 150 film credits.

Quincy Jones: Scoring Hot and Cold

In addition to Lalo Schifrin, another young film composer with a jazz background who came into the limelight in 1967 is Quincy Jones (b. 1933).

In the Heat of the Night is a contemporary drama about two policemen, a white gum-chewing Southern police chief (Rod Steiger) and a black detective from Philadelphia (Sidney Poitier), who attempt to solve a murder in a small Mississippi town. The title song, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman, and performed by Ray Charles, is a funky blues tune with a wailing electric organ background. Most of the other music also has a rhythm-and-blues style, and it features a number of noted Nashville artists, including a guitarist named Glen Campbell.

For Richard Brooks’s somber version of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Jones created a score laced with dissonant chords plus several jazz elements. There is also an occasional lyrical element, as in the waltz-like theme for the members of the Clutter family, whose violent deaths set in motion a police manhunt.The most memorable was written for one of the killers, Perry Smith (Robert Blake). It combines a lyrical melody with an offbeat instrumentation, including both acoustic and electric guitar, plus violins playing eerily high-pitched harmonics, with various bell-like tones in the background. In this score Jones used a real novelty: a set of bottles tuned to the various scale notes, which can be heard in Perry’s theme and elsewhere. The most chilling part of the film brought about the score’s most dramatic musical effect: prolonged pipe-organ chords, which are heard over a sustained low string tone, produce a disturbingly dissonant result during the flashback to the murder scene.

Ennio Morricone: Three Spaghetti Westerns

Although Italian composer Ennio Morricone (b. 1928) made a considerable impact in Europe with his 1960s film scores, he was unknown in the United States until the belated American release in 1967 of a trilogy of Western films shot mostly in Spain by Italian director Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as the “Man with No Name.” The first of these films, A Fistful of Dollars, a reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1962), was made while Clint Eastwood’s TV series Rawhide was on a summer hiatus in 1964.

European critics were quick to point out the film’s technical flaws, such as the use of cheap sets and corny dialogue: such terms as “Pizza Western” and “Macaroni Western” were used to describe the film’s odd mixture of desolate landscapes, violent gun battles, and frequent use of close-ups. But the term that has remained in use ever since the 1960s when referring to Dollars and many other Western films produced by Italian filmmakers is “Spaghetti Western.”

When Dollars was first released, the Italian filmmakers were aware of a potential critical backlash, and thus Sergio Leone chose to be identified by the name “Bob Robertson,” while Gian Maria Volonte, who played one of the villains, was identified as “John Wells.” Even Morricone himself adopted the fictitious name of “Dan Savio.”20 Despite these misgivings, A Fistful of Dollars became a huge hit both in Italy and the rest of Europe.

With the surprising success of Dollars, Leone and company rehired Eastwood and quickly scripted two more films, which were shot in 1965 and 1966. These films, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, were also hugely successful and made Eastwood a major star; in fact he became known in Italy as “Il Cigarillo,” after his cigar-chomping character in these movies.21

Despite the fact that these three films were made between 1964 and 1966, they were not released in the United States until 1967 due to a legal hassle brought about by the makers of Yojimbo, who demanded financial compensation for the unauthorized use of the basic plot of Kurosawa’s film for the story of A Fistful of Dollars. Eventually a percentage of the worldwide profits of Dollars was awarded to the Japanese producers.

By the end of 1966 United Artists finally got the green light to release Dollars, with the other films arriving on American screens within the next twelve months. All three were financially successful, and Clint Eastwood achieved stardom in his own country at last.

Much credit for the success of Leone’s trilogy goes to the music. Morricone had already composed music for over a dozen films by the time he was hired to do A Fistful of Dollars. Though this composer had classical training, one aspect of his music that is immediately obvious in all three Leone films is their use of unusual instrumental sonorities. The main-title music of Fistful, for instance, is performed by solo guitar, with a melody that is whistled (by Alessandro Alessandroni). There had actually been earlier Western themes with a whistled melody (one notable example is Lionel Newman’s theme from The Proud Ones [1956]), but Morricone’s simplicity seemed so fresh that many later film scores would emulate this one.

Although the Western genre had been a staple of the American cinema since the early silent days, it was in the 1960s that European filmmakers began to show a reverence for the Old American West, but with a fresh perspective that extended to many aspects of the films, including their music. In the words of film historian Didier Deutsch, who, in turn, quotes Leone:

Morricone did not blindly follow the traditional patterns set up by Hollywood. Instead, he developed a musical style which complemented Leone’s own vision of the Old West as a rugged place in which gore and violence were the order of the day, and in which the good, the bad and the ugly sometimes were indistinguishable. . . . “Without pretending to copy what had been done before, Ennio applied himself to exploring new territories in scoring Western films. Instead of slavishly trying to reproduce the usual monotonous music heard in such films, he had the audacity to invent new ideas and use new sounds, like the cries of birds and animals, a modulated howling in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the musical watch in For a Few Dollars More, or the harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West [1969].”22

The music for these films gradually emerged on a series of recordings, beginning with the original soundtrack of A Fistful of Dollars, which was released by RCA in 1967, followed shortly thereafter by the release of the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on United Artists Records. Morricone’s music gained further recognition through a studio recording, arranged and conducted by Hugo Montenegro, that consists of several tracks from each of the three films. Released in early 1968, this RCA album quickly became a best-seller.

