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LEGENDARY FILM COMPOSER Max Steiner was a workaholic who never turned down an assignment, even if he knew the picture was less than a classic. He considered each project a challenge, and often some of his best were for middling to lousy pictures.
Nobody today remembers "The Lion and the Horse" (1952), but Steiner fans know it's one of his finest Western scores, a genre in which he excelled. "On Moonlight Bay" (1951) and "Kiss in the Dark" (1949) might now seem lightweight programmers, yet Steiner's scores for them are full of comedic surprises. Who remembers "The Lady Takes a Sailor" (1947)? But what a wonderfully funny score with its "bustling city" passages.
Steiner admitted he had an addiction to scoring, and therefore wrote for every genre. But he performed especially well with Westerns at Warner Bros. Beginning with "Gold Is Where You Find It" in 1938, he produced a body of work (including eight Errol Flynn adventures and several Gary Cooper vehicles) that were alive with the themes of Americana folk music and Civil War-inspired tunes. "Gold" was quickly followed by "Dodge City" (1939), "The Oklahoma Kid" (1939), "Santa Fe Trail" (1940) and "Virginia City" (1940).
Extravagant but pleasing themes for stagecoaches, frontier boom towns, Indian war parties, saloons and cantinas, swaggering heroes, butstling heroines, U.S. Cavalry units, westbound wagon trains, Yankees, Johnny Rebs and other Western imagery were all defined in the movies by Steiner. They evoked the spirit of the winning of the West and never failed to blend folk music into their pioneering themes. Films like "They Died With Their Boots On" (1941), "San Antonio" (1945), "Cheyenne" (1947), "Silver River" (1948), "Dallas" (1950), "Sugarfoot" (1951), "Distant Drums" (1951) and "The Charge at Feather River" (1953). The latter was Steiner's only score for a 3-D picture and features the wonderfully comedic "Guardhouse Brigade March."
As good as he was with Westerns, Steiner was not always happy doing them.
"As for Indians scalping and cowboys shooting and lots of arrows flying, you work and you hear those noisy things day and night," he once said. "And finally you hear nothing but boom boom boom boom, and all the whooping. I mean, it's an awful lot of work and a lot of grief, and then, when you get all finished, you can't hear the goddamn music."
What Steiner preferred were sentimental love stories and melodramas--especially his scores for 19 Bette Davis hankie dramas at Warner Bros. Davis, in fact, was one of Steiner's greatest fans and felt his scores for 1948's "Beyond the Forest" (with its dramatic renderings of "Chicago, Chicago"), "Dark Victory" (1939) and "The Letter" (1940) were superb.
"He often improved our acting," Davis once said. "He knew more about film drama than any of us." And in knowing the full power of his music on screen, she once remarked on the set of one of her pictures, "Wait a minute! Do I walk up the stairs or does Max Steiner?"
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The Wagnerian depth and melodic design of the music of Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner, born May 10, 1888, was a result of being reared in the world of operetta and Viennese opulence built around 19th Century concert music. His father, who designed the famous Riesenrad ferris wheel in the city's Prater, on which Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles had a fateful meeting in "The Third Man," owned theaters and produced operettas; his mother, declared to be the most beautiful woman in all of Austria, ran three restaurants.
His grandfather Maximilian, after whom he was named, had discovered and encouraged Johann Strauss. By age 12, "Maxie" (as he was affectionately called by his friends all his life) was being hailed as a child prodigy for completing a four-year course at the Imperial Academy of Music in just one year. Even then he was already leading and conducting his first orchestra. And by age 15, he had written his first operetta, "Beautiful Greek Girl."
Steiner's love for story-telling is reflected in the ancedote he frequently told about the time he took "Beautiful Greek Girl" to his father.
"Naturally, since he was a producer, I thought my father would be eager to read it," Steiner recalled. "He did, and told me: 'Your operetta stinks.' So I took it to his biggest rival in Vienna, who immediately saw an opportunity to get back at my father. He gladly accepted it. I went back to my father and told him the exciting news. 'Max,' he said, 'your operetta still stinks.'"
Having trained under Gustav Mahler and Robert Fuchs, Steiner left for London in 1906 to conduct "The Merry Widow"--and stayed eight years to become the darling of London's theater scene. At the start of World War I, he was interned in England as an enemy alien, but the Duke of Westminster, one of his staunch admirers, granted him exit papers.
