In this article about film scores released in 1970, we focus on a number of films that benefitted heavily from brilliant film scores. The films were all nominated for various Academy Awards, two of them for their original film score. We begin with a movie about one of the most controversial army generals in World War II.

In 1969 film composer Jerry Goldsmith, under contract to Fox, was booked to write music for Beneath the Planet of the Apes. The studio was trying to cash in fast on the tremendous success of the original movie, Planet of the Apes, released the previous year and also scored by Goldsmith. The plan was to recruit the same team, including director Franklin J. Schaffner. However the director had committed himself to another movie, for which he wanted Goldsmith to write the music. When the composer learned more about that other movie, it took him no time to ask his studio to reassign him. That was a smart decision: the film became the now-classic Patton, for which Goldsmith scored one of the most memorable and effective scores in the history of films.

General George S. Patton was one of the most controversial characters in US military history. His military achievements before and especially during World War II were undeniable, but his behavior and views on issues like race drew high criticism. Various actors were considered or the leading role, including Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Rod Steiger, all of them declined the role or were deemed wrong for it. The tough acting job was given to George C. Scott, who gave it the performance of a life time, and for which he received (and turned down) an Academy Award. Writing music to portray such a character was no easy assignment either, and Jerry Goldsmith had to think hard about how to approach that task. He later said: “I wanted to treat Patton as this three-tiered personality of the character because he was a complex person and multi-layered. I wanted to naturally highlight the warrior which would be treated with the march and then the religious aspect of him in the chorale, and in the Fanfare which was to be his belief in reincarnation. I wanted those three themes to work in concert with each other. They could be played by themselves, two or three can be played together.”

The film is almost three hours long but only 32 minutes of it has music. Some of the music Goldsmith wrote did not make the cut during the editing process. In one of the film’s critical scenes Patton visits a military hospital and slaps a soldier who tells him his nerves cannot not take the shelling anymore, calling the soldier a coward. Goldsmith wrote music for that key scene, as he recalls: “Frank never wanted music there and I argued that we should have music because if I can create sympathy for Patton perhaps when he reacts so violently it’ll shock the audience more.” The music worked so well that it actually made a test screening audience feel that Patton was justified in his act. After farther deliberation both director and composer agreed to take out the music, but Frank Schaffner was so taken by it that, “he tried moving it a little to a different place, trying to play it for part of the scene.” That music segment was dropped from the film but made it to the soundtrack album.

One significant accomplishment of the music score in Patton is how well the music underscores Patton’s complex personality. Goldsmith discussed how he approaches writing music for a film that acts as a character study: “My main interest in scoring is in examining the characters in a film and making a comment on them, and I think you can only do that if you use music sparingly. The composer must realize his job is not to dominate. The composer must wait for those moments in the picture where there is a scene so special, where there is something to be said that only music can say.”

One such scene is “A Change of Weather”, when Patton, facing bad weather that prevents his troops from receiving air support, tells his chaplain to write a weather prayer. Goldsmith said of that scene: “The prayer is read against a background of battle. It seemed to me to be a real vital scene, and one in which I could make a comment that was counter to the almost overpowering visual. I saw it as an anti-war scene, and I wanted to play up the sadness and the sorrow and the irony of it all.”

Throughout the film there are flashback scenes for which Goldsmith wrote a trumpet theme that repeats a fading triplet phrase, going softer and softer. It is one of the film’s most memorable music themes. Goldsmith: “We had a primitive electronic echo device that would repeat over and over again. It became so catchy.” When the composer recorded the music for the soundtrack release, the orchestra trumpet player in the studio complained: “It’s so hard, just playing the one note and letting go!”

When the soundtrack album was released, director Frank Schaffner demonstrated his deep understanding of film music when he wrote in the sleeve notes: “Writing music for film is a torturous discipline. A composer naturally composes music to express his most personal emotion. Yet writing for motion pictures requires the strictest subordination of artist to subject.” He goes on raving about the work of Jerry Goldsmith, describing it as one that, “stands for itself as a musical entity, a contemporary Eroica containing its own dramatic narrative as an engaging symphonic integrity.”

It is interesting to note the difference in sequencing of music pieces between the film and the soundtrack album. In the movie all the quieter tracks are played during the first half, and the big dramatic pieces are played during the second half. Goldsmith felt that listening to the music without the visuals demanded a change in the order of tracks rather than sticking to the original sequence.

