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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD – Elmer Bernstein
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
To Kill A Mockingbird is renowned as a celebrated Pulitzer prize winning novel written by American novelist Harper Lee. It was adapted for the screen by Horton Foote and is set in 1930’s Alabama during the era of the great depression. There are two distinct narratives operating in the tale. The first tells the story of a widowed and respected lawyer Atticus Finch, played in exemplary fashion by Gregory Peck, and his laudable but ultimately futile effort to defend a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. The equally important second narrative however is more intimate and focuses on Finch’s two young children, Scout and Jem. In many ways it is a coming of age tale as we see through their young eyes the struggle of growing up in the old south during a time where the races were segregated and black people were denied equality and justice under law. Made in 1962 before the civil rights act, the film provided an uncomfortable and potent commentary on the ugly cultural pathology that was still manifest in America many years after the Great Emancipation. Read more…
Elmer Bernstein, 1922-2004
Composer Elmer Bernstein died on August 18, 2004, at his home in Ojai, California, after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 82.
Bernstein was born in New York City in April 1922, the son of immigrants from Ukraine and Austria-Hungary. He studied piano as a child and showed early promise as a performer; during his childhood, he performed professionally as a dancer and an actor, but then switched to music and trained at the Juilliard School where he was encouraged by prominent figures such as Aaron Copland. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces, where he composed and arranged music for military radio programs.
Bernstein moved to California in in the early 1950s, when he was hired to score the thriller Sudden Fear in 1952. However, along with many other artists in Hollywood, Bernstein faced censure during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, and was called by the House Un-American Activities Committee. After he refused to name names, pointing out that he had never attended a Communist Party meeting, he found himself composing music for Z-grade sci-fi movies such as Robot Monster and Cat-Women of the Moon.
His work on The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), one of the first major studio films to feature a jazz score, brought him back into the mainstream, earned him his first Oscar nomination and marked him as a daring and contemporary voice in film music. His score for The Ten Commandments (1956), an epic of biblical scale, demonstrated his facility with grand orchestration and established him as a composer of serious dramatic substance. He followed it with the heroic and unforgettable theme to The Magnificent Seven (1960), whose galloping rhythms and bold brass fanfares became one of the most enduring musical signatures in film history. Read more…
WILD WILD WEST – Elmer Bernstein
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When Elmer Bernstein scores a western, you know exactly what you’re going to get. With a track record that includes scores like The Magnificent Seven, The Commancheros, True Grit and The Shootist (his last “true” western back in 1976), it is obvious that Bernstein is a master of the musical depiction of the vast open prairie, of six-shooters and ten-gallon hats, and Wild Wild West is a welcome return to the genre which made him world famous. Read more…
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