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

Sunday, 7 September 2008

A DISPATCH FROM REUTERS
(1940 - Music by Max Steiner)

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Directed by William Dieterle

Starring Edward G. Robinson as Paul Julius Reuter

A Dispatch from Reuters (1940) tells the story of this man, a German-born British immigrant who wanted to "make the world a little smaller." He started his business in 1850, using carrier pigeons to fly stock prices between Aachen and Brussels. Two years later he had opened an office in London to transmit stock quotations between London and Paris via a new underwater cable. Eventually he was gathering information by means of a large telegraph network and feeding news to the London papers. All the while he built a reputation for speed and accuracy. It was an astounding achievement to relay a major speech by French Emperor Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) as it was being delivered. Later, he scooped Europe with news of Lincoln's assassination.


Technical Data: Reel Tape N.198b {19 minutes}

Music Composed by Max Steiner
Orchestrations Arranged by Hugo Friedhofer
Music Supervised by Leo F. Forbstein

Saturday, 6 September 2008


LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY
(1936 - Music by Max Steiner)

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Directed by John Cromwell

Starring Freddie Bartholomew as Cedric 'Ceddie' Erroll and Dolores Costello

After the death of Cedric ('Ceddie')'s English father, he and his mother live together in Brooklyn. Cedric's grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, had disowned Cedric's father when he married an American. But when the Earl's remaining son dies, he accepts Cedric as Lord Fauntleroy, his heir, and the Earl sends for Cedric and his mother. Cedric uses the first of his newly found wealth to do some favors for his old friends, and then heads to England, where he must try to overcome the Earl's dislike for Cedric's mother.

Technical Data: Reel Tape N. 180 {46 minutes}

Music Composed by Max Steiner

Friday, 5 September 2008


GREEN LIGHT
(1937 - Music by Max Steiner)

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Directed by Frank Borzage and Starring Errol Flynn, Anita Louise Margaret Lindsay and Cedric Hardwicke

Dr. Newell Paige is a dedicated surgeon and physician who is devoted to his patients and to the ethics of his profession. Covering for his mentor, Dr. Endicott, who is consumed by personal problems, Paige operates on a wealthy donor to the hospital, Mrs. Dexter. However, Dr. Endicott rushes in at the last moment and in his haste botches the surgery. Mrs. Dexter dies. An inquiry ensues and Dr. Endicott refuses to take or pass blame. The presumption of guilt then falls on Dr. Paige, who resigns rather than blame his mentor. By accident, Paige meets and falls in love with Mrs. Dexter's daughter Phyllis. When they each learn the other's true identity, Paige leaves rather than cause Phyllis pain, since she blames him for her mother's death. Paige travels to a rural settlement to join his friend Dr. Stafford in a dangerous experiment intended to eradicate spotted fever, which has decimated the local population. Influenced by the religious and ethical expoundings of church dean Harcourt, Paige risks his life in hopes of giving something of value to mankind.



Max Steiner's music is beautifully romantic but oddly unmemorable---which is hard to believe considering his catalog of work (the rousing "Charge of the Light Brigade", for instance, or the classics "The Wizard of Oz" or "Casablanca"). The choristers (boys) of St. Luke's Episcopal Church effectively lend their voices to a few scenes, and would do so in Flynn's follow-up film, "The Prince and the Pauper".

Technical Data: {Reel Tape n.190} {59 minutes}

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

This is the second score for an Errol Flynn's film. Max Steiner scored 17 films starred by him inclduing some memorables as Charge of the Light Brigade, Dodge City, Adventures of Don Juan, They Died with Their Boots On, Santa Fe Trail, The Prince and the Pauper ...

Some of them have already some kind of release (LP, CD original, CD with a re-recording). I plan to include some of the unreleased ones here.

Thursday, 4 September 2008

FIGHTER SQUADRON


FIGHTER SQUADRON (1948 - Music by Max Steiner)
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Directed by Raoul Walsh

Starring Edmond O'Brien and Robert Stack


At an American air base in England, 1943, is conniving Sergeant Dolan, who manipulates everyone, and insubordinate ace fighter pilot Major Ed Hardin. When Ed is promoted to commander of his group, he must fight his former anti-authority stance as well as the enemy; tension grows as D-Day approaches. Generally lighthearted between moments of technicolor gore; lots of air combat footage, much of it genuine.


Max Steiner and Raoul Walsh worked together in 13 movies

Technical Data: Reel Tape N. 238 {47 minutes}

Music Composed by Max Steiner
Orchestrations by Murray Cutter
Musical Direction by Ray Heindorf

Wednesday, 3 September 2008

VIOLENT MEN
(1955 - Music by Max Steiner)

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VOLCANIC! VALIANT! VICIOUS! Violence and Passion the Screen Has Seldom Seen!

Directed by Rudolph Maté

Starring Glenn Ford, Barbara Stanwyckand Edward G. Robinson


A Union ex-officer plans to sell up to Anchor Ranch and move east with his fiancee, but the low price offered by Anchor's crippled owner and the outfit's bully-boy tactics make him think again. When one of his hands is murdered he decides to stay and fight, utilising his war experience. Not all is well at Anchor with the owner's wife carrying on with his brother who anyway has a Mexican moll in town.


Max Steiner composed music for many Westerns as Dodge City, Distant Trumpet, The Searchers, Rocky Mountain, Santa Fe Trail


In the case of Violent Men the film benefits from a particularly stirring score penned by Max Steiner


Technical Data:
Reel Tape N. 245b {22 minutes}

Music Composed by Max Steiner
Orchestrations by Murray Cutter
Orchestra Conducted by Morris Stoloff

This is the first western score I include in the blog. I am not sure if I am a greater fan of Western than Golden Age but they are at the same level in my collection. I try to get any western score available. So this is the first but it is not going to be the last as I am plannig to include all my westerns scores here.