With its vocal yells and grunts, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme seemed to redefine the sound of film music. Its raucous, brash, and rhythmically driven sound departed drastically from the folksy style of Dimitri Tiomkin’s Western ballads and the exuberant full-orchestra sonorities of Elmer Bernstein. Morricone suddenly became the established master of Western film music and, although he would later branch out into other genres, his Western themes would long remain his chief claim to fame.

New Directions In Film Music

Arthur Penn’s stylish and trendsetting Bonnie and Clyde uses music sparingly, although there is a screen credit for an original score by Charles Strouse (b. 1929), who later became renowned for the Broadway musical Annie. The film’s most noticeable music is the bluegrass hit “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which is heard primarily in scenes of the bank-robbing gang being chased by the cops following their holdups. The original 1950 recording by the tune’s composers, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, was used.

Even more musical borrowings show up in Mike Nichols’s hugely successful film The Graduate, which features Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate, who has an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and then falls in love with her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). There are some catchy instrumental backgrounds by Dave Grusin (b. 1934), who was then in his first year as a film composer. More importantly, this film includes a number of previously composed songs by Paul Simon, whose recordings with his singing partner Art Garfunkel were incorporated into the film as a running, if somewhat detached, commentary. One new song by Simon that does comment topically on the film’s plot is “Mrs. Robinson,” which became a top-selling hit through a studio recording made after the film was completed.

After the success of The Graduate, which became one of the top box-office hits of the decade, film music would never be the same. The idea of using an entire score of songs as commentary was seen as a logical extension of both Dimitri Tiomkin’s influence, which dates back to 1952’s High Noon, and the impact of Bill Haley and the Comets’ recording of “Rock around the Clock,” which had been used as a teen anthem in The Blackboard Jungle in 1955. Since 1967, original scores have been increasingly jeopardized by the inclusion of popular recordings of previously existing songs. As The Graduate demonstrated, this device can be used effectively. However, this film proved to be a bad omen for film composers, due to the priorities of film producers who looked for box-office gold instead of dramatic suitability.

Short Cuts

Henry Mancini. In 1967, Henry Mancini produced three excellent film scores, including Gunn, a theatrical version of the TV series Peter Gunn, with a musical score that included several themes based on music written for the series. Two for the Road, an engaging romantic drama starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, includes a lilting title tune that ranks as one of Mancini’s most memorable movie songs. For Wait Until Dark, a chilling suspense thriller about a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn again) who is beset by murderous thieves looking for a hidden stash of cocaine, Mancini used an out-of-tune piano sound to create an eerie musical ambiance. He achieved this unusual effect by combining tones played on two separate pianos, one of which was tuned a quarter-tone lower than the other.23

Fred Karlin. One of the most tuneful scores of 1967 is the jaunty music of Robert Mulligan’s film version of Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase, which marked the film-scoring debut of Fred Karlin (1936–2004). A native of Chicago, Karlin created some interesting new sonorities for this score by combining five recorders (which are forerunners of the modern flute) with a fifteen-piece rock-band instrumentation featuring electric organ, guitar, and drums. The charm of Karlin’s music provides a lighthearted counterpoint to some of the film’s more melodramatic moments, most of which occur in scenes where Miss Barrett (Sandy Dennis) struggles through her first year as an English teacher at an urban New York City high school.

Frank De Vol. Frank De Vol (or simply De Vol, as the film credits bill him) produced one of his most effective scores for MGM’s violent World War II drama The Dirty Dozen. Amid lots of military-style drums, there is a main theme based on a four-note melodic motif, usually sounded by trumpets. For the scene in which the military misfits recruited by Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) erect their barracks, De Vol used a clever set of variations on “You’re in the Army Now.” During the film’s climactic mission, the music gets more tensely dramatic, with exciting full-orchestra sonorities.

De Vol is also responsible for the tuneful music of Stanley Kramer’s well-acted but dramatically contrived Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Most of the score consists of variations on the 1936 song “The Glory of Love,” by Billy Hill, which was resurrected for this film.

