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Masters of Movie Music First of Two Parts |
By JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
AS TIME GOES BY, Max Steiner's music continues to enhance, for old movie-going generations and for brand new ones, some of the finest films ever produced.
During a Hollywood career that spanned 35 years, he wrote an astonishing number of music scores: An amazing 307 altogether. Many of the images he enhanced with "the Steiner touch" are now legendary: Humphrey Bogart slumped over a whiskey glass in a Moroccan night club, pining over his lost love and ordering pianist Dooley Wilson to play his favorite tune; Clark Gable sweeping Vivien Leigh into his arms against the reddish glow of a burning Atlanta; Errol Flynn leading a cavalry charge at the Battle of Little Big Horn; a submarine rising from the Pacific depths with John Wayne gazing into the periscope; Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes together, one for lover Bette Davis; Gary Cooper diving into a Flordia lagoon with a Bowie knife clenched between his teeth.
Behind these images, listen to the majestic music that melodically and dramatically ascends and plummets, boils and simmers, soothes and unnerves, heightens and lowers, attacks and retreats. The music of Max Steiner varies from being robust, vigorous and sweeping to dramatic, comedic and romantic. Such music often puts a lump in your throat, sometimes a tear in your eye, and frequently a sense of patriotism in your heart. It is music that is always clutching at the edge of an emotion, becoming an inseparable part of the movie-watching experience.
Three of Steiner's works ("The Informer," 1935; "Now, Voyager!", 1942; and "Since You Went Away," 1944) earned him Academy Awards. Another 23 titles brought him Oscar nominations (including "Gone With the Wind," for which he probably should have won the award but didn't), and still others won him prestigious awards from around the world.
It's been almost 30 years since his death and yet he remains a legend of Hollywood. He is still remembered as "The Dean of Film Music" or "The maestro." More than any other single composer, Steiner was responsible for proving the effectiveness of the symphonic score at a time when Hollywood was dead-set against its use in the early '30s. Close-minded producers felt that audiences would never accept a full-blown orchestra booming out of nowhere. There had to be a "source," such as a radio on the window sill or a gypsy violinist strolling through the background while two lovers kissed. However, Steiner felt that music, properly conceived for a scene, would evoke emotional, dramatic dimensions that could make visuals work in unexpected ways.
As for the theory that music should be "unheard," Steiner once exploded: "What good is music if you don't hear it?" Steiner not only changed the industry's mind about music, but he also spearheaded the development of dramatic scoring in inventive ways. This included the perfection of the "click track," a system that allows a highly accurate method of synchronizing music to picture. Steiner needed perfection in timing because he wrote his music synched to images and action, a technique that cartoons later used comedically. From this evolved the nickname "Mickey Mousing"--termed specially for Walt Disney's cartoons and perfected to a fine art by another Warner Bros. colleague, Carl Stallings, who composed music for all the studio's cartoons, from Bugs Bunny to the Roadrunner.
Steiner was brilliant at painting images with music. He wove each evocative note to match the frame like a tight-fitting glove. He also knew when not to have music, so that after a quiet respite the thundering return of one of his themes was twice as effective.
"The Caine Mutiny" (1954), for which Steiner wrote an Oscar-nominated score unsurpassed in its use of naval and nautical motifs, was produced by Stanley Kramer. Kramer recalled how Steiner felt that any music played behind the court-martial sequence would intrude "upon the film's sense of bitter reality." And both agreed it was best not to have a single note of music for that lengthy stretch of the film's narrative.
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Steiner used music in shipboard scenes of 'The Caine Mutiny,' but used none in the dramatic court-martial scenes. Pictured, from left: Fred MacMurray, Robert Francis, Van Johnson, Humphrey Bogart.
Steiner denied that he had any set system for writing his scores. "There is no Method. My attitude -- to give the film what it needs. And with me, if the picture is good, the score stands a better chance of being good. The hardest thing in scoring is knowing the location of your music. Music can slow up an action that should not be slowed up and quicken a scene that shouldn't be quickened. Knowing the difference is what makes a film composer."
