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

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!!!