Showing posts with label Max Steiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Max Steiner. Show all posts

Best Music, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
(Song) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
(Song)  
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
Max Steiner, Since You Went Away.

A highly accomplished homefront drama, produced by David O. Selznick with his usual obsessive attention to detail (and to Jennifer Jones, who plays one of Claudette Colbert's daughters; the other is the teenage Shirley Temple). This was the thirteenth nomination and the  third Oscar for Steiner, who would receive eleven more nominations. 

(Scoring of a Musical Picture)
Morris Stoloff, Carmen Dragon, Cover Girl.

 If this colorful musical had a better story and more chemistry between its leads, Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth, it might have been a classic, considering that it has songs by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin. The truth is, only the nominated "Long Ago and Far Away" is one of their top-drawer songs. After making his debut in For Me and My Gal in 1942, this was Kelly's first musical, made on a loanout to Columbia, which gave him free rein on the choreography, on which he was assisted by Stanley Donen. Kelly and Donen then returned to MGM and glory. Dragon achieved his greatest fame as a conductor and arranger at the Hollywood Bowl, and as a recording artist with the Bowl's symphony orchestra. His son, Daryl Dragon, was the Captain of the Captain and Tennille, stars of a hit TV variety show in the 1970s. This was his only Oscar. It was the first of three wins for Stoloff, who accumulated nineteen nominations. 

(Song)  
"Swinging on a Star" from Going My Way. Music by James Van Heusen; Lyrics by Johnny Burke.

Van Heusen changed his name from Edward Chester Babcock when he was in his teens and working as a radio announcer. He teamed with Burke in 1939, and their hit song for Tommy Dorsey, "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," launched Van Heusen's long association with Frank Sinatra. Paramount hired the team to write songs for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's Road films. This was the first of four Oscars for Van Heusen -- the other three were for songs written with Sammy Cahn. It was Burke's only Oscar, although he was nominated two more times for songs written with Van Heusen, and once each for the lyrics to melodies by James V. Monaco and Arthur Johnston. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
David Raksin, Laura. 

Once again, Darryl F. Zanuck's obsession with promoting Wilson led to a nomination for Alfred Newman's score, when the real hit of the year was Raksin's Laura theme and the variations on it that constitute his film score. The theme became a hit song, one of the most-recorded of all time, when Johnny Mercer's lyrics were added to it, but because the song wasn't actually in the film, it was ineligible for an Oscar. Raksin would receive two nominations, for Forever Amber and Separate Tables, but never won an Oscar. After a stint with Benny Goodman, Raksin went to Hollywood in 1935, where his first assignment was the score for Charles Chaplin's Modern Times. His work as a composer and orchestrator led to Newman's hiring him at 20th Century-Fox, and when Newman passed on the score for Laura, Raksin took on the job.   



 (Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Georgie Stoll, Meet Me in St. Louis. 

 Stoll, a former child prodigy on the violin, began working in Hollywood in 1935 and joined the MGM music department in 1937. He became a favorite conductor of Judy Garland's after working with her on The Wizard of Oz. He received nine nominations, but his only Oscar win was for scoring Anchors Aweigh.  



 (Song) 
"Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" from Christmas Holiday. Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser.

 Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly in Christmas Holiday. Sounds like a cheerful musical treat, doesn't it? But it's a dark melodrama about a woman who escapes from a miserable marriage and becomes a nightclub "hostess" (the Production Code's word for prostitute). It was produced by Durbin's husband-to-be, Felix Jackson, as a way of changing her image from the well-scrubbed girl next door of her earlier musicals. Robert Siodmak directs from a screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz loosely based on a novel by Somerset Maugham. The song is one of the best of Loesser's earlier works, before he went on to fame as a Broadway composer. The failure to nominate it is understandable: Durbin sings it with little expression -- she has other things on her mind -- in the sleazy nightclub setting. But she later recorded it in a more romantic mode, and it has since become a standard. 
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Best Music, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

 The Academy had ironed out most of the wrinkles in its new category names, reassuring people that scores for comedies were as welcome to be nominated as those from dramas. There still remained some problems with allowing each studio or production company to submit a nominee. Universal nominated a song called "Pig Foot Pete," which it said was in Hellzapoppin', the film version of a Broadway revue that starred Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson, and Martha Raye. The trouble was, the song wasn't in the film. It had actually been sung by Raye in Universal's 1941 release Keep 'Em Flying, an Abbott and Costello movie, and hence was ineligible for the Oscar. The Academy admits that it has no idea how this mistake happened.