Steiner left for America, where he worked for the next 15 years on Broadway, arranging and orchestrating for Victor Herbert, Florenz Ziegfeld, George White, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. In 1920, with no desire to return to his native land, Steiner became an American citizen. Once sound movies had been established in Hollywood, it was only a matter of time before he was discovered for yet another medium that would stretch his talents to the maximum.
He arrived in Hollywood on Christmas Day of 1929 to score "Sons of Guns" for RKO. He remained at that studio to do 111 music tracks. His first work of importance was "Cimarron" in 1930. At that time, composers were held in such low esteem by producers that Steiner was not even given a screen credit. Scoring was still limited to opening and closing music. The turning point--for Steiner and every other working composer in Hollywood at that time--occurred in 1932 when he asked the studio if he could provide a single reel of music for "Symphony for Six Million." Specifically he wanted to write music for a death scene involving actor Gregory Ratoff.
"It was an astounding success," Steiner recalled years later. "People ran up to the producers at the screening and wanted to know who'd written the music. Some of them were crying. They'd never heard anything like it in a movie before. It was a happy moment for all film composers."
Needless to say, he was asked to write a complete score for "Symphony for Six Million," and the way was set.
Another important score was for "King Kong" (1933), which Steiner conceived for an 80-piece orchestra. This threw RKO executives into a tither because they had ordered him to recycle old music tracks from his earlier horror thrillers ("The Monkey's Paw," 1933; "Secrets of the French Police," 1932; "The Most Dangerous Game," 1932). By not following orders, Steiner became a major factor in the giant ape's box-office success. Steiner would always maintain that "King Kong" was "made for music. It was the kind of film that allowed you to do anything and everything from weird chords and dissonances to pretty melodies." Other major successes from this period included "A Star Is Born" (1937), John Ford's "The Lost Patrol" (1934) and "The Three Musketeers" (1939).
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Steiner left RKO in 1936 to work for Selznick, scoring "Little Lord Fauntleroy" and "Garden of Allah" that year. The latter 135-minute score earned him his first Oscar nomination. However, Steiner was restless because Selznick produced slowly and Steiner thrived on new assignments. So the composer accepted a free-lance job at Warner Bros., "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1937). It was there at Warner Bros. that he stayed for most of his career. He would turn out at least six scores a year and left only occasionally to freelance at Columbia ("The Violent Men," 1954), Republic ("The Last Command," 1955) and Universal-International ("Escapade in Japan," 1957).
Steiner's last score was in 1965 for a horror film, "Two on a Guillotine." It was hardly a fitting end for so distinguished a composer, especially when producer William Conrad accused Steiner of ruining the picture. (He hadn't; Conrad had achieved that without Steiner's help.)
By that time Steiner was almost blind, and nobody was eager to hire him. It was a condition that had been coming on for years. Don Franklin remembered how Steiner had prepared music sheets that were larger than normal. Almost every day at the studio, he recalled, "Max would walk down the corridor with one hand out against the wall to steady himself."
By 1965, symphonic tracks were not so much in vogue and even Steiner had to admit that movies were changing drastically. "If I had the chance," he said, "I would write my scores differently, too." He was a product of a "golden age," but by 1970 his time had come and gone. Max Steiner died two days after Christmas in 1971 at the age of 83.
At Steiner's funeral, fellow composer David Raksin eulogized: "Talent and skill and energy we (composers) still have in abundance. But the circumstances that produced the necessity for such Herculean accomplishments on Max's part can never occur again. Today one must wonder if we will ever again encounter a generation of directors and writers and producers such as those who understood enough about the power of film music and its value to them in their work to give the giants of our composers, of whom Max was the dean, the opportunity to create their miracles of evocation."
The legacy of Steiner was best summed up by a movie-music lover named Norm Ruby: "What manner of man is this, who with his music could so excitingly lift a bomber off a runway, capture the scent of magnolias, create a ballet for a Basset hound, say 'hello,' 'goodbye' and "I love you' with incredible feeling, and sometimes do it all in same reel."
© 2000 by John Stanley.
READ ABOUT THE MAX STEINER LIBRARY, WHERE HIS GREAT FILM SCORES ARE PRESERVED, IN JOHN STANLEY'S COMPANION COLUMN TODAY: PRESERVING STEINER
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