Goldsmith would go on to collaborate on many films with Schaffner, including Papillon, Islands in the Stream, The Boys from Brazil and Lionheart. Four of them were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

In 1970 Paramount Pictures invested $11m, a very large budget at the time, in a film adaptation of Arthur H. Lewis’ 1964 book ‘Lament for the Molly Maguires’. Set in a coal miner’s town in 19^th century Pennsylvania, it tells the story of a rebellious group of miners battling the exploitation of the mine owners. Martin Ritt, blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, and known for films dealing with social justice, was a natural pick to direct the film. Broadway composer Charles Strouse, who delivered the score for Bonnie and Clyde a few years earlier, was picked to write the music. At the end of production the film was screened to a test audience, and the verdict was that the music just did not work well with the film. The producers called in a hurry on Henry Mancini, who picks up the story: “I was in Brazil for the International Song Festival, when I got a call from Paramount. They were in a panic because they had previewed the picture and felt that they wanted to replace the score.”

Mancini had four weeks to complete the score. He asked to view the film without the rejected score and set to write a number of themes: The main theme used in the opening titles and in various parts of the movie showing the miners in town, a dark Irish motif accompanying the rebels on their raids, and of course, a love theme. In addition to a symphonic orchestra, Mancini features an interesting array of instruments including an Irish harp, a button accordion, a pennywhistle and an ocarina.

Martin Ritt, a director of realistic films, was never kin on using a large-scale score in his films. He did not believe in the classic Hollywood system that leveraged symphonic music to drive the plot, and he used music sparsely in his films. Mancini commented: “He was a brilliant man, but Marty’s focus was as a director of actors. It was like he was doing a stage play. He really didn’t have much to say about music. He’d be very happy for the sparsest of scores.”

Mancini considers The Molly Maguires one of his finest film scores, quite the compliment for someone who scored close to a hundred films including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade and Days of Wine and Roses. He said about that score: “The challenge was to get beyond the clichés that are commonly used for this kind of music. When the Molly Maguires set out on a mission, I wanted something melodic but dramatic. That was my spin on Irish music. And the ballad, ‘The Hills of Yesterday’, is very simple. That was a hard one to come by – I didn’t want to do a ‘Rosy O’Grady’ or ‘Mother Machree’.

Henry Mancini’s next film score was another 1970 project, this time for an international production led by two stellar men of Italian cinema. After he completed his work on The Molly Maguires, he was contacted by producer Carlo Ponty and director Vittorio De Sica to write music for a film. You do not say no to the producer of La Strada and Doctor Zhivago and the director of Bicycle Thieves. Mancini jumped on the opportunity to score the story of a woman in search of her lost husband who is assumed missing in action in the Russian front during World War II. The film, titled Sunflower, stars the two iconic Italian actors Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

Mancini was looking for inspiration to write the music to this dramatic and romantic story. He found it in another Italian master from the previous century. He tells the story of a day when together with Carlo Ponty he was watching visuals from the movie in a screening room: “When we came out of the theater I just looked at him and said, ‘Puccini?’ and he beamed back and said ‘Si!’” Mancini wrote a number of motives for the movie, the most significant is the love theme that plays over the main titles. Another is a sad waltz that plays during the heroine’s travels through Russia.

Working with folks of Italian temperament proved a new experience for Mancini. He recalls the power plays between Ponty and De Sica in the editing room: “They obviously had been having at each other, for various artistic and procedural reasons, fighting the good Italian fight. There was no shouting, but the gestures were sarcastic and very eloquent. Whatever one said, the other would be ridiculing him behind his back with that incredible vocabulary or insulting gestures that Italians have.” He also needed to be tactful during the recording of the score in Rome with a large orchestra. At one point during the session he heard an error coming from one of the French horns: “Though my Italian is limited, numbers and notes I can handle. I looked at the first horn player and said, not sharply or critically, ‘In bar thirteen, the first note is a B-natural.’ The guy stood up, indignant, tapped his finger on the music, and said, ‘I played what it says on the paper! It says B-flat, and I played B-flat!’ He took it as a personal affront that I would correct a note he had played. Recording in Rome can be very interesting.” But Mancini’s struggles through working on the score for Sunflower paid off. He was nominated for the academy award for original score, the only nomination for this film. He lost, as did Patton, to the very popular tear jerking theme from Love Story. Mancini and Goldmith both received 18 total Academy Award nominations over the course of their careers. Mancini won four, Goldsmith took one.

