This Day in Film History (Death of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ Composer Maurice Jarre)

Mar. 29, 2009—Maurice Jarre, a French composer and conductor who netted three Oscars among his 150 movie soundtracks, died at age 84 of cancer at his villa in Malibu, Calif.

You might wonder why I picked a photo of Peter O’Toole to illustrate a brief account of someone else. Well, it’s because that picture instantly brings to mind the first of Jarre’s memorable Oscar-winning scores: Lawrence of Arabia.

Accomplished film composers have existed for nearly as long as there’s been a Hollywood, but except for John Williams, I don’t think that one has emerged as a name brand in his own right—and the latter’s fame was surely enhanced by his 14-year association with the Boston Pops.

But once you see that picture of O’Toole, more likely than not, the majestic theme of Lawrence of Arabia will resound in your head—as distinct a contribution to that epic’s grandeur as the spectacular cinematography of Freddie Young.

So indelible were the sounds created by Jarre that his soundtrack for the film was voted #3 on the American Film Institute’s 25 Greatest Film Scores of All Time, surpassed only by Williams’ Star Wars and Max Steiner’s Gone With the Wind.

Yet the soundtrack that Jarre produced for Lean’s next epic, Doctor Zhivago, produced an even more inescapable melody: “Lara’s Theme,” a hit international single.

Oscar honors came yet again for Jarre for his work on that 1965 film, then again 19 years later for what turned out to be Lean’s last big-screen epic: A Passage to India.

As Jarre’s agent and friend Richard Kraft noted in a 2009 appreciation for The Hollywood Reporter, Jarre came to the U.S. when pioneering symphonic-oriented film composers such as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold were passing from the scene, replaced by Elmer Bernstein, Alex North, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith interested in new sounds.

Although Jarre’s conservatory training leaned heavily on percussion, he shared the younger composers’ interest in different musical textures, using instruments that evoked the settings of his films, as seen in:

*The Man Who Would Be King, featuring sarangi and sarod, or Indian lutes;

*Ryan’s Daughter, with eight harps among the “lot of little experiments in the sound, music and concept” that Jarre mentioned in an August 1993 interview with Susan King of the Los Angeles Times;

*Witness, relying on synthesizers;

*The Dead Poets Society, with Celtic harp and flute layered over synthesizers.

Hired by producer Sam Spiegel, Jarre found Lawrence of Arabia a far more complex and high-stakes job than any he’d experienced in French theater and cinema. It was on a grand scale, requiring more than two hours of music; Lean was editing the second part of the film first, so Jarre would have to compose out of chronological order; and he had only six weeks to compose and conduct.

Making matters worse, as Sheila O’Malley noted in a perceptive 2007 blog post, Adrian Boult was engaged to record the soundtrack because British subsidies would not fund a foreign conductor, even though the first rehearsal made it plain that Boult didn’t know key aspects of what he was about to take on, such as keep an eye on the chronometer and an eye on the screen. (Boult ended up on the film credits, even though he didn’t record a note.)

Early on in researching this post, I wondered what Jarre’s personality was like—an inquiry triggered by Williams’ recent comment in an interview with Variety Magazine in which he discussed the older breed of film composers: “Alex North, David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith and others — brilliant, beautiful talents. All unhappy.”

I’ve come to think that, while Jarre might have been a “brilliant, beautiful” talent, he was far from “unhappy”, with these traits among his most prominent:

*Perfectionism: Lean helped instill this characteristic, Jarre explained in commentary for a tribute concert for the director recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

*Loyal: Jarre worked on the last four films completed by Lean and was starting on a fifth, an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel Nostromo, before the project died with the director’s death from cancer.

*Convivial: At the time of the composer’s death, Bernard Miyet, then leader of French musicians’ guild SACEM, praised his friend’s “eternal good nature, a way of living and a simplicity that became legendary.” Jarre loved to regale listeners with anecdotes spotlighting the films and personalities he had known over the years, including how during an L.A. recording session, his entire orchestra stopped playing after spotting actress Sophia Loren in the technician’s booth.

This Day in Classical Music History (Copland-Scored ‘Our Town’ Opens in Theaters)

May 24, 1940-- Our Town, Hollywood’s adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Thornton Wilder, with a screenplay by the playwright himself, was released in the United States. 

