The man on the podium was short and stocky, grizzled and growling, with a chewed cigar in one hand and an elegant conductor’s baton in the other. One contemporary newspaper described him as looking “more like a fight promoter than a musician.” Yet whenever that baton began to sway and the Paramount orchestra began to play, magic was birthed into the world, magic that sounded like this:

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That’s a beautiful melody titled “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” and it was written for the movie Shane by one of Hollywood’s premier musical talents, the composer Victor Young. He was, in the words of his colleague and best friend, the equally great composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Searchers), “a very, very talented composer, excellent orchestrator, and wonderful violinist” whose seemingly endlessly inventive stream of lush melodies during a two-decade career as head of Paramount Pictures’ music department came to define Hollywood film scoring.

Born the poor son of a Chicago opera singer in 1900, a chance encounter with an old violin at the age of five (and his mother’s fateful decision to have the instrument re-stringed for him to play with) turned him into a child prodigy. When his mother died a few years later, both Victor and his sister were sent to live with their grandparents in Poland, where they attended the Imperial Conservatory in Warsaw. Both graduated with honors and played in orchestras all across Europe, but came back to America in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and postwar economic strife in Eastern Europe (at one point a starving Victor, impounded in a German prison, played a three-hour concert for the guards on his violin in exchange for a simple bowl of soup). (more…)

Some time ago, in my eternal quest to set the record straight, I suggested that the true hero of the motion picture industry wasn’t Thomas Edison or D.W. Griffith, not Chaplin or Keaton, not Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer, but the anonymous fellow who first came up with the notion of putting salt on popcorn, thus turning packing material into a concession stand bonanza that costs more per-pound than lox and caviar put together. 

But there are others who, more often than not, get overlooked while far too much praise is lavished on actors and directors.  I refer to the men who compose musical scores for dramatic films.  Although there have been great scores composed for mediocre movies, there has very rarely ever been a great movie that didn’t have a great score. An example of the difference a fine score can make was “Brian’s Song,” a TV movie that would have drowned in its own bathos and banalities if Michel Legrand’s music hadn’t saved it from itself.  (more…)