way O.T.: Waxman/Bartok/Schumann

[barry guerrero]

The final movie of this year's S.F. film noir festival (Noir City) was the big Joan Crawford melodrama, "Possessed".  The music was by Franz Waxman. Needless to say, it was a very good film score. The story is fundamentally centered around Crawford's obscession for a handsome but rugged man who is a mechanical engineer, who can also play a haunting Schumann piece on the piano - quite well, at that. He's not nearly so interested in her. Naturally, the story is then developed from there and becomes far more complicated, with several other main characters getting intimately involved. At one spot, Waxman blatantly lifts an opening motif from Bartok's "Concerto For Orchestra". It's where the low strings play a series of ascending perfect fourth intervals, and then come back down. Waxman didn't attempt to disguise his lifting from Bartok, as he voiced those intervals exactly the same way. I think it was even in the same key. A bit later, he copies some of the eerie night music from the central movement of the "Concerto For Orchestra" too. Anyway, the extent to which these movies are dependent on a good film score is just amazing. For example:

One rare film that they showed was titled "Pushover", with Fred MacMurray (before "Double Indemnity"), and a very young and delicious looking Kim Novak - her very first movie, in fact. The film score was positively atrocious! At one point, just when the music should sound very tense and noir-ish, the composer, Robert Morton, wrote something that sounded like Elgar (my friend made the same comment). With a decent, more appropriate sounding score, and a bit of tightening up - editing, in other words - "Pushover" could become an outstanding film noir.

The film that I consider to be the grand-daddy of all film noirs, "The Big Sleep" - which is a big Bogart/Bacall vehicle - has a truly outstanding film score by Max Steiner. To me, Steiner's score is an integral part of why this is such a successful film adaptation of a classic Raymond Chandler story. I can't begin to recommend the DVD of "The Big Sleep" too highly - it's that good.

Anyway, thanks for reading this off-topic nonsense. I happen to like good film scores. Perhaps Mahler would have also.

[Leo K]

Great post...

I happen to like good film scores. Perhaps Mahler would have also.

The main title music to Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn sounds alot like the 2nd Movement of Mahler's 7th...so much so that I often think of Mahler's 7th as the Star Trek Symphony

My favorite film score is Bernard Herriman's Vertigo.  Herriman used to visit Charles Ives when he was 17 years old!  He said the 2nd movement of the 4th was his musical Bible,if I recall correctly.

[barry guerrero]

Max Steiner:



Franz Waxman: