Thirties Flashback: Film Music Column

By Bruno David Ussher

Edited by G.D. Hamann

We have a special treat this week in reprinting a critic's column on film music from 61 years ago. Bruno David Ussher was a Los Angeles music critic (and Professor of Music Criticism at the University of Southern California) for many years for different Los Angeles newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals from at least the 1920s and into the 1950s. During the years 1938-1941, his column appearing in the Los Angeles Daily News (not connected with the current Los Angeles Daily News) regularly covered film music. The columns presented below comes from the forthcoming book "Music in Film," a collection of Ussher's film music columns, edited by G.D. Hamann for the Filming Today Press. For further information on the book, please contact Mr. Hamann at Filming Today Press, 2365 Scarff Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007 or by e-mail at GDHamann@Juno.Com. Filming Today Press has published over 100 books of newspaper coverage in the 1930s on film stars, character actors and film directors.

Here's the first column, coming at us from...

Background music accompanying most of Walter Wanger's film Stagecoach lifts this screen play far above the level of the so called Western. Exceptionally beautiful to behold, gripping one's dramatic sensibilities, Stagecoach becomes more heroic, more human, more American and convincingly western because of the music. For that matter this ample score is based almost entirely on 17 American folk tunes.

This being the month when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences makes awards for the best achievements during the last twelve months, I believe that film composers and scorers will have to exert themselves considerably during the current year if they wish to outdistance Stagecoach music during next February's nominations. This is the most remarkable because four men have collaborated on the music Richard Hageman, Frank Harling, John Leipold and Leo Shuken. Boris Morros is screen credited for music direction.

Some one may tell me that Stagecoach is not an "original score" because of the fact that the music is founded to a considerable extent on tunes popular during the early 1880s, such as "Ten Thousand Cattle," "Home on the Range," "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair" and a dozen others. I grant that this is a point to be conceded, but to a certain extent only. These four composers have wrought a background fantasia genuinely of their own making, just as Victor Herbert made Irish melodies his own in his well known orchestra piece, just as Brahms created a new opus in the "Academic Festival" overture, crammed full with traditional German student songs.

It is quite unimportant at this time to what extent Hageman, Harling, Leipold and Shuken have invented the tunes which make the finished product of their imagination and skill so engaging. Of much more account is the story heightening, character deepening manner in which their joint work adds inner poignancy of emotion and power of action to occurrences on the screen. Not original? Something much better, here is a superbly American composition.

Producer Wanger's script makes his characters plausible enough. The music provides them with an emotional three dimensionality which only these plain, tender, larking melodies can create. Or rather, it is the other way around. Here is the spontaneous singing of men and women incredibly brave in a truly disarming, unpretentious and therefore unpremediatedly heroic fashion.

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