Newman: All About Eve

Of all the talented, groundbreaking composers who busied themselves during Hollywood's golden age, Alfred Newman was perhaps the most powerful, most influential and certainly most insightful. Yet, for all the praise lavished on his vast work as a composer, conductor and administrator, Newman has received scant attention in the recent spate of film-music re-recordings. At least one reason involves the films he scored. Many were top-flight productions in their day, but they now lack the enthusiastic, faithful followings boasted by Warner Bros.' Errol Flynn swashbucklers and Humphrey Bogart film-noir classics, Universal's vintage monster movies and the special effects-packed Ray Harryhausen spectaculars. "What attracts so many people isn't just the music but the film itself," conductor and composer Fred Steiner, foremost expert on Newman's music, lamented in 1996, more than a quarter-century after Newman's death. "Some of the films Alfred Newman scored then don't have drawing power today. Wuthering Heights may be OK, but whoever heard of Beloved Enemy? It's not like the popularity of The Adventures of Robin Hood or Gone with the Wind. Of course, then again, the last thing we all need is another re-recording of Gone with the Wind!" One can also argue that Alfred Newman's wonderful scores have been handicapped by the very fact he so effectively set the tone for much film music of the 1940s and 1950s - literally and figuratively. Although he wrote in a richly romantic idiom that owes much to Richard Strauss, Newman shaped it in such a successful manner that many other composers in Hollywood quietly adopted similar stylistic tendencies (though precious few succeeded in furnishing scores that functioned as well as his). Today long-dead film composers with particularly individualistic styles; Erich Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin and Max Steiner spring to mind, cannot help standing out against the standard so firmly set by Newman from his perch as music director at 20th Century-Fox. This may well be why their music - so different from that Hollywood norm - is also given more attention today. In any case, the neglect Newman's film music experiences is unwarranted, especially considering such soaring, swashbuckling scores as Captain from Castile (1947) and Prince of Foxes (1949), religious dramas such as The Song of Bernadette (1943) and The Robe (1953) and gargantuan epics such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Considering the huge number of films Newman scored and the quality he sustained till his death in 1970, it's remarkable he approached composing with such reluctance. Yet he did. "Newman worked on a total of 225 films and toward the end admitted that it was too much to have done," author, producer and long-time Newman friend Tony Thomas wrote in Film Score: The View from the Podium. "As a conductor, he was probably the finest ever to work in films. It was what he most loved to do, and the many who played under his baton claim that had circumstances been different, he would most likely have been an outstanding symphonic conductor. Despite his talent as a composer, he did not enjoy the work of sitting and inventing music. A most gregarious man by nature, the loneliness of composing disturbed him, and he admitted he often sat for hours looking at blank music paper before being able to write a note." In an interview on occasion of the recording at hand, veteran film-music orchestrator Arthur Morton echoed this insight concerning Newman's immense talents at the podium, though he also outlined certain preferences: "He was reluctant to do anything outside the studio. When he went to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl, I remember he was a nervous wreck. But inside the studio, in front of an orchestra - and, let's face it, 20th Century-Fox had the best - he was an absolute master. He loved conducting and he was good at it."