Richard Rodney Bennett. Two of the 1967’s most memorable scores were written by the English symphonic composer Richard Rodney Bennett (1936–2012), who had started scoring films a decade earlier but only began to gain recognition in the 1960s. John Schlesinger’s beautifully photographed version of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd includes a score of remarkable subtlety, with a melancholy main idea consisting of a motif that rises boldly and then drops back down in pitch. Bennett used a variety of woodwinds for this motif, including English horn and oboe, plus solo violin. Though the film has lavish production values, this score concentrates on the characters of Bathsheba (Julie Christie) and the three men in her life by using the orchestra very sparingly. In view of the film’s nineteenth-century setting, the score includes some surprisingly modern harmony.

For the third Harry Palmer movie, Billion Dollar Brain, which again starred Michael Caine, Bennett displayed an uncanny knack for creating an atmospheric score much different from the usual spy-movie backgrounds then in vogue. Adding to the novelty of his sometimes pulsing themes is the use of the ondes Martenot. Although this electronic keyboard instrument would be featured almost regularly in later film scoring, especially in works by Elmer Bernstein and Maurice Jarre, its presence in this 1967 film score provides a tonal sonority that is unique for its time.

Alfred Newman. Alfred Newman collected his ninth Oscar (on his forty-fourth nomination!) for his dazzling arrangements of the Lerner and Loewe songs in Joshua Logan’s Camelot. Despite the shortcomings in the vocal abilities of the film’s stars, Richard Harris and especially Vanessa Redgrave, the brilliant background score, a good deal of which is based on Newman’s original musical ideas, keeps this film from being a total failure.

John Williams. Another Oscar nominee was John Williams, who did lushly orchestrated arrangements of André Previn’s songs for the popular but critically panned Valley of the Dolls. This was Williams’s first appearance among the music nominees. Although he didn’t win this time, he would eventually rival Alfred Newman in the total number of nominations and Oscars earned for both original scores and musical arrangements.

1968

John Barry: The Lion in Winter

Almost from the time John Barry first began scoring films, his name became synonymous with the brash and brassy sounds of James Bond films. Yet his creative achievements in film music encompassed a wide variety of genres and won for him a total of five Oscars in a forty-year film career.

The first full flowering of John Barry’s talent as a film composer came in 1968 with the inspired musical backgrounds for Anthony Harvey’s film version of James Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter. Goldman’s screenplay retains the essential structure of his play, which is a series of family squabbles involving King Henry II of England and his family, who have gathered to spend the Christmas holiday of 1183 together. The problem of selecting Henry’s successor is supposed to be addressed. Henry (Peter O’Toole) and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), have different ideas on this delicate matter. The central joke in both the play and the film adaptation is that absolutely nothing is resolved. After several verbal battles (and a few physical ones), Henry bids farewell at the end of the holiday season to Eleanor, who returns to her confinement at Chinon; all remains as before.

Barry’s score begins with a gloriously dramatic background consisting of a rhythmically driven main theme for trumpets and strings, with a choral melody added after a few moments. The Latin text, the meaning of which is unfortunately not explained in the film (although a translation is listed on the soundtrack CD recording), hints of the dark cloud hanging over this family and the enmity that is felt, although in much of the film the hatred is so disguised by the royal family members that the viewer almost believes them when they speak lovingly to one another.

The most memorable musical moment in the film arrives early on, as Eleanor is being brought by boat from Chinon, where she has been confined by Henry for the last ten years. Here Barry’s music has an ethereal beauty that casts a spell over the scene, with a romantic-style theme played by strings, over which is juxtaposed another choral line, this time featuring angelic-sounding women’s voices.

Following this preliminary music, the score takes a backseat to the dialogue. Barry’s music returns in the latter part of the film, at the end of which there is a marvelous repetition of the score’s dramatic opening music.

What is ultimately fascinating about Barry’s score is his uncanny way of combining, in the main-title theme, a modernistic, steadily driven beat with a melodic pattern inspired by the sounds of medieval chant. Few scores have so successfully bridged the gap between ancient and modern techniques, while being constructed so skillfully and with such an inspired sense of melody. Barry richly deserved the Oscar he received for this score.

Nino Rota: Romeo and Juliet

There were few dissenters regarding the merits of Franco Zeffirelli’s breathtakingly beautiful production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Zeffirelli’s choice of two inexperienced teenagers for the title roles, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, caused some negative comment, but they looked so right for their parts that this filming of Shakespeare’s play transcended other productions featuring more mature actors.

One of the most popular movie themes of the decade was the melancholy love theme for this film, by Italian composer Nino Rota (1911–1979). After having scored several Italian films made by the internationally renowned Federico Fellini, Rota began to get offers from other filmmakers, including Zeffirelli, who first hired Rota to write a boisterous score for his 1967 version of The Taming of the Shrew. Rota’s music for Romeo and Juliet is subdued in style, with a smaller instrumentation than its predecessor. Romeo’s theme is a slow-paced minor-key idea, first played by a solo English horn with strings. The love theme is first heard in the party scene at the Capulet home, where Romeo has gone incognito. When he first sees Juliet dancing with her family, the theme is sounded by a solo oboe over a background of tremolo strings. When Juliet looks at Romeo, several woodwinds take up bits of the melody; finally, the strings play it for a moment. The theme is also performed vocally as the melody of the song “What Is a Youth?,” as a young man sings it for the assembled party guests.

