To Touch a Moment

Music education that takes place in the dark classrooms of the movie theater begins with the lesson that love is a violin. Soon the moviegoer learns that modern jazz means trouble in the streets and that war is brass with cymbals. Worry and fear are both cellos, bravery is a trumpet call, and God is the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. Film fans once trusted such associations implicitly, like cobras listening for their charmer's clarinet, but lately they have been startled by the sound of surprise. The new and higher esthetic of the film has made a greater range of emotion and circumstance available to Hollywood's composers, and the modern film score has attained a dignity it never had in the days when Cecil B. DeMille said, "If you can't whistle it, it's no good."

The function of the film score has always been the same: to touch the essence of the moment on screen. When it works, it comments on the action as words or pictures seldom can--warning of perils, praising the good, cursing the bad. A good score can enrich an actor's performance or make the heart flip at the camera's glimpse of the sky. The new movie music being written in Hollywood accomplishes all this with a freedom and imagination all but unknown to films ten years ago. An art has emerged from within a craft.

A Sweet Ambiance. Elmer Bernstein's brilliant jazz score for Man with the Golden Arm was among the first to depart from the prewar formula laid down by such old masters as Max Steiner, who has written more than 200 scores. Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront and Alex North's Streetcar Named Desire were part of the same revolt. The Third Man's zither score had an insistent, mechanical inevitability that suggested a man out of control of his fate. Viva Zapata! rang with the violent sound of revolution, and Breakfast at Tiffany's, for which Henry Mancini wrote one of the best film scores ever, was lighted with a sweet ambiance that had the very taste of caviar.

Mancini, 39, is universally considered the king of the trade (TIME, May 25, 1962), with scores such as Experiment in Terror, TV's Peter Gunn and the brand-new Charade to his credit. With him, North, Dimitri Tiomkin, Elmer Bernstein, Ernest Gold and Miklos Rozsa share most of the significant action: together they write the music for at least a dozen pictures a year. Among new composers, Jerry Goldsmith, 34 (Lonely Are the Brave, Freud), and Jazzman John Lewis, 43 (No Sun in Venice, Odds Against Tomorrow), are the most admired. The young writers have completely abandoned the customary 100-piece orchestra of Tiomkin's heyday; for next month's Shock Treatment, Goldsmith uses a chamber orchestra and a chilling array of electronic instruments.

Embarrassing Case. Hollywood composers are among the world's best-paid ($25,000 or so for a 45-minute score and about six weeks of their time), but their working conditions are esthetically punishing. Because sound-track music must be written to fit snatches of action that are timed to the second, it rarely makes sound musical sense--and heard apart from the film, it seldom makes sense at all. Except for a few haunting cases such as Forbidden Games, Black Orpheus, Limelight, movie scores are usually forgotten together with their movies, despite the recent proliferation of sound-track LPs.

Producers can also complicate things by insisting on jimmying a pop tune into a movie--as in the presently embarrassing case of Elmer Bernstein's Love with the Proper Stranger. The function of the tune is merely to promote the picture, and never mind the music. And the film industry is likely to give its Oscar to the score that got the best play on the hit parade. This year Riz Ortolani's Mondo Cane is a probable winner, thanks to its theme song, More, even though John Addison's Tom Jones and Mancini's Charade are clearly superior scores.

Something of Value. The stock of composers has lately risen in Hollywood. They are booked before the script is written and consulted all the way through the shooting. They can argue the merits of their music with more luck than in the past, and their work is likely to get a fair share of the volume instead of being drowned by sound effects and dialogue. But Tiomkin, who gave credit to Bach, Beethoven and Mozart when he accepted his Oscar for The High and the Mighty, now says that the idea that film music is something of value is nonsense. "I'm not doing music in pictures," he says, "I'm trying to be part of the picture. When I'm Rachmaninoff, that's when I'll do a concert suite."

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