The movie, distributed by United Artists when Americans feared being drawn into an overseas war, appealed to critics and audiences alike for affirming eternal values found in even the smallest communities in the country. It went on to be nominated for six Academy Awards.

When writing about a collaborative medium like film, there are all kinds of subjects to consider. In the case of Our Town, I could talk about how it represented a step forward for William Holden after his debut in Golden Boy; how director Sam Wood expertly guided the other members of the cast; and how producer Sol Lesser worked to win Wilder’s approval of the finished product.

But instead, I will focus on another aspect: the score by Aaron Copland. It fits squarely into a roughly 15-year period, from 1935 to 1950, when this and other works such as Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, Hoe-down, and A Lincoln Portrait virtually redefined the notion of “Americana” in music. 

At first glance, the 39-year-old product of Brooklyn might seem an unlikely candidate to render a small-town setting created by Wilder. But in fact, he had already begun to do so the year before, with his score for John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which had enabled him to morph from a modernist art composer to one working in a mass medium. 

When Copland discovered that Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corner was inspired by Peterborough, N.H., where the composer had created several of his own works, he felt an immediate affinity with the playwright and setting.

In a 1980 interview with Roger Hall, Copland explained the delicate balance maintained by film composers: “When you’re writing music for a film, you know that it’s not going to be listened to like concert music. People should be absorbed in the story of the film. Very often they don’t even know that music is going on, though it affects their emotions. The music mustn’t get in the way. But on the other hand, it must count for something.”

Our Town represented a particular challenge. The playwright was at pains to dispense with conventional stagecraft, to allow the text to convey his deepest meanings. 

“Each individual’s assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner,” Wilder wrote in a preface to this and to his two other most successful plays, The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker. “And here the method of staging finds its justification — in the first two acts there are at least a few chairs and tables; but when Emily revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birthday, the very chairs and tables are gone. Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind — not in things, not in ‘scenery.’...The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.”

But film is a vastly different medium from the stage. Wordless closeups can convey all that a playwright might try to express in a five-minute monologue. In fact, extensive talk is antithetical to the combination of movement and image inherent in the concept of “motion picture.” On the other hand, music can subliminally express this emotion, as long as it remains unobtrusive.

Studio executives and Wood were "counting on the music to translate the transcendental aspects of the story,” Copland later recounted. “I tried for clean and clear sounds and in general used straightforward harmonies and rhythms that would project the serenity and sense of security of the story."

The experience with Our Town was successful and pleasant enough that four years later, Copland arranged his soundtrack for an 11-minute orchestral suite, dedicating it to protege Leonard Bernstein. That compressed take (here in this YouTube clip) has become a staple of symphony orchestras since then.

As he had been for Of Mice and Men, Copland was nominated in the Oscar categories Best Music, Score, and Best Music, Original Score for his work on Our Town. He would be nominated two years later in the category Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for The North Star before finally winning at the close of the decade for his score for The Heiress.

But the latter film marked the end of Copland’s Hollywood activity. Director William Wyler cut and unevenly dubbed much of the composer’s carefully wrought music, and Copland now had enough financial resources that he could afford to be more selective about his projects. As a result, the only other movie that Copland worked on for the rest of his life was the 1961 independent production Something Wild.

More disappointing for Copland, he never got the chance to work with Wilder again, despite the great esteem the two had for each other. When Copland broached with Wilder the idea of collaborating with him on adapting Our Town for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the playwright declined: 

“I'm convinced I write a-musical plays: that my texts 'swear at' music; that they're after totally different effects; that they delight in the homeliest aspects of our daily life . . . Music and particularly opera is for the unlocked throat, the outgoing expressive 'idea and essence' behind our daily life. I hope my plays don't lack that idea and essence, but they singularly shrink from an explicit use of it. They are homely and not one bit lyrical.'' 

If Copland’s association with Wilder was fleeting, the composer’s influence on subsequent Hollywood film music was enduring, most notably in soundtracks by Elmer Bernstein (To Kill a Mockingbird), Randy Newman (The Natural) and James Horner (Field of Dreams). 