In 1953, when preparing the music for "The Caine Mutiny," he revealed that he considered himself a "film doctor -- it's my function to help the picture. I can speed it up or slow it down. I can help a weak character be strong. People often forget that music composed for pictures is not a finished composition. We have to modulate away from the theme so much, to keep pace with the ever-changing images, we don't often get a chance to finish a statement in the thorough way a classical composer can."
Jack L. Warner was Steiner's boss for 155 pictures. After writing "The Charge of the Light Brigade," his first Warner Bros. effort in 1937, Steiner asked Warner: "Boss, how much music do you want?" Warner was heard to reply: "Max, for me you can start on the first frame and finish on the last." The "Light Brigade March" became just the first of a series of breathtaking pieces for action pictures, culminating with "A Distant Trumpet" in 1964.
Steiner never read scripts in advance. "I look at the picture. Then I go home and think it over. I run the picture again the next day and try to get my themes together." He did this in his Beverly Hills home, playing away for hours on his grand piano and often discarding 10 themes for each one he finally kept and used.
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Steiner was at his best with romantic scores for films like 'Now, Voyager' (left) with Paul Henreid & Bette Davis or 'Casablanca' with Ingrid Bergman & Humphrey Bogart.
There were many who were inspired to go into pictures because of Steiner's music. Stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, who chose his career based on his enthusiastic response to "King Kong" and Steiner's rousing score, remembered, "Steiner's music had a thirlling and unique theatrical style that seemed to be lacking in other studios' products."
Those who worked side by side with Steiner remember him with fondness. Rudy Fehr, a Warner Bros. film editor for 40 years who worked on eight Steiner movies-- "Desperate Journey," 1942; "Watch on the Rhine," 1943; "The Conspirators," 1944; "Voice of the Turtle," 1947; "Key Largo," 1948; "Rocky Mountain," 1950 -- recalled Steiner as "an absolute perfectionist, the king of scorers. He had a flair for finding all the right moods. In every picture, the compositions enhanced the dramatic impact." And Stanley Kramer adds, "He understood theme and sub-theme and could impress those heavily on an audience."
Don Franklin, a music preparation supervisor at Warner Bros. for 40 years who worked with Steiner on such films as "Springfield Rifle," 1952; "Room for One More," 1952; "The Iron Mistress," 1952; and "The Searchers," 1956, recalled that in the recording studio Steiner "could cut bars from the music and still extend it to fit the picture exactly. And he was rigid--he could sit down and turn out a score in just a few days if there was an incredibly tight deadline facing him."
Randall Larson, author of "Musique Fantastique: A Survey of Film Music in the Fantastic Cinema" -- in which he critiques Steiner's "King Kong" score -- feels that the composer's themes "could be so delicate and personal . . . he brought the characters' feelings to life on the screen."
The late Tony Thomas, author of "Music for the Movies" and a one-time BBC interviewer who interviewed Steiner on several occasions, became a close friend of Steiner's. In 1990 he told me, "Steiner was a funny little guy, 5-foot-4, pixie-ish, with an earthy sense of humor that often included an inclination to bad puns. He wore thick glasses and was always telling funny, risque stories. It was hard to get him into a serious conversation about his music. He didn't want to discuss it away from the studio."
Franklin also remembered the "roly-poly figure who loved to have fun when he wasn't working. He was a real hellraiser." But on the recording stage he was dead serious about his music. He knew exactly what he wanted. He always did his own conducting because he felt that nobody else could get it completely right. Max was a great composer because his music had melodic structure; he wasn't just writing background droning sounds."
Steiner's music had a signature all its own, preceded by the Warner Bros. Studio fanfare he introduced in 1937 in "Tovarich" and which was repeated by all the studio's composers for years afterward. Steiner always established recurring themes for main characters and often assigned a motif to an object or an emotion. He would recycle these themes in serious and comedic ways throughout a film, which ultimately helped to tie up all the ingredients.
Steiner admitted about the potboilers. "You can have the greatest music ever written, but if the picture stinks, the score will fall down. The music will help a picture but never save it."
©2000 by John Stanley.
To Read
Part Two of John Stanley's Max Steiner column,
click here: PART
TWO
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