This theme later became enormously popular as the melody of the song “A Time for Us,” with a new set of words written by Larry Kusik and Eddie Snyder. Several recordings of the song were eventually released; the most successful was an instrumental version that featured Henry Mancini as the piano soloist. In addition to song recordings, three different soundtrack albums were produced by Capitol Records. The first, which includes excerpts of both dialogue and music, became one of the top-selling albums of 1969. Its popularity led Capitol to take the unprecedented step of releasing a four-record set of the film’s entire vocal and music tracks. In 1970, due to popular demand, a single-disc album of Rota’s score was released.24 Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is unique in that no other Shakespearean film has ever spawned such a record-buying frenzy.

Jerry Goldsmith: Planet Of The Apes

The most unique film score of 1968 is Jerry Goldsmith’s dissonant and percussive accompaniment for Franklin J. Schaffner’s film adaptation of the Pierre Boulle novel Planet of the Apes. This adventurous story, which is set in the distant future on an unknown planet, features three astronauts who discover a civilization in which intelligent apes have enslaved humans.

From the outset, Goldsmith’s music, which basically avoids any conventional use of melody and harmony, is rhythmically propelled by sharply accented sounds made by pounding on drums and tapping on stainless-steel mixing bowls, with high xylophone tones added to the mixture of sounds. One of the primary melodic ideas is a three-note motif, first introduced by a flute, and then later played by violins amid punctuating phrases featuring dramatic low-pitched piano tones and sharply accented percussive sounds. Added to these unusual sonorities are dissonant brass chords and occasional wailing sounds of a ram’s horn and a Brazilian culka (which suggests the hysterical yelling of the apes).

There are two standout musical moments that occur early in the film. The first is heard when the astronauts, seeking any signs of life on this strangely barren planet, discover water. Here several triumphant brass chords signify a moment of discovery as the three men find a waterfall. The second moment occurs when an army of apes raids a field where humans forage for food. The rhythmic propulsion of Goldsmith’s music adds to the hysteria of this scene which culminates in the capture of Taylor (Charlton Heston), the leader of the space crew.

A really unusual aspect of this score is the repeated use of an echo effect that features the use of a device called the “echoplex.” Many times in this film, tones played on strings or other instruments have a fluttery, repetitive effect that is achieved by the tape-recording of sounds and filtering them through an amplifier which has a delay-of-sound capability.25 Through the use of this technology, the music of Planet of the Apes is far removed from the sounds of other science-fiction movies of the 1960s.

For this first of the five Apes films made between 1968 and 1973, Goldsmith received a richly deserved Oscar nomination. He would return to the series in 1971 as composer of the third movie, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, but his later music would not equal the sheer daring and originality of the score for the 1968 film.

Marvin Hamlisch: The Swimmer

The most promising newcomer to the ranks of film composers in 1968 was Marvin Hamlisch (1944–2012), who was chosen by producer Sam Spiegel to score the film version of John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer. This score is quite an accomplishment for such a young musician (although veteran arrangers Leo Shuken and Jack Hayes deserve credit for their expert orchestrations).

Hamlisch’s evocative themes include a lyrical and melancholy main-title melody. This melody launches a story in which Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster), clad only in bathing trunks, declares that he is going to swim home to his wife Lucinda via all of the swimming pools in the neighborhood (it is Westchester County, so there are lots of pools). When he at last reaches home, the place is empty, with broken windowpanes and no furnishings.

There are two other important melodic motifs in the score, which builds up in intensity through the last scene where Ned, broken both physically and emotionally, slumps onto the deserted doorstep while the wind and cold rain blow around him. All three of the score’s primary melodic ideas are combined into one emotionally devastating final piece of music that reflects the hopelessness of Ned’s situation.

Short Cuts

Lalo Schifrin. Among the other successful film music accomplishments of 1968 were two scores by Lalo Schifrin. Bullitt has a funky, jazz-inflected sound with an up-tempo main theme and several other numbers with a bluesy style plus a rock beat. The Fox, for which Schifrin received an Oscar nomination, is much more tuneful and has a very subdued instrumentation. The lovely main theme, which is also heard in a song entitled “That Night,” is introduced by a solo flute with harp. Its melody line is based on a rising motif of six notes.

