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Posted: |
Feb 12, 2010 - 2:35 PM
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By: |
Morricone
(Member)
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I have been bouncing around going from the AVATAR thread where Horner is extolled as the greatest story teller the cinema has ever known to the Williams discussion board where "isn't he the greatest composer ever!" pops up regularly. On the Morricone messageboard it is easy to find "Ennio changed the face of film music and left all the others behind" and there is the semi-annual sojourn here declaring "I miss Jerry Goldsmith so much, he was the greatest!" I never indulged in this stuff because I always thought it demeaned the real qualities of these master composers. But recently I thought it must FEEL really great to say something like that. So I have picked the only one of my kings who doesn't get as much gushing as the others and let fly:
Elmer Bernstein is IT! No one else has been there when everything was happening. From his baby steps in filmscoring smack in the midst of it's golden age, whose eastern European influences he could emulate expertly, to his innovative modern approach in SUDDEN FEAR (1953) (with woodwind solos and an "intimate" approach which showed he had a foot in both worlds). He had already started out as a strong young contender when a number of events honed him into a master.
In 1952 he met Charles Eames, the groundbreaking designer whose work, with wife Ray, in industrial design, furniture design, art, graphic design, film and architecture is famous the world over. Eames had made a film about the concepts that made the computer possible and Elmer scored it and throughout the next 25 years and 30 short films (all during Elmer's hollywood career) they truly would go where no man had gone before. Film score geeks probably are just familiar with "Toccata for Toy Trains" but cinema students have seen "The Powers of Ten" a film that begins with a wide shot of the known universe and ends within the subatomic particles of a man's hand. Yeah, Elmer scored that one too.
Event two was the Mccarthy era and his "gray listing". He would learn a lot of life lessons AND music ones too. He couldn't work on anything above ground so he was stuck the likes of CAT WOMEN ON THE MOON and ROBOT MONSTER but they taught him how to make due with practically nothing! The people at Capitol records (where he recorded these in 1952) were impressed with the sound you could get when you used a Novachord, a Hammond B3 organ, some electrified instruments and an extremely small orchestra. They went wild for those early electronics. So did many over the years. In retrospect if someone were to ask me what score is the best marriage of electronics and conventional instruments I would pick Bernstein's THE CARETAKERS.
The third event was meeting David Wolper. After doing "Hollywood and the Stars" Elmer did a long series of award winning documentaries that changed the face of that artform including the National Geographic series that retains his "accidental" theme to this day.
Meanwhile back in Hollywood Elmer broke the blacklist with a one-two punch that no one ever forgot. One from controversy-magnet Otto Preminger hiring him to do THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, the first jazz score in history. Alex North may have incorporated jazz influences into his score but Elmer's was the first to incorporate jazz riffs into his, which, let's face it, is the definition of what jazz is. He opened things way up for Mancini and a ton of others. In the mean time punch number two came when, while working on dances for THE TEN COMMANDMENTS it's composer Victor Young became ill and he inherited the whole score under the auspices of Cecil B. Demille, the man who created the blacklist (on the artists side of things)! Elmer could write old Hollywood with the best of them. There has got to be a dozen leitmotifs in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, these days I am lucky if I can hear one. And in the exodus scene he learned how to score faster than what is ostensibly on screen. Add to that he did it all again in THE BUCCANEER which Demille did not have the health to direct himself. As a dubious honor Elmer used to joke he scored more major director's swansongs than anybody else. The last films of Demille, Fred Zinnemann, William Wyler, John Ford and Michael Curtiz were all done by him.
Elmer Bernstein, along with Jerome Moross, sashayed Coplandesque American writing into the western score with THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, which Jerry Goldsmith called the “greatest western score ever written.” Indeed if you want to make the ultimate cliché film music concert you HAVE to include PSYCHO, JAWS, GONE WITH THE WIND, the James Bond theme, THE PINK PANTHER and THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, all for instant identification. Having been stereotyped as king of the western score he used that power to explore many angles of the western including the starkness of Serge Bourguignon’s arty THE REWARD, the western jazz of THE SCALPHUNTERS, the spare modern western score for HUD, the gentle satire of FROM NOON TO THREE and the epic comedy THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL that has enough themes for a musical, in fact, it has 4 songs. Also mainstream Hollywood could finance this experimentation since John Wayne hired him to “give me another MAGNIFICENT SEVEN” for the next 16 years (and he came damn close in THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER).
