This is where it
all started (If the first original
music written for the screen is disregarded
– i.e. music for the early French
film, The Death of the Duke of
Guise (1908) composed by Saint-Saëns,
no less).
In the six and a
half years or so that he was at RKO
Radio, Max Steiner, affectionately
known as ‘the father of modern film
music’, forged the new art-form of
original film music. This was based
on accessible Viennese/European late-romantic
traditions that were fast giving way
to the new, less listener-friendly
atonality then invading the concert
halls. Steiner made liberal use of
Wagner’s system of leitmotifs to underline
characterisation. At RKO, he scored,
or was musical director of, seventy
motion pictures. Amongst these was
perhaps his most famous and most lauded
ground-breaking score for King
Kong (1933) - not included in
this compilation.
The suites on these
CDs are taken from materials, including
the original film soundtracks, laid
down in the early 1930s so they are
recorded in that era’s more constricted
mono. But the ear soon becomes accustomed
and the listener is rewarded by a
full appreciation of the genuine Steiner
sound.
(Listeners can hear
highlights of some of Max Steiner’s
greatest scores in modern stereo sound,
including The Informer, on
RCA Victor GD80136 (original LP release,
1973) – ‘Now Voyager Classic Film
Scores of Max Steiner’ recorded by
Charles Gerhardt and the National
Philharmonic Orchestra).
One of the most interesting
tracks in this compilation is the
second bonus of CD2 in which we hear
the voice of Max Steiner rehearsing
the sweet sentimental cue that is
‘Brave Little Women’ from the Katherine
Hepburn film Little Women.
The first CD begins
with the arresting Main Title music
for the 1931 Academy Award winning
western, Cimarron that starred
Richard Dix and Irene Dunne. Here
in the space of just over two minutes
Steiner states one of those memorable,
heroic marches that would become one
of his trademarks. He establishes
time and locale by the inclusion of
that type of Indian war-cry music
that would be another Steiner fingerprint
together with cantering-paced traditional
cavalry tune material. This relatively
sparse contribution to Cimarron
would set the pattern for so many
other westerns.
Symphony of Six
Million also had another memorable
noble march for its Main Title: a
theme that would wend through variations
of many moods according to the twists
of the plot. This was a breakthrough
film for its producer, the great David
O. Selznick. He encouraged the studio’s
thinking about music to progress beyond
a minimal assortment of themes to
enable Steiner to develop an extended
score. The film, based on a Fannie
Hurst tear-jerking novel of love,
sacrifice, struggle and eventual success
against an ethnic background, related
the tale of a brilliant Jewish doctor
who abandons his ghetto clinic for
a more lucrative practice uptown before
he rediscovers his roots. Here, Steiner
established the pattern that would
recur in most of his subsequent RKO
scores: leitmotifs for all the main
characters with variations and one
theme dominating the Main Title and
the balance of the score. The music
is sometimes reminiscent of Liszt
and Wagner and utilises traditional
Jewish music. The notes that accompany
the album indicate how Steiner collaborated
with his long-time orchestrator, Bernhard
Kaun.
Bird of Paradise
was another landmark film score with
music played almost continuously from
beginning to end. It was an exotic
production with a Hawaiian location.
It starred Joel McCrea as an American
sailor whose romance with a native
girl (Dolores Del Rio) violates tribal
taboos and precipitates tragedy. Steiner
striving for authenticity, hired Hawaiian
musicians and singers to add spice
to an already sumptuous tropical score.
We hear shimmering strings, sultry
Hawaiian guitars, music suggestive
of exotic birdsong, the comic drunkenness
of one of the sailors, the menace
of a shark and turbulent storms.
Sweepings, starring
Lionel Barrymore, was a somewhat
downbeat multi-generational saga about
the owners of a department store.
Steiner’s theme ‘The Store’ dominates
the score. The music is playful, sweetly
sentimental, and melodramatic (‘Mother’s
Death’) with some unashamed ‘mickey-mousing’.