Neal Hefti. Following in the jazz/pop vein established by Henry Mancini for romantic comedies in the early 1960s, Nebraska native Neal Hefti (1922–2008) burst onto the TV/movie scene with the popular theme for the campy TV series Batman (1964). Soon thereafter, he added a jazz-inflected touch to several films, including two movies based on the plays of Neil Simon. After scoring Barefoot in the Park (1967), Hefti created a theme that has left an indelible impression on movie comedy: the jaunty minor-key main theme of The Odd Couple. With its insistent bouncy rhythmic background, this catchy tune would later be recycled for the long-running ABC TV series based on Simon’s play of two divorced men attempting to survive in an apartment they share.

Christopher Komeda. One of the most talked-about films of 1968 was Roman Polanski’s version of Ira Levin’s tale of modern witchery in Manhattan, Rosemary’s Baby. Polish composer Christopher Komeda (1937–1969), who had composed the music for several of Polanski’s earlier films, did an effective score, including a main theme in the style of a lullaby, with Mia Farrow singing the “la-la-la’s” that are heard on the soundtrack. The death the next year in a car crash of this talented musician deprived film music of a promising young artist.

Maurice Jarre. The main theme for Isadora, a long but engrossing film starring Vanessa Redgrave in a dazzling performance as the great dancer Isadora Duncan, is set in the style of a waltz. Its minor-key harmony qualifies it as one of the many film themes of the year (along with the main themes of The Lion in Winter, Romeo and Juliet, The Odd Couple, The Fox, and Rosemary’s Baby) to make extensive use of minor chords. This trend would be short-lived, but its presence in the film music of 1968 is an unmistakable part of the year’s most acclaimed scores.

Michel Legrand. Still another minor-key tune is Michel Legrand’s haunting main theme from The Thomas Crown Affair. Its vocal version, “The Windmills of Your Mind,” became one of 1968’s most memorable melodies, and also won for Legrand his first Oscar as a composer of movie songs. The lyricists for this tune, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, have contributed to a long string of award-winning movie songs. This would be only the first of many Oscar wins in their collaborative career, which has lasted for several decades.

Alex North. Among the year’s critical disappointments was the film version of Morris L. West’s intriguing novel The Shoes of the Fisherman. Despite the film’s deficiencies, Alex North’s brilliant score remains one of his most accomplished works, with majestic brass fanfares for scenes set in the Vatican, where a new pope is being elected. Russian folk melodies are also included in the music.

The Elder Statesmen. Dimitri Tiomkin wrote his final original film score in 1968, for the physically pretty but dramatically lame adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Great Catherine. Even Peter O’Toole couldn’t rescue this attempt at political satire.

With Max Steiner’s retirement in 1965 and Franz Waxman’s death in 1967, few of the film-scoring pioneers were still active by 1968. Alfred Newman had no scores in progress that year, and Bernard Herrmann’s only film music came from France, by way of Truffaut’s bizarre suspense thriller The Bride Wore Black.

About the only notable achievement in Hollywood by one of the masters was the emotionally stirring music by Miklós Rózsa for The Power, an entertaining sci-fi film made by MGM. Its tensely dramatic main theme starts out with a six-note idea, the first four tones of which bear a striking similarity to his theme from The Killers (and also the Dragnet motif). Adding to the colorfulness of this score is Rózsa’s use of a Hungarian folk instrument, the cimbalom; the instrument can be glimpsed briefly during the opening credits, as a pair of arms are seen using mallets to produce rapidly repeated twangy tones based on the score’s main motif.

Footnote to 1968

A final comment concerns the ill-fated score by Alex North for 2001: A Space Odyssey. After composing music for the first hour of the film, North was prepared to record his cues, but director Stanley Kubrick stopped him. Although North subsequently used some of his Odyssey themes in concert pieces, only in the early 1990s did Jerry Goldsmith, with the cooperation of North’s widow, make the first-ever recording of this score. In many ways North’s music resembles some of the classical pieces that wound up as replacements in the film.

Apparently Kubrick had grown so fond of the musical pieces he used as a temporary track while editing that he decided to keep them. Thus, when the film premiered, audiences thrilled to the sounds of the opening chords of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra and the lilting strains of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s The Blue Danube. These and several other previously composed pieces became 2001’s “score.” Perhaps without realizing it at the time, Kubrick was setting a dangerous precedent for future filmmakers, who would often hire composers to write original scores, and then reject them in favor of preexisting music.

1969

John Williams: The Reivers

When Mark Rydell’s film version of William Faulkner’s The Reivers was released at the end of 1969, few filmgoers were aware of the significance of its composer, since John Williams was then known mainly for such TV music as Lost in Space and several innocuous cinematic comedies. But with this film, and the Oscar nomination for its original score, John Williams was on his way to becoming the most famous name in film music; he would achieve this distinction within the next decade.

John Williams (1932–)

Williams, born on Long Island on February 8, 1932, represents possibly the most famous of all film composers. His record forty-eight Oscar nominations is testimony to not only his great longevity in film scoring, but also to his enormous skills as an accompanist for the on-screen heroics of such famous fictional film characters as Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, and Superman.