In 1957 when BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI had made a hit of the Colonel Bogey March there was a clamoring for an original hummable march. Way before William’s Indiana Jones march Elmer created THE GREAT ESCAPE. It set the tone for many a score and practically the rest of Ron Goodwin’s career. Robert Zemeckis’s and Bob Gale’s academy award winning student film A FIELD OF HONOR is totally built around that march. And, again, Elmer would only follow-up with very different approaches; British ZULU DAWN, Israeli CAST A GIANT SHADOW and an extraordinary meld of march and Vienna waltz BRIDGE AT REMAGEN.
More stereotypes followed but he used every one to explore different styles of music extending jazz to the classic SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and STACCATO TV series. And further To Cajun jazz in WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, to the African-calypso fusion of RAMPAGE, 70s funk of LIBERATION OF L.B.JONES, Ye Old English WHERE’S JACK, the gospel folk of GOD’S LITTLE ACRE, the Polynesian HAWAII, the Vegas SILENCERS, the pschedelia of I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS, Rock-a-billy BABY THE RAIN MUST FALL and on and on. And speaking of BABY, Glenn Yarbrough’s chart topping rendition of that song wasn’t the only popular song Elmer wrote. Brook Benton’s WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, Johnny Cash doing THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER, Jack Jone’s LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER and even Vikki Carr on THE SILENCERS all got some airplay. Elmer did lots of theater including the 2 musicals MERLIN and the Tony winning HOW NOW DOW JONES. He wrote dance music for OKLAHOMA, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and PETER PAN. And let us not forget his ultimate challenge. Ivan Reitman getting him to score the animated epic HEAVY METAL. Rock reviewers were assigned to review this film across the country and an amazing amount of them referred to Elmer’s score as the glue that melded the disparate heavy metal songs together into a coherent whole. I’ll go further and say this was Elmer’s STAR WARS and would have been recognized as so if the subject matter wasn’t so marginal for the time.
Now John Wayne wasn’t the only loyal employer Elmer had, Frank Sinatra, in films like SOME CAME RUNNING, CAST A GIANT SHADOW and KINGS GO FORTH remembered the talented GOLDEN ARM composer and when Sinatra did his only conducting album based on the poems of Norman Sickel, there is Elmer doing “Silver”. The fact is Elmer has one of the longer lists of Director-composer relationships ever. They include Cecil B. Demille, Anthony Mann, John Sturges, George Roy Hill, Robert Mulligan, Ivan Reitman, John Landis, Martha Coolidge, Tom Laughlin and Martin Scorsese. Frankly there are few directors of that era he didn’t work with. Vincente Minneli, Stanley Donen, Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Frears, Peter Yates, Henry Hathaway, John Schlesinger, Martin Ritt, Sydney Pollack, Don Siegel, Jim Sheridan and John Frankenheimer all had a go with the maestro. At his peak he had so much work that he passed it on and recommended the likes of Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, Lalo Schifrin, Fred Carlin and Marvin Hamlisch for jobs.
When I starting collecting him in 1965 he already had 20 soundtrack LPs out, more than any other composer. And that status remained with him for at least ten years more. He also had the most bootlegs made of his scores which led him to become the most outspoken activists against them. But he put his money where his mouth was. When fans asked “but then how do we get this music?” he created the Elmer Bernstein Film Music Collection, re-recordings of unreleased scores (available in The Bernstein Collection Box) and Filmmusic Notebook (available through the Film Music Society) to compliment them. Everything mostly out of his own pocket. Even though this experiment failed it led to a lifelong commitment to film music preservation as well as being president of the Society for the Preservation of Film Music from 1996 to 2001. BTW other positions he held include the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (first vice president, beginning in 1963; chair of the music branch with others), Screen Composers Association (director), Composers and Lyricists Guild of America (president, 1970--), National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (founding life member and director) and Young Musicians Foundation (president 1961-71).
