Showing posts with label Harold Arlen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harold Arlen. Show all posts

Best Music, 1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
And the Oscar went to ...  
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 

Miklos Rozsa with Oscar presenter Ginger Rogers
One of Alfred Hitchcock's less-successful films, marred by the meddling of producer David O. Selznick and his fascination with psychoanalysis: His own shrink, May Romm, receives screen credit as "psychiatric advisor." Among the mistakes was having Salvador Dalí design dream sequences that in the end had to be cut to about two minutes of screen time. Even Selznick's wife, Irene, called it "a terrible piece of junk." It's not quite as bad as that, since Hitchcock didn't take it nearly as seriously as the producer did, and it has eminently watchable stars, Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. This was the first of three wins out of sixteen nominations for Rozsa, who began his career as a screen composer with fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda in London in 1935, and moved to Hollywood in 1940. Selznick and Hitchcock wanted Bernard Herrmann to score Spellbound, but he was unavailable. Rozsa made use of the theremin, an early electronic instrument, in his score, and for the one he did for The Lost Weekend.   



(Scoring of a Musical Picture)
Georgie Stoll, Anchors Aweigh. 

 Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra play sailors who fall for the same woman, Kathryn Grayson, with predictable consequences for their friendship. Grayson's nephew is played by nine-year-old Dean Stockwell. The songs by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn are pleasant, and Kelly and Sinatra make an enormously appealing team. The choreography is by Kelly, and Sinatra proves to be a surprisingly good dancer. The movie, directed by George Sidney, was Kelly's first big hit for MGM. After his 1942 debut in For Me and My Gal, the studio seemed to be unable to find anything for him to do, so it loaned him out to Columbia for Cover Girl, in which he displayed his ingratiating athletic style of dancing for the first time on screen. Anchors Aweigh is lightweight stuff compared to later Kelly films such as An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain, and it features MGM's usual tedious appearance by pianist Jose Iturbi, but its highlight is the wonderful sequence that was suggested by Stanley Donen, in which Kelly dances with Jerry, the mouse from MGM's Tom and Jerry cartoons. This was the only Oscar for Stoll, who had been a music director and conductor for MGM   
since 1937. 


(Song)
"It Might As Well Be Spring," from State Fair. Music by Richard Rodgers; Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.

A musical remake of the 1933 film version of the novel by Phil Stong, directed by Walter Lang from a screenplay by Hammerstein, starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, and Vivian Blaine. This is the only original film musical written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, though each had collaborated with other lyricists or composers on other films. In addition to the Oscar-winning song, the score also included "It's a Grand Night for Singing" and "That's for Me." Crain's voice was dubbed by Louanne Hogan, and although Andrews had a trained voice and once thought of becoming an opera singer, he is dubbed in his only brief vocal moment by Ben Gage. This was Rodgers's only Oscar nomination and win; Hammerstein had already won for "The Last Time I Saw Paris" from Lady Be Good and received three more nominations.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Song) 
"Accentuate the Positive," from Here Come the Waves. Music by Harold Arlen; Lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

 Betty Hutton plays twins -- one smart, one silly -- who have a nightclub act but decide to do their part during the war by joining the Waves. The smart twin falls in love with Bing Crosby, and the silly twin tries to break them up by pretending to be her sister. Goofy nonsense, directed by Mark Sandrich, that is now remembered almost solely for Arlen and Mercer's classic, introduced by Crosby and Sonny Tufts in a blackface number. The minstrelsy is kind of unforgivable, but if you can tolerate it, just listen to Crosby demonstrate why he was one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. The accompanying dance number, choreographed by Danny Dare, is pretty good too. 

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Best Music, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 

Newman's score is reserved and dignified, without relying on "heavenly choir" clichés. While Max Steiner's Casablanca score is more stirring, it leans heavily on other musical sources, such as the "Marseillaise" and Herman Hupfeld's "As Time Goes By." If what you're looking for is originality, Newman probably deserved the award, the third of his record-setting nine Oscars. 



(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Ray Heindorf, This Is the Army.

 Originally a hit Broadway revue, entirely performed by soldiers, that also toured military bases, the film version supplies a frame story about Jerry Jones (George Murphy), who writes a World War I revue called Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which was an actual show written, like This Is the Army, by Irving Berlin. Comes the next war, and it's the turn of his son, Johnny (Ronald Reagan), to write his own show. The spectacle of two future California Republican politicians playing father and son is probably enough to get some people's attention, but there's also Berlin himself singing "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" and Kate Smith doing (what else?) "God Bless America." This was the second of Heindorf's three scoring awards.   