Morning Glory
won Katherine Hepburn her first Academy
Award. She played a hopeful young
actress who endures disappointments
in her ultimately successful bid for
a career on Broadway. Steiner created
a lovely waltz for her character that
nicely expresses her gentility.
(The waltz bears a close resemblance
to that used in the ballroom scene
in Jezebel (1938), the Warner
Bros film, again scored by Steiner,
that would win an Academy Award for
Bette Davis.). The waltz is treated
to show her quiet determination and
the highlight, the cue ‘Romeo and
Juliet’, is richly, persuasively and
sensitively scored as Eva, plied with
drink, is persuaded to recite Shakespeare.
The first CD concludes
with a short suite of two cues from
the Leslie Howard and Bette Davis
vehicle Of Human Bondage. This
is based on the W. Somerset Maugham
novel about a young man’s self-destructive
obsession with a cheap tart played
by Davis in her breakthrough role.
Steiner’s Main Title has an opening
flourish that anticipates his score
for The Foutainhead and sets
the action in a glamorous Paris (with
taxi cab noises and a reference to
the Marseillaise and sophisticated
café music). It is mainly concerned
with the sweet ‘Mildred’s theme. Sweet,
plaintive, sentimentality pervades
‘Norah’, the other short cue.
CD2 is devoted to
two Steiner scores for pictures starring
the great Katherine Hepburn: films
of Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women
and Sir James M. Barrie’s The Little
Minister. This is Steiner in sentimental
mood, his music is unabashedly sentimental
and is played with all the stops out
and plentiful use of rubati and portamenti.
Little Women’s
Main Title beginning with harpsichord
chords leading into a sweet, demure
setting of the Josephine (played by
Hepburn) theme soon gives way to the
brashness of Civil War songs immediately
stating time and locale. (Steiner
would repeat this effect in his Gone
With the Wind score). Another
prominent theme is that for Beth the
sickly sister; it is heard in a variety
of colours especially when sombre
minor variations give way to joy as
she enjoys a temporary recovery.
One of the most striking
and amusing tracks is the tongue-in-cheek
melodramatic ‘watch out for the dastardly
villain’ music Steiner uses for the
play the sisters put on, ‘The Witches
Curse’. This employs the most outrageously
cheeky glissandi and takes off Rossini’s
William Tell music. Attractive
period-style waltzes and polkas are
dotted through the score - all uninhibitedly
played.
The Little Minister
is a fey tale set in Scotland and
it represents Steiner at his lush
sentimental best. The score makes
use of a number of well known Scottish
folk melodies but cleverly arranged
so that they glitter and enhance the
storyline (beautiful use is made –
as in Little Women – of the
harp). As usual Steiner employs a
variety of themes used as leitmotifs,
often deployed in counterpoint to
delineate different characters. Babbit
(Hepburn) the supposed gypsy girl
who transforms Gavin Dishart, the
minister, and ‘his community’. Babbit,
Gavin and their love are all allotted
strong individual themes, the latter
reaching a powerful emotional climax
in ‘Babbit and the Minister at the
Well’.
The opening glisten
of the Main Title immediately suggests
a fairy-tale-like magic. The main
romantic theme, one of Steiner’s loveliest
tunes, is wrought in the Scottish
tradition. There is wry humour too
especially in the drone-like music
for Wearyworld the policeman and darker
shadings over the sentimentality for
‘The Minister Wounded’.
The fourth CD is
devoted to two sturdy masculine dramas.
The Informer, starring Victor
McLaglen, Margot Graham and Preston
Foster, and directed by John Ford,
gained Steiner the first of his Academy
Awards. It is represented here by
an eleven-track 31½ minute suite.
It is set in Dublin, in the early
1920s, the years of struggle against
English domination. This is a dark
score befitting a Judas-like tale
of betrayal of a colleague-in-arms
by the anti-hero Gypo Nolan (McLaglen)
for money so that he and his girl
Katie, might escape to America. Steiner
uses a grimly black relentless march
to represent Gypo and its feminine
inversion for his girl-friend Katie
that is expressed in a variety of
colours depending on the context (e.g.
with a bluesy saxophone or by strings
and harp for her intimate moments
with Gypo). Gypo’s theme is developed
and used to make musical associations
between him and the rest of the characters.
