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 Bess
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