(Song) 
"You'll Never Know," from Hello, Frisco, Hello. Music by Harry Warren; Lyrics by Mack Gordon. 

 Social-climbing Barbary Coast saloon keeper John Payne and rising star singer Alice Faye fall in love in this stale musical trifle. The Oscar-winning song, performed by Faye in her most misty-eyed fashion, was a big hit because it expressed the sentiments of couples separated by the war. This was the second of Warren's three Oscars, but the only win out of nine nominations for Gordon. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
George Bassman, Roger Edens, Hall Johnson, Georgie Stoll, Cabin in the Sky. 

 We should know enough by now not to complain about the Academy's choices, especially when it comes to music, but how the hell it passed over this extraordinary musical in the nominations remains a mystery equal to the ones it later raised, when it failed to nominate any of the songs from A Hard Day's Night and Saturday Night Fever. At least it did take note of the great Arlen-Harburg song "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe." The original Broadway version had songs by Vernon Duke and John Latouche, including the title song as well as "Taking a Chance on Love" and "Honey in the Honeycomb," though they were ineligible for the Oscars. But the film also had music performed by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, and John Bubbles. And the film had to be scored by someone. Looking at the IMDb credits, I've singled out Bassman, the orchestrator; Edens, the musical adapter; Johnson, the choral arranger; and Stoll, the musical director, as the likely overlooked nominees. 



(Song) 
"That Old Black Magic," from Star Spangled Rhythm. Music by Harold Arlen; Lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

 Part commercial for Paramount, part flag-waving "salute to the boys in blue," this all-star revue on a story about a studio gatekeeper (Victor Mature) pretending to be head of Paramount. Switchboard operator Betty Hutton tries to keep Moore's son, a sailor played by Eddie Bracken, from learning the truth. Meanwhile, the studio musters its resources to put on a show for the Navy. Those resources include Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and dozens of other stars, as well as directors Cecil B. DeMille and Preston Sturges, all playing themselves. With that much talent it's a wonder that they chose the bland Johnny Johnston to sing Arlen and Mercer's hit song. This was the year that Arlen had three Oscar nominees for best song, two of them with lyrics by Mercer. Arlen, though he racked up nine nominations, won only once, for "Over the Rainbow." Mercer, on the other hand, won four Oscars and was nominated nineteen times.
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Best Music, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940

 One thing became clear this year: Everyone was confused by the distinction between "Original Score" and "Scoring." Why, for example, was Aaron Copland's music for Of Mice and Men nominated in both categories? And why was Herbert Stothart nominated for Original Score, when much of the music in the film was by Harold Arlen and a pastiche of themes by Schumann, Mussorgsky, and Mendelssohn? Clearly the voters were confused, since they gave Stothart the Oscar for his "originality." It would take the Academy until the 1941 awards to solve this problem.

The nominees were ...  
(Original Score) 
(Scoring) 
(Song) 
... when they should have been ... 

(Original Score) 
(Scoring) 
(Song)* 
*Under the Academy rules this year, studios could submit only one song, which means that MGM couldn't submit "Good Morning" and "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady" along with "Over the Rainbow," which was bound to win. But I threw them in because nobody cares about "Faithful Forever" or "Wishing" anyway.

And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Score) 

 It was MGM's fault for nominating Stothart in the Original Score category and not for Scoring. Of the actual nominees for Original Score, the clear winner would have to be Max Steiner's familiar music for Gone With the Wind. 

(Scoring) 

The themes on which Stagecoach's score is based sound like a collection of Western-movie clichés: "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair," "Shall We Gather at the River," and so on. And it's not quite clear why it took four accomplished musicians to assemble them into a score: Hageman was a Dutch-born conservatory-trained composer, conductor and pianist; Harling was an Englishman who had studied at the London Academy of Music; Leipold had film music credits going back to 1928; and Shuken's career as an orchestrator for the movies stretched from 1936 to 1974, two years before his death. 

(Song) 
"Over the Rainbow," from The Wizard of Oz; music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. 

The familiar story goes that studio head Louis B. Mayer and producer Mervyn LeRoy thought the song slowed the movie down and should be cut, and only the insistence of associate producer Arthur Freed and Judy Garland's vocal coach, Roger Edens, kept it in the film. Even lyricist E.Y. Harburg has been cited as thinking Harold Arlen's melody more suited to Nelson Eddy than to a Kansas farm girl. All of this may be true, although at MGM what Mayer wanted is usually what you got. Freed's argument was that the film needed a song that would serve as a transition from Kansas to Oz, and he was, of course, right. It became one of the most beloved songs of all time, especially after Garland's troubled life gave Harburg's wistful lines a special poignancy. Neither Harburg nor Arlen ever won another Oscar, but together and in collaboration with others they are responsible for some of the greatest songs ever written. 
  


