Choose 10 Golden Age must-haves
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Someone came up to you and asked you to list 10 – and only 10 – Golden Age must-haves. You can only choose one per composer. Which would it be? Let’s put a cut-off point at 1948, since that’s what most histories do (the Paramount verdict, television, suburbanization).
It’s a tough call, but I think mine would be:
Alfred Newman – THE SONG OF BERNADETTE
Bernard Herrmann – THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR
Dimitri Tiomkin – IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
Erich Wolfgang Korngold – THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX
Franz Waxman – REBECCA
Hugo Friedhofer – THE ADVENTURES OF MARCO POLO
Miklos Rozsa – THE JUNGLE BOOK
Ralph Vaughan Williams – SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC
Victor Young – GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
Virgil Thomson – THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINSWhat would yours be?
Good choices already and nice to see the rarely mentioned Virgil Thomson. One score per composer is tough to choose 😉
As you say, one per composer is a tough. But, today, my list would be:
Bernard Herrmann – THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR
David Raksin – LAURA
Erich Wolfgang Korngold – THE SEA HAWK
Franz Waxman – THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
Gottfried Huppertz – METROPOLIS
Herbert Stothart – THE WIZARD OF OZ
Max Steiner – KING KONG
Miklós Rózsa – SPELLBOUND
Ralph Vaughan Williams – SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC
Sergei Prokofiev – ALEXANDER NEVSKYI might have misread the topic.
I read “favourite” when you meant “must have”. But, as my favourites are must-have I left my list unchanged. 😉
I think ‘must-have’ and ‘favourite’ are more or less interchangeable in this case. Must-haves to YOU. Listings of just classic, important scores would be far more boring.
Of course, the cutoff point at 1948 means that I can’t choose my favourite score by some of these. My favourite Waxman score is PEYTON PLACE, for example, but that came out in 1957 and hence too “new”.
If 1948 is the cutoff point then Victor Youngs AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS being from 1956 is disqualified. And also Hugo Friedhofer’s SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD from 1955 😉
Ugh. You’re right. Don’t know what happened there. Scrolling my iTunes collection too quickly, without double-checking dates, I suppose. Anyways, replaced with GULLIVER’S TRAVELS and THE ADVENTURES OF MARCO POLO.
Well, I normally would count Golden Age until around 1959 and had totally missed that at first.
You all listed a lot of my favorites, so I tried to list some else for variation but still got some “duplicates”:
Max Steiner – King Kong
Franz Waxman – Bride Of Frankenstein
Erich Wolfgang Korngold – The Adventures Of Robin Hood
Dimitri Tiomkin – Red River
Gottfried Huppertz – Metropolis
Edmund Meisel – Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Prokofiev – Iwan The Terrible
Miklos Rosza – Thief Of Bagdad
Alfred Newman – Captain From Castille
David Raksin – LAURAGreat list, Malte!
Well, I normally would count Golden Age until around 1959 and had totally missed that at first.
Well, there’s no 100% answer. But generally, 1948 is used as the cut-off point because the Paramount verdict ended vertical integration, and television challenged feature films. So it’s generally seen as the fall of the classical “Golden Age” Hollywood studio system; they at the very least had to re-think their strategy (with indie films, spectaculars etc.). But I know that the late, great David Bordwell extended the type of films made until about 1960 in his seminal book Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), even if the studio system was rather different after ’48.
So just a convenient cut-off point for lists and recommendations like these.
Okay, I always thought that the generaly end of music department system and Alfred Newman’s departure as 20th Century Fox’s head was counted as the cutoff point.
Yeah, I think that’s just part of the general dismantling that happened in the years following 1948, or rather the re-organization into something else.
My list would probably be a mishmash of the lists above.
Korngold’s Robin Hood
Thief of Bagdad
Waxman’s Rebecca is fine, but I would have prefered his Sunset Boulevard, even though that was 1950.
Steiner’s Treasure of Sierra Madre should be there.
And William Alwyn’s Odd Man Out even though that is British and not Hollywood. But I think, some of the scores mentioned above aren’t Hollywood either.
