MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Ronald Stein died in Los Angeles ten years ago today, on August 15, 1988, at the age of 58, from pancreatic cancer.

One of the defining musical voices of American low-budget genre cinema, Stein wrote music for more than 140 films during a career stretching from the mid-1950s into the 1970s. He was especially associated with American International Pictures and producer-director Roger Corman, bringing invention and musical seriousness to films including It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Premature Burial and The Haunted Palace.

Louis Ronald Stein was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 12, 1930. His mother, Cecilia, had played piano for silent films and gave him his earliest musical training, encouraging both his musicianship and his fascination with cinema. He studied at Washington University in St. Louis, where he wrote for theatrical productions and worked with the Municipal Opera, before continuing his studies at Yale. His education was interrupted by military service, during which he composed and conducted shows for the U.S. Army Special Services.

After leaving the Army, Stein moved to Hollywood determined to become a film composer, despite receiving discouraging advice from established studio musicians. His opportunity came through Roger Corman, who hired him to score the western Apache Woman in 1955. Stein’s ability to compose and conduct quickly on tiny budgets led to a five-year contract with American International Pictures and an extraordinary period of productivity.

For Corman and AIP he scored a succession of science-fiction and horror films that became cult classics, including The Day the World Ended (1955), It Conquered the World (1956), The She-Creature (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Not of This Earth (1957), The Undead (1957) and Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957). His music was frequently far more ambitious than the films’ budgets suggested, using aggressive brass, restless strings, unusual percussion and strong thematic writing to give monsters and alien invasions a scale the productions themselves could rarely afford.

One of Stein’s best-known assignments was Nathan Juran’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), but he was equally comfortable outside science fiction. His credits included the western The Legend of Tom Dooley (1959), the family adventure The Littlest Hobo (1958), teenage exploitation pictures such as Dragstrip Girl and Hot Rod Gang, and Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The Premature Burial (1962) and The Haunted Palace (1963). He later wrote both the score and wonderfully macabre title song for Jack Hill’s cult horror-comedy Spider Baby (1967), with the song performed by star Lon Chaney Jr.

During the 1960s Stein increasingly worked independently. He scored Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 (1963) and later The Rain People (1969), Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968), and Richard Rush’s Getting Straight (1970). These projects allowed him to move beyond the B-movie formulas with which he had become identified and revealed a composer capable of considerably subtler dramatic and psychological writing.

Stein gradually withdrew from feature scoring during the 1970s, working as a post-production supervisor and documentary filmmaker before turning increasingly to teaching. He later taught composition, arranging, orchestration and music theory, including several years at the University of Colorado Denver. His manuscripts and professional papers were subsequently preserved in the Ronald Stein Archive at his alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis.

Stein was survived by his wife Harlene and their son, Victor.