The warmest, most sympathetic music
is reserved for, the victim’s sister
Mary (played by Heather Angel) while
the source music, the traditional
‘The Wearing of the Green’ represents
Frankie and the rebels. A dissonant
descending four-note progression signifies
the tainted money. The score closes
with a moving chorus signifying ‘Forgiveness’
for a shot showing Gypo being pursued
into a church. Steiner had the advantage
of conferring with screenwriter, Dudley
Nichols before the film’s production
and was very meticulous in his scoring
so much so that at one point he spent
ages timing his music to coincide
with every drip of water that falls
on McGlagen on his prison cell.
But the main part
of the second CD is devoted to the
music for another, earlier John Ford
film, The Lost Patrol, another
bleak story. This time it’s an adventure
film set in Mesopotamia during the
First World War when a patrol of British
soldiers is lost in the desert and
picked off one-by-one by off-screen
Arab snipers. The cast is headed by
Victor McLaglen as the sergeant and
Boris Karloff, cast against type,
as the religious fanatic, Sanders.
Steiner’s score for
The Lost Patrol won him an
Oscar nomination. It was the first
purely dramatic score to be so nominated.
Only when the film was completed was
Steiner approached to write the music.
At first it was intended that only
the first reel was to be scored but
when it was seen how superbly Steiner’s
music enhanced the film, its release
date was pushed back so that the composer
could proceed to score the whole film.
His music, for me one of the best
of his RKO years, brilliantly deepens
and intensifies the drama. Belying
the intense pressure Steiner and his
arrangers must have worked under,
to complete the music, it does not
sound skimped or rushed. On the contrary,
Steiner took pains to maximize his
orchestral colours. Take for example
his use of droning woodwinds to suggest
bagpipes (as they had done also in
The Little Minister)
and his instruction to the chorus
to sing in cupped hands to suggest
a moaning, scouring desert wind. On
hearing this suite, the listener will
be immediately struck by the familiar-sounding
‘Arab’ theme for Steiner would use
it again, eight years later, over
at Warner Bros., as the Main Title
music for Casablanca. Strains
of his The Charge of the Light
Brigade march will also be recognised.
As might be expected a military march
is strongly featured, first proud
and patriotic, then weary and despairing.
Bugle calls are heard throughout,
imaginatively coloured, at one point
‘trumpeted in the hat’ and often suggesting
the ‘Last Post’. Much of the music
refers to the characters and backgrounds
of the individual doomed soldiers.
Gentleman soldier, Brown (Reginald
Denny) in ‘Memories of Malaysia’ has
a rollicking urbane theme (reminiscent
of the swagger of Steiner’s Charge
of the Light Brigade music), Sanders
has a prayer-like motif that darkens
and becomes desperate as in his madness
he rushes from the protection of the
trench to his death. Pearson, the
idealist is represented by a harmonica
rendition of ‘Pack up your troubles’
and noble material that, in its continued
usage, ensures that his ideals linger
on after his death. The sergeant is
the only man left when rescue ultimately
arrives; his thoughts of home are
represented by waltz music and by
measures reminiscent of a music box
that suggests small children in the
nursery.
The accompanying
72-page booklet is a mine of information
about the films featured in this compilation
(with many advertising poster illustrations
as well as a number of studio production
photos showing Max Steiner at work
in the RKO Music Department). There
are notes about all the scores together
with a succinct introductory background
article by James D’Arc, Curator, Brigham
Young University Film Music Archives,
and a remembrance of Max Steiner essayed
by Louise Steiner Elian who was the
harpist in the RKO Studio Orchestra
and was married to Max from 1936 to
1946.
A compilation that
no student of the earliest days of
Hollywood’s Golden Age of Film Music
can afford to ignore
Ian Lace
BYU (Brigham Young University) FILM MUSIC ARCHIVES
FMA-MS110 [3 CDs: 77:22 + 63:06 + 73:09]