We end this review with one more film about war, this one set in Korea, 1951. It is quite different in genre from the dramatic movies we discussed thus far. You guessed it – we are talking about one of the best war satires in the history of film – M*A*S*H. The film was an adaptation of the book ‘MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors’, published in 1968. Written by Heister Richard ‘Dick’ Hornberger, a surgeon who served in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (hence MASH) in Korea, the story was then pitched to 20^th Century Fox by screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., son of famed writer Ring Lardner. A number of movie directors passed on the script, including George Roy Hill, Stanley Kubrick and Sidney Lumet, before it finally landed in Robert Altman’s lap. Starring Donald Sutherland, Tom Skerritt, Elliott Gould and the unforgettable Sally Kellerman (hot lips), the movie is considered one of the greatest films ever made.

Altman recruited composer and arranger Johnny Mandel to write incidental music for the movie. The two have collaborated on Altman’s previous movie, That Cold Day in the Park, in 1969. If you have watched M*A*S*H, you probably recall the omni-present loudspeaker that supplies all kind of announcements and was front and center in the movie’s classic ‘Kiss my hot Lips!’ scene. The loudspeaker was also a source of incidental music played at the barracks, an idea of Johnny Mandel. He tells the story: “I had a Japanese friend take me to Little Tokyo to look in the Japanese records stores, and I went back to Altman and played this stuff. He said, ‘Great, but how do we use it?’ I said, ‘Why don’t you have it coming over the loudspeakers, from Radio Tokyo.’ His brain starts working, and it became the greatest cutting device he ever had. It allowed him to get from one scene to another. He was open to everything, but only Bob had the imagination to pull it off.”

The key piece of music from the movie is its theme song, ‘Suicide is Painless’. The story behind it is worth telling and as funny as the movie, so here goes. The first scene that Altman planned to shoot was ‘The Last Supper’ scene, in which a fake suicide is planned for the character of Painless Pole. After failing to deliver the expected performance in bed with a nurse, Painless decides to end his misery with a suicide. At a staged Last Supper setting he is given a pseudo poison pill and enters a casket for his wishful eternal sleep. During the scene Altman wanted one of the witnesses to this farce to sing a song. Mandel picks up the story: “When I got there, the first thing he was going to shoot was the suicide scene. We’re sitting around one night and he says, ‘This is the first thing I have to do . . . . We need a song. It’s got to be the stupidest song that was ever written . . . . Painless Pole is going to commit suicide. The name of this song is Suicide is Painless. I used to write songs. I’m going to go home and see if I can come up with something.’ The next day, he tells me . . . . ‘I can’t get anything nearly as stupid as I need. But all is not lost. I have this kid who is a total idiot. He’ll run through this thing like a dose of salts.’”

Undeterred by his father’s low appreciation of his skills, Michael Altman, then at the tender age of 14, proceeded to provide the goods. He later recalled: “I wrote like a hundred and twelve verses. Just the most atrocious crap you’ve ever heard in your life. It was just awful, I mean, ‘I hear the sound of gunfire from over the hill. Come on boys, let’s kill, kill, kill.’ You know, just terrible shit.” But some of the lines survived and became classic, like “The game of life is hard to play / I’m gonna lose it anyway.”

Lyrics done, it was now up to Johnny Mandel to come up with a simple and catchy melody to match the somber words. How do you write a melody to words set to a satirical scene about suicide written by a 14-year adolescent? Naturally, you take to the bottle. Mandel: “It’s the only song I ever wrote dead drunk. I only wrote sober, but this particular song I couldn’t get together. I had to get loose enough to come up with that. Finally, out of desperation, I got bombed and wrote it. I don’t recommend that. I didn’t have to make any changes—verse, chorus, verse, chorus construction. Threw in a couple of odd bars to make it sound homemade. He wrote a very good lyric for what it was.”

The result was so good, that the producers decided to use it during the opening credits, with the helicopters flying in the wounded to the field hospital. Mandel: “I said, ‘That doesn’t belong.’ They said they liked it. I said, ‘That’s the stupidest answer I ever heard.’ They said, ‘Well, we like it.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to be part of this stupid conversation.’ I’m glad they didn’t listen. It became my biggest copyright.” All’s well that ends well.

While the two songwriters made a handsome profit from royalties to the song, especially after the very popular TV show based on the film started airing, Robert Altman never saw a dime after being paid the flat fee of $70,000 for directing the movie. He always joked that his son made much more money than him from M*A*S*H over the years. But the movie, his most successful, launched a brilliant career that continued for the next five decades.

Sources:

Robert Altman’s Soundtracks: Film, Music, and Sound from M*A*S*H to A Prairie Home Companion, by Gayle Sherwood Magee