Golden Age Film Music

CITY FOR CONQUEST
(1940 - Music by Max Steiner)
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Directed by Anatole Litvak and Starring James Cagney and Ann Sheridan

Cagney is Danny Kenny, a truck driver who enters "the fight game" and Sheridan plays his girlfriend, Peggy. Danny realizes success in the ring and uses his income to pay for his brother Eddie's music composition career, while Peggy goes on to become a professional dancer. When Peggy turns down Danny's marriage proposal for her dancing career, Danny, who wanted to quit the fight game, continues on & is blinded by rosin dust purposely placed on the boxing gloves of his opponent during a fight. His former manager finances a newsstand for the now semi-blind Danny. The movie ends with brother Eddie becoming a successful composer and dedicates a symphony at Carnegie Hall to his brother who listens to the concert on the radio from his newsstand. Peggy, now down on her luck, but in the audience at Carnegie, rushes to Danny at his newsstand where they reunite. The movie is based on a novel of the same name.

The film has one of the finest of Max Steiner's scores from this period, one in which Steiner was able to slip what amounted to a chunk of a symphony into the movie, in an unusual extended music sequence at the end that also helped to make this one of the most ambitiously structured movies of its period.


Technical Data: Reel Tape N. 198a {6 tracks} {16:16 minutes}

Music Composed by Max Steiner
Orchestrations by Hugo Friedhofer and Ray Heindorf
Musical Direction by Leo F. Forbstein