... when they should have gone to ...
(Original Score)
Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky.

Sergei Prokofiev
It is one of the greatest film scores ever written, but it's unlikely that Joseph Stalin would have allowed Mosfilm, the production company, to enter it in so bourgeois capitalist a competition as the Academy Awards. Prokofiev, who had left Russia after the revolution but returned in 1936, was under constant political scrutiny, but his teaming with director Sergei Eisenstein on the historical epic Alexander Nevsky was looked on favorably. It was released in the Soviet Union in December 1938 to great acclaim, and was well-received in its 1939 release in the United States. Unfortunately, the whiplash alliances of wartime Europe caught up with the film when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in August 1939. Nevsky, which is blatantly anti-German, was pulled from circulation. Then, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, it was just as quickly restored to screens. Prokofiev's music was integral to the film: He worked closely with Eisenstein, who sometimes shot and edited footage to match the composer's music, just as Prokofiev composed to match the director's visuals. On the other hand, the sound recording for the film was poor, so Prokofiev transformed his score into a cantata with orchestra, chorus, and mezzo-soprano soloist. It's still very much part of the repertoire of symphony orchestras, and is often performed by them in tandem with screenings of the film.

 

(Scoring)
Herbert Stothart, The Wizard of Oz. 
Herbert Stothart
This is where Stothart's achievement belongs. Because if his Wizard of Oz is not a great Original Score, it's still a great score, as the San Francisco Symphony demonstrated last year when it performed a reconstructed version of the score (the actual score had been trashed during the great sell-off of MGM property in 1970) along with a screening of the film. Although MGM erred by placing him in the wrong Oscar category, it's not entirely true that Stothart didn't compose any of the score of The Wizard of Oz -- he wrote these themes, for example: 

And the melding of the Arlen themes and the reworked classical motifs with Stothart's own compositions is skillfully done. Stothart had been a composer and orchestrator on Broadway before being hired by Louis B. Mayer in 1929. He worked as composer at MGM for his entire career, until his death in 1949, but although he was nominated nine times, this was his only Oscar.

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Best Music, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935

 Music was an inevitable category for the Oscars, particularly in the mid-1930s, when the golden era of popular song was in full sway: Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Arlen, Carmichael and others were reaching their peak creativity. At the same time, composers and musicians were fleeing from Nazism, Stalinism, and the growing threat of war in Europe, bringing with them new ideas and new sounds for film scores. There would be controversies and various reshapings and renamings of music award categories as the years passed, the film musical flourished and faded, and popular music discovered new audiences. 

The nominees were ... 
(Scoring) 

(Song) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Scoring) 
One Night of Love, Columbia Studio Music Department, Louis Silvers, head of department (Thematic Music by Victor Schertzinger and Gus Kahn). 
Although the Oscar went to Silvers as head of the music department, the nomination at least cites the real composers, Schertzinger and Kahn. 

(Song) 
"The Continental," from The Gay Divorcee, Music by Con Conrad; Lyrics by Herb Magidson. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Scoring) 
The Gay Divorcee, RKO Radio Studio Music Department, Max Steiner, head of department.
Max Steiner


 It's hard to know how much Steiner had to do with the actual arrangement of the Cole Porter song Fred and Ginger dance to here, if anything. His nomination came about because for the first few years of the music Oscars, the award went to the head of the studio music department, and not to the composer. But he is credited with the score for the parts of the film that don't feature singing and dancing. And he was one of the most prolific and skilled composers of film scores in Hollywood history. Born in Vienna to a musical family -- his godfather was Richard Strauss -- he studied with Johannes Brahms. But he fell in love with musical theater and in 1906, when he was only eighteen, he went to London where he conducted the orchestras of various theaters. He was in London when World War I broke out, which made him an enemy alien, but he made his way to the then-neutral United States, and became a Broadway conductor. Scouted by RKO at the beginning of the sound era, he came to Hollywood in 1929. His score for King Kong caught everyone's attention, and he eventually won three Oscars and twenty-one nominations.  

 (Song) 
"Let's Fall in Love," from Let's Fall in Love, Music by Harold Arlen; Lyrics by Ted Koehler. 
Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler 


Arlen, who is heard singing his own song on the recording above (Ann Sothern sang it in the film), would win a real Oscar for "Over the Rainbow," of course, and would rack up eight more nominations, including one for another collaboration with Koehler on "Now We Know" for Up in Arms (1944). The best-known Arlen-Koehler collaboration, however, is on "Stormy Weather," which was written for Ethel Waters to sing at the Cotton Club in 1933. 

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