The latter two baseball films so vividly evoked the wistful pastoral nostalgia associated with “America’s pastime” that Spike Lee decided to go directly to the original source, so to speak, in recasting the image of a different sport. For He Got Game, the director borrowed directly from Copland with the selections “The Open Prairie," "Appalachian Spring," "John Henry," "Lincoln Portrait," "Hoe-Down."

(The image accompanying this post shows William Holden and Martha Scott from the film Our Town.)

This Day in Music History (Death of Oscar-Winning Film Composer Jerry Goldsmith)

June 21, 2004—Jerry Goldsmith, a prolific and versatile Oscar- and Emmy-winning composer of film and TV scores that deserve to rank with the classics of the studio system, died at age 75 after a protracted, arduous battle with cancer.

Chances are, you may have heard a Goldsmith score without realizing it: he did, after all, create around 250 soundtracks over nearly five decades in the business. The next time you find yourself humming the theme for the series The Waltons, for instance, you have Goldsmith to thank.

Surely you’ve guessed by now that the image accompanying this post is not of Goldsmith, but of a scene from one of his most prominent projects, The Omen, the 1977 horror film that earned him his only Academy Award. Director Richard Donner and producer Harvey Bernhard urged Twentieth Century Fox studio head Alan Ladd Jr. to increase the film's post-production budget so they could hire Goldsmith, whom they had come to believe, after seeing him live at the Hollywood Bowl, would be just right for the project. Ladd did so, and Donner subsequently became convinced that the film's eventual box-office success owed much to the mood Goldsmith was able to create with his score: his most avant-garde music to date, relying heavily on a chorus that, even with strange noises (barking, howling, grunts, whispering Latin phrases), were incorporated as if they were musical. 

Yet The Omen was not Goldsmith's only great work onscreen. You also might recall his music from the Star Trek film series, Basic Instinct, The Planet of The Apes, The Blue Max, Patton, The Russia House and Chinatown.

After the success of Easy Rider and American Graffiti in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the wall-to-wall, symphonic motion-picture soundtrack became an increasingly lost art in Hollywood. Directors such as Martin Scorsese, Cameron Crowe and Lawrence Kasdan decided to buy the rights to hit (often rock ‘n’ roll) songs that seemed to fit perfectly a particular scene, rather than collaborate with a composer to create something completely new. It all fit with another trend: Hollywood’s attempt to find songs that, when released separately from the film, could not only drive traffic to the movie but also generate revenues in association with it. Goldsmith, James Horner and John Williams remained the master practitioners of a style that had nurtured some of Hollywood's finest music.

Goldsmith was something of a throwback to the golden age when classically trained European composers, fleeing the Nazis, found work in Hollywood. Max Steiner (Gone With the Wind), Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane and a decade of Hitchcock films), Franz Waxman (Sunset Boulevard), and Erich Maria Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood) contributed scores as integral and memorable to classic dramas and comedies as their scripts, cinematography and stars. Goldsmith learned this vibrant art from one of its best practitioners while studying film composition at the University of Southern California: Miklos Rosza, composer of the Ben-Hur soundtrack.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Goldsmith built his reputation and honed his working methods through such series as Dr. Kildare, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Twilight Zone and the Boris Karloff-hosted anthology series, Thriller. (See my prior post on the latter.)

Thriller may have been especially significant in providing him multiple and varied opportunities to work in different musical styles and in meeting relentless deadline pressure. Each story received its own especially composed musical accompaniment. Goldsmith ended up scoring 10 episodes in the first season alone, one-third of the entire roster that year. The complete series DVD allows listeners to hear these compositions not just within the contexts of the episodes, but as separate entities.

Eleven years ago, Film Comment magazine published an article titled "Soundtracks101 – Essential Movie Music: A Listener's Guide." Five of Goldsmith’s made this list of 101 classics.

Goldsmith, like many of his peers, was subject to an unfortunate aspect of his collaborative craft: often, his soundtracks were a good deal better than the films they were meant to accompany. He worked as a master of one medium that was meant to support another. In addition to those titles already listed here, readers (and film fans) might also want to listen to A Patch of Blue, The Wind and the Lion, Papillon, Lilies of the Field, The Sand Pebbles, and Total Recall.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Hitchcock’s Music Master, Bernard Herrmann)

June 29, 1911—The premature birth of Bernard Herrmann to Russian immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side was not unlike how he conducted his career as Hollywood’s greatest film composer: loud, insistent, immediate—an undeniable event.