Williams is the son of Esther and Johnny Williams; the latter was a jazz drummer with the Raymond Scott Quintet and later a Hollywood studio musician. John began studying the piano at age eight and decided early on that he wanted to become a concert pianist. He attended North Hollywood High School, where he met Barbara Ruick, who became his first wife (and also had a featured role in the film version of Carousel).

Williams attended UCLA to study music, but his education was interrupted by a three-year stint in the air force. After his discharge in 1954 Williams spent a year at Juilliard, where he studied piano with Rosina Lhevinne. But he soon returned to Los Angeles, where he pursued composition studies with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.* He also obtained work as a pianist for film-score recording sessions. His piano playing can be heard on the soundtracks of many 1950s films, especially those produced by Columbia Pictures, where he began working in 1956 under Columbia’s music director, Morris Stoloff. He was also employed at 20th Century Fox under Alfred Newman, and continued there under Alfred’s younger brother Lionel Newman. In 1958 and 1959 Williams also worked with Henry Mancini on the Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky TV series. For Peter Gunn Williams recorded the piano part of the Grammy-winning title theme.

In 1955 Williams began arranging and conducting music for many popular singers, including Vic Damone, Patti Page, and Howard Keel. Williams began TV scoring in 1958 and for the next few years his name appeared on credits for episodes of Wagon Train and M Squad, plus such sitcoms as Gilligan’s Island and Bachelor Father. He also wrote original scores for the short-lived series Checkmate, and also for Lost in Space. Between 1965 and 1968 he scored over forty episodes of this space fantasy, plus the title themes for the show’s last two seasons.†

In 1966 Williams’ film career began to take flight with the scores of The Rare Breed, How to Steal a Million, Not with My Wife You Don’t, and The Plainsman. In 1967 he earned his first Oscar nomination for arranging André Previn’s songs for Valley of the Dolls. In 1969 he finalized his name as “John” Williams (he was formerly known as “Johnny” or “John T.”). Also in 1969 Williams won his first nomination for an original score for the music of The Reivers.

Williams’s fame increased greatly through his collaborations with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Williams has scored almost all of Spielberg’s films, beginning with The Sugarland Express and Jaws. He also scored all six of Lucas’s Star Wars films plus the four Indiana Jones adventures. No other film composer has amassed such an impressive list of credits for films that have attracted such large audiences all over the world.

Photo: Thomas Jaehnig

*Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art & Craft of Movie Music (Burbank, Calif.: Riverwood, 1991), p. 324.

† Ibid., p. 236.

From the opening moments of The Reivers, Williams’s evocative music enhances Faulkner’s nostalgic story of the four-day adventures of the three reivers (or thieves, as the narration of Burgess Meredith helpfully explains), in the summer of 1905. The film begins in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, on the day when a train arrives bearing a brand-new Winton Flyer; this car has been purchased by Boss McCaslin (Will Geer), the grandfather of young Lucius (Mitch Vogel). Two of Boss’s employees, Boon Hogganbeck (Steve McQueen) and Ned (Rupert Crosse), take advantage of the absence of Lucius’s parents and Boss, who have left Jefferson for a few days to attend a family funeral. Soon after they leave, Boon decides to take Lucius on a joyride in the new car. Along the way to Memphis they discover that Ned has hidden out in the rumble seat.

The main-title music consists of a pair of themes; although they contrast in style, they are both in ¾ time. The first consists of a fast-paced melody sounded by strings, while the other, a more lilting tune, is first played by a solo harmonica. Both melodic ideas are then presented in a more fully orchestrated style, with extra sounds thrown in for flavoring, including guitar and orchestra bells.

There are two other principal themes, the first of which is a soaring idea for the Winton Flyer. It is first heard when the townspeople gather on a hot summer day at the train station to get their first look at the car. When the tarp is removed from the automobile, Williams’s theme gloriously sounds, with tremolo strings followed by full orchestra. The remaining melodic motif is a boisterous theme that is first heard as Ned swipes the car from Boon and drives it recklessly through town, and later when Boon, Ned, and Lucius take off on a joy ride to Memphis. This rambunctious music is flavored with clever instrumental insertions, including banjo, a Jew’s harp, and a tinny-sounding piano.

These themes, with their preponderance of waltz-like rhythms, convey an air of nostalgia for the Old South at the turn of the twentieth century, and also celebrate the romance of the early automobile when its presence in the community was a real novelty.