From Herrmann I would probably rather chose Citizen Kane or Jane Eyre.I am a great Herrman fan as well but somehow tend to his later works and especially the Hitchcocks. I never really warmed up with GHOST AND MRS. MUIR somehow.
There are lots of great British scores. The “concert hall favorite” WARSHAW CONCERTO by Richard Addinsell is also actually film music.
I’m not good at destilling favourites into lists, but here goes:
Korngold: The Adventures of Robin Hood
Walton: Henry V
Korngold: The Sea Hawk
Chaplin: City Lights
Korngold: Captain Blood
Bliss: Things to Come
Steiner (& Hupfeld): Casablanca
Newman: Wuthering Heights
Raksin: Laura
Newman: The Mark of ZorroHonourable mentions (released shortly after the cut-off year 1948):
Waxman: Sunset Boulevard
Herrmann: On Dangerous Ground
Rozsa: Young BessI’m not good at destilling favourites into lists
But that’s the whole fun of being a film music nerd! Lists for life!
In seriousness, good selections.
Would love to get more from MARK OF ZORRO than that one suite Roy Budd recorded. And I am still wondering why there has been no proper re-recording of CAPTIAN BLOOD besides suites.
Looking good, Thor! 😉
Would love to get more from MARK OF ZORRO than that one suite Roy Budd recorded. And I am still wondering why there has been no proper re-recording of CAPTIAN BLOOD besides suites.
Agreed on both accounts. Some choices for re-recordings by Stromberg and the likes baffle me when we have gems like these that are mostly unavailable.
Yes, that whole ABBOTT & COSTELLO thing recently baffled me. But I have no connection to those guys, the films or the scores (I keep confusing them with Laurel & Hardy anyway).
I think this is a US vs Europe thing, Abbott & Costello are probably don’t have the fan base over here. Actually I barely know them by name but grew up with Laurel & Hardy.
I loved watching Abbott and Costello when I was growing up. But I have no connection with the music in their films. I find the music of this new release just annoying. Well done, but annoying.
But for Laurel and Hardy, I loved their shows and the music featured in what they did. Their short films were constantly being repeated and became very familiar with certain cues becoming favourites of mine.
A similar experience to the oft-repeated original STAR TREK series : lots of repeats and lots of re-using of music in those repeated episodes.
Here in Germany their shorts ran in the early evening time for kids being named “Thick and dumb” (“Dick und doof”) and with new music. Same with of Charlie Chaplin shorts.
Somehow I have no memory of seeing any Abbott and Costello. I have only sampled that new release – it’s on the streaming service of my public library – and it is quite micky mousy.
OK, ok, I give this a shot… 10 Golden Age must-haves, cut-off point at 1948, and only one per composer. Were it not for the “one per composer”, it would be easy, I could just list every Miklós Rózsa or Bernard Herrmann score. But I stick to the parameters.
In chronological order:
Aaron Copland: The City (1939)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold: The Sea Hawk (1940)
Roy Webb: The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
Hans J. Salter & Paul Dessau: House of Frankenstein (1944)
Franz Waxman: Rebecca (1940)
Bernard Herrmann: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
Miklós Rózsa: The Lost Weekend (1945)
Max Steiner: Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Dimitri Tiomkin: Red River (1948)
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Scott of the Antarctic (1948)
When it comes to Rózsa, I started with “Double Indemnity” before I changed that to “The Red House”, until I settled for “The Lost Weekend”… Rózsa really did some great work in that period. As I said, I probably could fill the list with just Rózsa and Herrmann. 🙂
There was a lot of discussion of THE RED HOUSE on FSM recently. I remember giving it a chance a few years ago, and it didn’t do much for me. But I’m going to give it another chance now. Everyone seems to love it.
This was actually a thread I did on FSM in 2010, but which I won’t replicate. I’d rather just post the original question once more:
I know that rejected scores is not an exclusive modern phenomenon (Herrmann’s TORN CURTAIN, North’s 2001 and so on are early examples), but was it very common in Hollywood films between, let’s say, 1930 and 1950 (just to have a specific timeframe)?
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