In a career stretching from 1941 to his death in 1975, Herrmann composed the music for 48 movies, from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver.

But of course, Herrmann’s most sustained work was done with Alfred Hitchcock. The association, which lasted a dozen years, coincided with the Master of Suspense’s creative zenith: nine films, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds. (Hitch-like, Herrmann made his own cameo appearance as what he really longed to be—an orchestra conductor—at the climax of the director’s 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.)

Of all the people with whom Hitchcock collaborated over five decades behind the camera, Herrmann might have been the most important, because he gave these thrillers a dimension that the image-conscious Briton, according to Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano, "didn't have a language for": music and sound.

Herrmann had strong opinions about when music was most appropriate, and didn’t mind arguing with Hitchcock about it. Sometimes he felt a theme was necessary instead of silence, as when he pushed for a leitmotif in Vertigo when James Stewart’s haunted detective Scottie has a shock of recognition over a woman eerily reminiscent of the woman he loved. Other times, however, the composer resisted any attempt to show off his craft if he felt it would have detracted from the action. Thus, in North by Northwest, he allows silence to prevail for much of the early part of the famous cropduster scene, allowing audienceanxiety to build over Cary Grant’s isolation in a seemingly empty field.

Amazingly, though Herrmann was nominated for his film debut as a composer, Citizen Kane (as brooding and brilliant as friend Orson Welles’ direction) and did win for his uncharacteristically sprightly work for The Devil and Daniel Webster in the same year, he did not win—and was not even nominated—for any of his movies with Hitchcock. You have to ask why, especially when those screeching violins in Psycho are as memorable as the rapid-fire shower murder images it accompanies.

The only reasons I can imagine why Herrmann was overlooked were that a) he didn’t need the recognition (he was famous not just for his movies with Hitchcock, but also for his TV work --Alfred Hitchcock Presents, of course, and The Twilight Zone); and b) he was a prickly guy who annoyed enough people that they didn’t want anything to swell his ego any larger than it was already.

Film historians have remarked on Herrmann’s affinity for Hitchcock (the composer was evidently a devout Anglophile), but the person whose temperament was closer to his was Orson Welles. Both were classic enfants terribles who made their marks in their twenties. Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’ bon mot about his co-screenwriter/director (“There but for the grace of God, goes God”) registered strongly in the studio system.

But Herrmann might have been even worse. While Welles might have simply ignored a boss, Herrmann would tell his off. Jim Fusilli’s excellent appreciation of the composer in today’s Wall Street Journal included this line thrown at CBS’ William S. Paley, a media mogul not easily crossed: "You're assuming the public is as ignorant about music as you."

That volatility also ended his partnership with Hitchcock. The director had put up with Herrmann’s various fits over the years (including, but not limited to, his rage that he did not conduct the orchestra for his own score of Vertigo), but was less inclined toward equitability during the filming of Torn Curtain in 1966.

The subpar performance of Marnie led studio brass to put their foot down concerning use of music in Hitchcock’s films. Executives, like their brethren elsewhere in the industry, badly wanted a hit song or two that could boost profits even more than usual. Even the grim subject matter and milieu of Hitchcock’s new project--Cold War espionage and murder--didn’t put them off: Heck, hadn’t Doctor Zhivago scored with “Lara’s Theme” the year before?

Hitchcock made a point of telling Herrmann beforehand exactly what he wanted. The composer agreed, then turned in the kind of brilliant but traditional work he’d always done before. That led to a blow-up between the two men, who never worked together again--and who never had the sustained, multi-year success with others that they had with each other.

“I believe that only music that springs out of genuine personal emotion and inspiration is alive and important,” Herrmann once said. That uncompromising nature led him into exile from Hollywood for several years after the Hitchcock quarrel, but it also ensured that film fans--even those who might not associate his name with a project--would experience extraordinary sounds that memorably--but appropriately--served the story and the character.