Burt Bacharach: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

In the continuing trend away from symphonic backgrounds, Hollywood embraced the score by Burt Bacharach (b. 1929) for George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was a radical departure from the Waxman/Newman/Rózsa brand of music. Much of the film’s music features wordless choral singing, perhaps influenced by a series of then-popular 1960s recordings by the Swingle Singers. The infectious rhythms of the singing provide a flavorful background to the film’s atmospheric cinematography that at times gives the film the look of old sepia-tinted snapshots. Ultimately, there is a curious disparity between the score’s modern, pop-oriented style and the late-nineteenth-century setting of this film. The jaunty song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was written for a scene in which Butch (Paul Newman) spins around on a bicycle, performing a variety of stunts, and also carries Etta Place (Katharine Ross) on the handlebars. The song, as performed by B. J. Thomas, is undeniably charming, and perhaps helps to account for the success of the film, which went on to win several Oscars, including two for Bacharach (for the song and the score).

Short Cuts

John Barry. Following his Oscar for The Lion in Winter, John Barry continued to prove his versatility with one of the best of his James Bond scores, the music for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and with the haunting harmonica theme of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. Although Barry’s music in Midnight Cowboy often had to take a backseat to the songs of Harry Nilsson and a number of rock songs used in the film, his contribution greatly enhanced this film.

Michael J. Lewis. Thanks to John Barry’s overcrowded schedule, Bryan Forbes’s film of The Madwoman of Chaillot introduced a new name in film scoring: Michael J. Lewis (b. 1939). Apparently, Barry recommended Lewis personally to Forbes, who took a chance on him. Lewis created a first film score that is marvelously atmospheric. There are two main themes, the haunting “Aurelia’s Theme” (for Katharine Hepburn’s character, the madwoman who attempts to foil a plot by several anarchists to blow up Paris), and the lovely “Irma’s Theme,” for the pretty barmaid (played by Forbes’s wife, Nanette Newman). The melody for Aurelia is particularly memorable, with a mandolin line that boldly rises through the octave (starting with the pitches A–D–A), then turns around and comes back down. A repeated pattern of six tones is heard several times as part of a long, lyrical line. At the film’s conclusion this theme gradually builds up to a gorgeous statement for full orchestra.

Ennio Morricone. Italian composer Ennio Morricone continued to crank out Western scores, including the music for Once Upon a Time in the West, starring Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson, which many consider to be director Sergio Leone’s best film. Morricone’s music incorporates the style of the “Man with No Name” trilogy, in which Clint Eastwood starred. The main-title theme is performed by a solo voice, and other themes are either whistled or played on a solo harmonica. In many ways this is one of Morricone’s finest scores.

Easy Rider. Instead of an original score, the music in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider basically consists of a series of prerecorded tracks by such popular rock groups as Steppenwolf, the Byrds, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. There are additional songs by Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn, including the latter’s “Ballad of Easy Rider.” Sales of the soundtrack album topped the million mark. The success of this film, with its rock soundtrack, would lead to many imitators in the years ahead.

John Green. For the vivid re-creation of the dance-marathon contests of the Great Depression in Sydney Pollack’s film version of the Horace McCoy novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Pollack hired John Green to provide a background score of period songs, which included Green’s own “Body and Soul” and “Out of Nowhere.” Green’s arrangements incorporate a number of such songs, while providing atmospheric scoring for this ultimately depressing story of a number of desperate people who compete for prizes by dancing almost nonstop for over thirty hours.

Postlude: Passing the Torch

A look back at the 1960s reveals the gradual passing of the torch from the film-music pioneers of Hollywood’s Golden Age to a younger generation of composers. Not only did Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Bronislau Kaper retire from film scoring during the 1960s, but death claimed Franz Waxman in 1967, and Alfred Newman survived only two months into the start of the next decade. Of the Hollywood veterans who did remain active through the ’60s, neither Miklós Rózsa nor Bernard Herrmann were given many scoring opportunities.

Film music changed drastically during the 1960s, from a symphonic idiom to a more modernistic, popular style. Henry Mancini, John Barry, and Michel Legrand, all of whom possessed an affinity for pop tunes, jazz, and rock sounds, were now the leading trendsetters for the film-music art. Despite this stylistic metamorphosis, symphonic film scoring was not completely gone. Composers such as Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams demonstrated in their music a versatility which set the stage for a remarkable mixture of styles that can be found in the film music of the 1970s.

Notes

1. Cobbett S. Steinberg, TV Facts (New York: Facts on File, 1980), p. 144.

2. David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), p. 401.

3. André Previn, No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 86.

4. Tony Thomas, The Great Adventure Films (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1976), p. 222.

5. Henry Mancini, with Gene Lees, Did They Mention the Music? (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), p. 98.

6. Ibid., p. xi.

7. Miklós Rózsa, Double Life (New York: Wynwood, 1989), p. 193.

8. Ibid., p. 195.

9. Steven M. Silverman, David Lean (New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1989), pp. 142–43.

10. Tony Bremner, liner notes for the studio recording of Lawrence of Arabia, with Bremner conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra, on a Silva Screen Digital Film Scores CD, FILMCD 036.

