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EXODUS – Ernest Gold
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
In 1958 Otto Preminger and United Artists studio purchased the film rights to Leon Uris’s forthcoming novel, “Exodus”. Preminger, who would both produce and direct the film, felt that this was a story that needed to be told, and for him it became a passion project. He hired Dalton Trumbo who had been blacklisted as a communist by the infamous McCarthy Committee to write the screenplay. From day one he had Paul Newman in mind to play the lead role of Ari Ben Canaan. The stellar cast rounded off with Eva Marie Saint as Kitty Fremont, Ralph Richardson as General Sutherland, Peter Lawford as Major Caldwell, Lee Cobb as Barak Ben Canaan, Sal Mineo as Dov Landau, and John Derek as Taha. The story is based on the actual historical events in 1947, which began with the ship Exodus, and the lead up to the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Nurse Kitty’s fate becomes entwined with Ari Ben Canaan a Hagannah rebel who obtains a cargo ship and smuggles 611 Jewish inmates out of the Cypriot internment camp for passage to Israel. In Israel, the British are preparing to leave, and the unfolding partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states portends war. Read more…
Ernest Gold, 1921-1999
Composer and conductor Ernest Gold died in Santa Monica, California, on March 17, 1999, at the age of 77, following a stroke.
An Austrian-born composer who became one of Hollywood’s leading musical voices during the 1950s and 1960s, Gold wrote scores for more than 100 film and television productions. He received four Academy Award nominations, winning for Otto Preminger’s Exodus, and enjoyed an especially fruitful collaboration with director Stanley Kramer.
Gold was born Ernst Sigmund Goldner in Vienna on July 13, 1921, into a musical family and began composing while still a child. Following the Nazi annexation of Austria, his family emigrated to the United States in 1938, settling in New York. Gold initially wrote popular songs while continuing his musical studies, and eventually moved to Hollywood, where he began working on low-budget features while also orchestrating and conducting for other composers.
After a decade of smaller assignments, Gold’s career accelerated in the late 1950s. He worked with Stanley Kramer on The Defiant Ones (1958) and then composed On the Beach (1959), Kramer’s bleak drama about the aftermath of nuclear war. Gold ingeniously incorporated the Australian song “Waltzing Matilda” throughout the score, transforming the familiar melody from something nostalgic and comforting into an increasingly tragic reminder of a world facing extinction. The score earned him his first Academy Award nomination and won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score.
Gold’s greatest success came the following year with Otto Preminger’s epic Exodus (1960), starring Paul Newman. Its expansive main theme, combining sweeping romanticism with musical gestures intended to evoke the film’s Israeli setting, became one of the most popular film themes of its era. The soundtrack was an enormous commercial success, the theme was recorded by numerous artists, and Gold won the Academy Award for Best Dramatic or Comedy Score as well as two Grammy Awards. Exodus remains by far his best-known work and established him internationally as a major film composer. Read more…
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