But all of this is secondary to the music. Every composer is judged by his highest achievements. Elmer has them in spades. His writing can be as dense as TWILIGHT or KINGS GO FORTH or he can achieve a simplicity, as in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD that goes to the heart of what music is there for. And the effectiveness? How much does Elmer help Shirley Maclaine’s excruciatingly tragic performance at the end of SOME CAME RUNNING earn her an Oscar nomination? At what point did Burt Lancaster’s sensitive portrayal of THE BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ and the imagery of the chicks he nurtures merge with Bernstein’s oh-so-gentle proddings to reach poetic heights? How much of Tennessee William’s repressed sexuality in SUMMER AND SMOKE is expressed through Geraldine’s Page’s performance and how much through Elmer’s smoldering music? How much of MY LEFT FOOT's young Christy Brown's inarticulateness IS expressed through Bernstein's "figures turning in on themselves?" Is Sinatra in MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM trying to get through the DTs, or the “high” of Elmer’s music? Isn’t it Elmer’s music that gets Steve McQueen over that first fence in THE GREAT ESCAPE? Charleton Heston and the special effects go a long way but it is Bernstein’s music that convince us that we are witnessing the hand of God parting the waters in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. And if you want to see the real power of film music just turn the sound off during the exodus in that same movie. Of the myriad titles Saul Bass created (including the Herrmann/Hitchcock ones), is there a more perfect marriage of music and image than the cat stroll in WALK ON THE WILD SIDE? But possibly the most telling is the minutiae of film scoring. The only music in HUD is accompanying rides over the lonely expanse, isolating these small town lives more than anything I could imagine. The few seconds of TRUE GRIT music that accompanies Rooster Cogburn one-handedly cocking his rifles before his final showdown in the meadow does more than any long overworked cue could. Elmer’s entire comedy career for me is encapsulated in the few seconds he vamps as Bluto comes up with the second half of his speech in ANIMAL HOUSE. He not only knows what is funny but knows how to make it funnier. This is the art of film scoring at it’s purest!
Now if you lay ALL of this out on the table you would be hard-pressed to find a career comparable, even among Golden Age composers! At the very least you have to admit there are no film composers that more deserve the designation “ARTIST”.Or you can go further, like me, and say Elmer Bernstein – the greatest film composer ever!
Wow! Now I see what you guys get out of it. That felt great!
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BEAUTIFUL! A wonderful overview of this incredible talent, as insightful as it is enthusiastic! Let's face it, Elmer Bernstein was among the best.
I do believe he is somehow underappreciated by some these days. Back in the 1960's was there ever another composer getting as choice assignments as he?
Well done, Morricone!
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BEAUTIFUL! A wonderful overview of this incredible talent, as insightful as it is enthusiastic! Let's face it, Elmer Bernstein was among the best.
I do believe he is somehow underappreciated by some these days. Back in the 1960's was there ever another composer getting as choice assignments as he?
Well done, Morricone!
Thanks Steve ! It was a friggin' high!
Best post and thread this month!
ADDENDUM- Elmer's work ethic and lovely personal philosophy was so generous, so down to earth and humble. I rarely heard of him thinking ill of another. A gentleman in the truest sense.
THAT'S the word for the man. GENEROUS. To his peers, fans, you name it.
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He's never been my favourite composer to listen to at home, but I have to admit that he knew what he was doing. And he seemed to be very good with people, something that's probably very important for a composer who has to work in movies.
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Yesssss! Bernstein ROCKS!
That post was beautiful, Henry, and a great overview of his career (though more thorough on his early career than later). I have to say I've been disappointed lately how much less attention Bernstein's been getting compared to say, Goldsmith, even though Jerry is my favorite...
Yavar
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Posted: |
Feb 12, 2010 - 4:39 PM
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By: |
joan hue
(Member)
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My first reaction to your Magnificent Opus (or tome) is that Morricone needs to change his moniker to Bernstein!!! 
My second reaction is DITTO, I agree. Others won't, but I do share the same sentiments. He is my absolute favorite composer, and he has written an astonishing amount of stunning compositions.
I'm so glad you "cued" into that cue where Rooster Cogburn cocks his rifle, and when he rides, guns blazing, the music is also magnificent.
I can compare his Magnificent Seven to Katie Elder to Commancheros because of his signature western rhythms and strong themes. So versatile, he composes dramatic, bone-melting music heard in To Kill A Mockingbird. And then there are his jazz compositions, comedic scores, and astounding themes like Walk On The Wild Side. Yep, he's number one for me.
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Greater than Karl Hajos? I remain skeptical.
WHO is that? Please.... no Arcane obscuratum here.
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Greater than Karl Hajos? I remain skeptical.
WHO is that? Please.... no Arcane obscuratum here.
Never mind. I looked him up on IMDB. He composed scores for Z programmers.
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Very nice, Henry.
Bernstein and Goldsmith have always had to duke it out for second and third spot inside my head. They were names we saw on TV and in the movies when we were growing up.
Later, when I knew a little bit more, my mind said Herrmann, but, in my heart, the battle continues on between Bernstein and Goldsmith.
And then it was Waxman who wrote my favorite score, so go figure.
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