11. Derek Elley, ed., The Chronicle of the Movies (Toronto: B. Mitchell, 1991), p. 236.

12. Silverman, p. 167.

13. Maurice Jarre, liner notes for the thirtieth anniversary edition of the Doctor Zhivago soundtrack, Rhino Movie Music CD, R2 71957.

14. Ibid.

15. Several bits of music not used in the final version of the film may be heard on the thirtieth anniversary edition soundtrack recording, issued in 1995 on the Rhino Movie Music label. This recording includes virtually everything that Jarre wrote for the film.

16. Joseph Murrells, Million Selling Records (New York: Arco, 1984), p. 217.

17. In 1998, Rykodisc released an elaborate compilation of soundtrack materials relating to this film (CD set RCD 10734). It includes the original recording of the score as released on a United Artists LP, plus all of the unreleased portions of Newman’s score, including his original music for the Lazarus sequence.

18. Thomas, Film Score, p. 292.

19. Murrells, p. 217.

20. Didier Deutsch, liner notes, Ennio Morricone: The Legendary Italian Westerns CD, RCA 9974-2-R.

21. Marc Eliot, American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood (New York: Harmony Books, 2009), p. 71.

22. Deutsch, liner notes, Ennio Morricone.

23. Mancini, p. 154

24. Murrells, p. 275.

25. Joe Russo and Larry Landsman, with Edward Gross, Planet of the Apes Revisited: The Behind-the-Scenes Saga of the Classic Science Fiction Saga (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001), p. 83.

John Barry (1933–2011)

Barry was born John Barry Prendergast in York, England. A love for both music and films came easily, since his mother, Doris, was an accomplished pianist and his father, Jack (known as JX), was the owner of a chain of eight movie houses in Northern England. Barry started piano lessons at nine and progressed rapidly, but at fifteen he switched to the trumpet because he was more drawn to the world of swing music and jazz than to the classical music his mother preferred. As soon as he progressed enough as a trumpeter he started playing in local bands. After completing public school Barry started private lessons with Dr. Francis Jackson, the Master of Music at York Minster. Through Jackson, Barry learned harmony and counterpoint, plus an appreciation of choral music. Barry also worked in the family business as a projectionist, and played third trumpet most nights in a jazz band called the Modernaires.*

In 1952 Barry began National Service. Instead of regular military duty, Barry agreed to a three-year term in place of the compulsory two years. In exchange he was able to choose the Green Howard’s regiment where he played trumpet in the band and wrote musical arrangements.

After returning to civilian life, Barry founded the John Barry Seven [JB7], a rock band in which Barry provided lead trumpet and vocals. The group rehearsed on Sundays at his father’s Rialto Theater and made its professional debut there in 1957; soon they were making appearances on the BBC TV program Six-Five Special. In 1959 Barry appeared with the group on the TV show Drumbeat where he met singer Adam Faith. Barry began composing pop tunes for the JB7, one of which was a song with Faith as the vocalist, “What Do You Want?” This song became a number-one hit, at one point selling almost 50,000 copies per day.† Barry soon received an exclusive recording contract at EMI records and also achieved his first film-scoring opportunity, a teen exploitation film called Beat Girl, which featured the film debut of Adam Faith. Barry was at first hired to write the songs for Faith to sing, but he was then given the background score as well. Despite the film’s inferior script, the musical results helped to bolster Barry’s career.

By 1962 Barry turned over his band to another director and began to fully embrace film scoring as his principal focus. The defining moment in his film career came with the request to improve the “James Bond Theme” which British pop-musician Monty Norman had created for Dr. No, the first film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s spy novels. Barry’s use of strings and strident brass gave this theme its special flavor, but he had to settle a dispute with Norman over authorship of the music. Norman demanded sole credit and got it, although court proceedings regarding the rights to this theme continued all the way to 2001, when Norman sued once again. Despite this controversy Barry was offered the score for the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, and he remained with the Bond franchise into the 1980s; he composed eleven James Bond scores over a twenty-five year period that ended with The Living Daylights (1987).

In a career that extended all the way to 2001, Barry won five Oscars (including two for Born Free in 1966). The Lion in Winter (1968), Barry’s third Oscar winner, represents a huge departure from the world of James Bond, with chanting voices and medieval harmonies. He also excelled in a romantic vein, as with Somewhere in Time (1980) and his Oscar-winning Out of Africa (1985). Dances with Wolves (1990), his final Oscar winner, contains some of his finest film music, with themes that capture the feeling of the expansive Western prairies.

Photo: Gay Goodwin Wallin

*Geoff Leonard, Pete Walker, and Gareth Bramley, John Barry: The Man with the Midas Touch (Bristol, England: Redcliffe, 2008), p. 17.

†Pete Walker, liner notes for the soundtrack of Beat Girl, released on a Play It Again CD, no. PLAY 001.