The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 

(Song) 
... when they should have been ...  
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
Max Steiner

Between his first Oscar, for The Informer, and this one, Steiner had also composed the score for Gone With the Wind. The next year he would write the music for GWTW's chief rival for the Great Hollywood Romantic Movie, Casablanca. Interestingly, he won the Oscar for neither of them. But the unstintingly romantic score for Now, Voyager is one of his best.   



(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Ray Heindorf, Heinz Roemheld, Yankee Doodle Dandy. 
Ray Heindorf
Heinz Roemheld
Heindorf was signed to a contract at Warner Bros. in 1932 and remained there for his entire career as a film composer, becoming head of the music department at the death of Leo Forbstein in 1948. This was the first of his three Oscars out of a total of eighteen nominations. This was Roemheld's second nomination and his only Oscar. A child prodigy on the piano, Roemheld was born in Wisconsin, but studied in Berlin. A prolific composer, his music has been used in more than 400 films.


(Song) 
"White Christmas," from Holiday Inn. Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.       
Irving Berlin
Virtually overnight, "White Christmas" became one of the most popular songs of all time. Berlin had written the song in the 1930s and set it aside, but it was a perfect fit for Holiday Inn, when Berlin himself came up with the idea for a musical set in a hotel that opens only on holidays. He was also nominated for original story for this idea. The instant popularity of the song owed much to the film's release during the first year of the United States's involvement in World War II, when it captured the mood of homesick soldiers and the families that missed them. This was Berlin's only Oscar, even though he composed dozens of great songs for the movies, notably for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals of the 1930s, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, and Carefree. A Berlin song, "Blue Skies," was one of the first ever sung on the screen, in 1927's The Jazz Singer. His last work for the movies came thirty years later, the title song for Sayonara, which had once been proposed as a Broadway musical for Berlin.     
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Best Music, 1935

Awards presented March 5, 1936

The Academy was still accepting write-ins and indicating who placed second and third. The scores for Mutiny on the Bounty and for write-in candidate Captain Blood came in second and third, respectively. "Cheek to Cheek" was the second-place song and "Lovely to Look" at came in third.

The nominees were ... 
(Scoring)
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Scoring) 
The Informer, RKO Radio Studio Music Department, Max Steiner, head of department (Score by Max Steiner). 

(Song) 
"Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935, Music by Harry Warren; Lyrics by Al Dubin. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Scoring) 
Captain Blood, Warner Bros.-First National Studio Music Department, Leo Forbstein, head of department (Score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold). 
Erich Wolfgang Korngold

His name inevitably produced the joke that his music was "more corn than gold," but he was one of the most successful and most admired film composers of his day, eventually winning an Oscar in his own name for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) after winning one for Leo Forbstein, the head of the music department at Warners, for Anthony Adverse (1936). (At the time, the Oscar went to the music department head, and not to the composer.) As a child prodigy in Vienna, his early compositions were praised by Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. His opera Die tote Stadt, which had its premiere in 1920 when Korngold was twenty-three, was a hit, and was performed at the Metropolitan in New York two years later. After falling out of favor, it has been revived in recent years, and its most familiar aria, "Glück das mir verblieb," originally a duet for soprano and tenor also known as "Mariettas Lied," is frequently performed by sopranos in recitals. Korngold also drew the attention of the Viennese theatrical entrepreneur Max Reinhardt, who collaborated with him on productions of Die Fledermaus and La belle Hélène, and brought him to Hollywood to arrange Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream when Reinhardt's production was being filmed. Korngold returned to composing and conducting in Vienna, where he wrote the score for Captain Blood, integrating some themes by Franz Liszt with his own, so he declined to be credited as composer. The rise of Hitler and the Anschluss of 1938 drove him into exile in America. 

      

(Song) 
"Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat, Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin. 
Irving Berlin

Berlin is, of course, the most famous and admired of all the great songwriters of the 1930s and '40s. But it's easy to undervalue him because of his tendency to sentimentality and hyperpatriotism (both in abundance in the too-familiar "God Bless America," for example). But this song finds him inspired as only a great composer might be by the voice of Fred Astaire and the dancing of Fred and Ginger. Consider the astonishing dramatic shifts in mood and melody found in ''Cheek to Cheek'': The song starts with the dreamy ''Heaven/I'm in heaven'' theme, which it repeats, then breaks into the buoyant ''Oh! I love to climb a mountain'' theme, repeating it (''Oh! I love to go out fishing''). And then, suddenly, there's the ecstatic command to ''Dance with me'' -- before the singer settles back into the first theme: ''The charm about you/Will carry me through/To heaven/I'm in heaven....'' The song may have been written for Astaire and Rogers to dance to, but it stands, or rather dances, on its own.




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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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