Music: Pop Records

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"Movie music," said Sir Thomas Beecham, "is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica." For years, audiences approached screen music with what the industry regards as a more eupeptic attitude: they ignored it. Although isolated scores such as Max Steiner's music for Gone With the Wind caught the public fancy, Hollywood's rule-of-baton used-to be that a good score is one the audience does not hear.* Now film scores have become big sellers on the pop market. The change was foreshadowed by The Third Man theme and by Dimitri Tiomkin's High Noon; both tunes were dramatically part of the movies whose titles they bore, but also became huge independent hits. Nowadays a producer may assign a composer to do a title tune even before he casts the leading roles or raises all his money. Even mere accompaniment scores without notable single tunes are selling on LPs. Currently there are more than 200 movie LPs, and record men are unreeling more as fast as they can tape them.

The current boom started when Decca taped the palpitating score by Elmer Bernstein (no kin to Leonard) for The Man With the Golden Arm found itself with an unexpected hit on its hands. Decca is now high on the charts with the soundtrack music of Around the World in 80 Days by Victor Young. Other companies have rushed into vinyl with the sound tracks of such uncertain musical bets as Mogambo, The Pride and the Passion, Hot Rod Rumble. By and large, present-day studio composers seem a trifle more sophisticated than the practitioners of "Micky Mouse" music in the '30s, when whole orchestras simply hurtled into the bass clef when a character tumbled downstairs. Columbia's The Bridge on the River Kwai, by British Composer Malcolm Arnold, skillfully melds its bellowing brasses and shivering strings with such traditional military airs as the Colonel Bogey March in a score long on pomp, short on circumstance. RCA Victor's Bonjour Tristesse, by French Composer Georges Auric—member of the sometime modernist group known as The Six*—offers the listener a deft American Express tour of the French psyche, is at its best when it cuts loose with some lowdown jazz hot.

But even the best screen scores—laden with what the industry calls "the old gutseroo"—suffer from the terrible facelessness that is the bane of most movie music. "We can write symphonic music," a Hollywood composer once boasted, "almost as fast as an orchestra can play it." More often, the scores sound as though the orchestra had started wandering from the mark before the composer finished his job.

Other pop records:

Tonight (José Melis, his piano and strings; Seeco). A collection of standards —Love Is a Simple Thing, Harbor Lights, One Morning in May—played by a 40-year-old Cuban supper-club pianist (and member of the Jack Paar TV show). Melis has a nice, unpretentious fancy and an attack as clean as a sea breeze. Particularly pleasant when he cuts loose from all those viscous strings.