Tuesday, 2 September 2008


FORCE OF ARMS
(1951 - Music by Max Steiner)

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Directed by Michael Curtiz

Starring William Holden and Nancy Olson

Winter, 1943. The German army has halted the American advance in the mountains of Italy; back-and-forth combat decimates Joe Peterson's platoon. On leave in Naples, Joe meets WAC lieutenant Eleanor MacKay; initially cool, she begins to melt during a bombing raid. Their romance develops despite Joe's periodic returns to the front. But whether he'll come back in the end becomes more than doubtful...

Curtiz used to hire Steiner for many of his films Dodge City, Santa Fe Trail, Virginia City, Casablanca, Life with Father ...

Technical Data: Reel Tape N. 245a {23 tracks} {42:13 minutes}

Music Composed by Max Steiner
Orchestrations by Murray Cutter

Monday, 1 September 2008


MARA MARU
(1951 - Music by Max Steiner)

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Directed by Gordon Douglas

Starring Errol Flynn, Ruth Roman and Raymond Burr

Greg Mason, salvage diver in the Philippines, finds his partner Andy drunk and raving about treasure. Whatever it is, somebody wants it badly enough to kill Andy and frame Mason for murder. Cleared by an insinuating private eye, Mason is immersed in intrigue, with detective Rainier, sinister Benedict, mysterious Orgega, and Andy's comely widow all somehow involved. Soon various parties, not really trusting each other, are on a sea voyage to dive for they know not what...



Technical Data: Reel Tape N. 219a {8 tracks} {24:02 minutes}

Music Composed by Max Steiner

Orchestrations by Murray Cutter

Sunday, 31 August 2008


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

Tuesday, 11 December 2007


DIVE BOMBER (1941 - Music by Max Steiner)
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Directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn and Fred MacMurray

A new flight surgeon and a Navy pilot overcome personal differences to work on solving the problem of Altitude Sickness which causes blackouts at high altitude. The real stars of the film are the pre-World War II navy aircraft featured in full color

When Dr. Doug Lee fails to save the life of navy pilot Swede Larson, who blacked out and crashed after entering a steep dive, the flyer's friends take an immediate dislike to him and disparage his efforts to learn more about the problem by becoming a flyer himself. Lee's new superior officer, Dr. Lance Rogers, also exhibits resentment toward the presumptuous newcomer. They ultimately become friends and form a mutual bond of personal and professional respect when their research develops a high altitude flying suit which they hope will prevent the kind of blackouts that killed Swede. Unfortunately the process of experimental testing of the new device proves to be a dangerous undertaking.


Technical Data: Reel Tape N. 199b {12 tracks}{22:41 minutes}


Music Composed by Max Steiner

Musical Direction by Leo F. Forbstein
Music Arranged and Orchestrated by Hugo Friedhofer



Max Steiner
(1888 - 1971)

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My first entry could not be other but Max Steiner.. The "father" of the film music.

Austrian composer who achieved legendary status as the creator of hundreds of classic American film scores. As a child he was astonishingly musically gifted, composing complex works as a teenager and completing the course of study at Vienna's Hochschule fuer Musik und Darstellende Kunst in only one year, at the age of sixteen. He studied under Gustav Mahler and, before the age of twenty, made his living as a conductor and as composer of works for the theater, the concert hall, and vaudeville. After a brief sojourn in Britian, Steiner moved to the USA in the same wave as fellow film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold and quickly became a sought-after orchestrator and conductor on Broadway, bringing the Western classical tradition in which he had been raised to mainstream audiences.

He was soon snatched up by the film studios with the advent of sound and helped the fledgling talkies become musically sophisticated within a brief few years. He was one of the first to fully integrate the musical score with the images on-screen and to score individual scenes for their content and create leitmotifs for individual characters, as opposed to simply providing vaguely appropriate mood music, as evidenced in King Kong (1933), which set the standard for American film music for years to come.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, he was one of the most respected, innovative, and brilliant composers of American film music, creating a truly staggering number of exceptional scores for films of all types. He was nominated for Academy Awards for his scores eighteen times and won three times. Years after his death in 1971, he remains one of the giants of motion picture history, and his music still thrives.


A good link for knowing more about Mr. Steiner
http://chelsearialtostudios.com/maxsteinerpages/
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Periodically I will publish my own Max Steiner Library Collection. Coming from The Max Steiner Music Society tape library that started in about 1965 and terminated in 1981 by the audio engineer was James E. Reising who edited the raw transcribtions and organized them into programs.

I have created an amateur collection of some of these scores. I have edited the transfers cutting the into different track. Then I named these tracks and prepared some artwork for them.




Welcome to Golden Age Film Music

Hi all..

I have created this blog where I would like to show you my golden age film music collection.

I've been collecting film music for more than 15 years. I don't have a really big collection (only around 3500 scores), but I am really proud and happy of it.

I've been lucky to get a great bunch of rare, expanded and unreleased music from Golden Age films. I will show an excerpt of the artwork and information I have created for my rarest acquisitions.

I love to create artwork for my collection trying to make them look as much professional as I can but always giving the touch of a collector. The hardest part is trying to put name to all the tracks. I spend hours and hours trying to do this. But it is really satisfiying once you have everything to start a new cover: Posters, photos, information and tracklisting. Being just an amateur and a music fan I feel like been working in a new release.

Here you will see Max Steiner, Victor Young, Miklos Rozsa, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred Newman ... There are not many places in the web where you will find them together


Stay connected!!!