Max Steiner: Maestro of Movie Music

This biography covers the entirety of Steiner's life, from his rather privileged beginnings in Vienna. Interested in composing and conducting from boyhood, he went to England, and he had some success working on musical productions there, but then WWI broke out and he was afraid of being jailed as an enemy alien, so he boarded a ship to America, landing with 32 dollars in his pocket.

He worked on the musical comedies that were popular in the 1920s, and then sound came to film. For most musicians this was the death of a livelihood - No longer would orchestras be needed to accompany silent films. One orchestra would supply the music for one film to the whole world. Fortunately for Max Steiner, he was to be head of that one orchestra for newcomer RKO studios, a studio created in 1928 just to deal with sound films. At first after sound film began, musicals were very popular, but audiences grew tired of them and so sound films were being made with talk and no scoring. You can still hear them today. The actor stops speaking and all you hear is dead silence and some static from the primitive recording technology. Steiner started scoring some of these early sound non-musical films, and the results were well received. So Steiner essentially paved the way for non musical films to be scored.

In 1937 Steiner went to Warner Brothers and was under contract to them for 16 years where he did some of his best work. In 1939 he was loaned out to David Selznick, his old producer when they were at RKO, to score Gone With the Wind, probably his greatest individual achievement, being the longest musical score to date, though he won no Oscar for it. There is also a discussion of Steiner's work process and how he would go about composing scores for films and matching them to scenes along with the technical assistance that was necessary to do that matching.

Steiner managed to never lose his edge in being able to score films that resonated with contemporary audiences. He was having real money problems by the late 50s considering his over generous ways when the score for "Summer Place" became a big hit in 1959 among teens and on the pop charts and solved his money problems with its royalties.

Steiner really did pave the way for John Williams, who is the closest thing to his equivalent, and all of his great scores starting in the 1960s..

The documentary puts the meat on the bones of my outline here, including a fascinating piece on how so much of the material from Max Steiner's career is now archived at BYU in Provo, which offhand seems like an odd final resting place for Steiner's work.

Before I write my fulsome review let me first assure previous reviewer kdcrowley that, while I cannot vouch for lipton, plankton or cineanalyst, I am not related to or have any connection whatsoever with Lionel or Diana Friedberg, ( althoughI did briefly date a Donna Friedberg in my senior year of high school).

As far as this bio doc goes it is most engaging. Exactly how engaging? Well, let's just say that after it was finished I rushed to You Tube to listen to the score for "A Summer Place" and "The Searchers", my two faves among this genius' monumental output. Guy won three Oscars and, in my opinion, should have won at least eight* in a career that spanned fifty years and three hundred films and whose workaholism, as the documentary intimates in its saddest section, probably cost him his son and most likely first wife, as well.

If I have any gripe with this work it is that there is not enough of the music. I would have liked to at least have heard "Tara's Theme", the opening to "Dodge City", "the theme from "Now Voyager" and the opening to "The Searchers" played in their entirety and not just in snippets by Mike Feinstein on the piano. And the narrative voice of the actor portraying Steiner sounds like a cross between Boris, of Boris and Natasha, and Groucho. Give it an A minus.

*top 5 Oscars the Academy jobbed Max out of:

5) Treasure of Sierra Madre 4) Dodge City 3) Casablanca 2) A Summer Place 1) GWTW.

"Max Steiner: Maestro of Movie Music" is a loving tribute to a great composer and orchestrator of movie music from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. Many of the greatest movies of this time were scored by Steiner (over 300!) and the film features a lot of his music, countless interviews (some by people who knew him) and lots of film clips.

What I like about this documentary is that it gets you to appreciate something you often don't even notice as you watch movies...the music, and not just the themes but the incidental music. What I would have also liked was to hear about other artists like Steiner...but perhaps that's best for another film. Very well made and well worth seeing...particularly if, like me, you adore classic films.

By the way, for some odd reason the closed captioning for this film is terrible by modern standards. This might make watching the film difficult if you are severely hearing impaired.

I love the work of Max Steiner. And hate this film.

I love documentaries. And hate this film.

I swear I've not seen any documentary this bad since grade school some fifty years ago. Remember the one about the clever stoat? This is worse.

Check out the credits. Looks like nepotism run a-mock. Clearly they wasted their time on this. Let's hope they also only wasted their own money. Let's hope no poor, no doubt poorer now, investors were involved.

Perhaps this is just a vanity piece financed and produced by a family of over-resourced under-talented film makers. From the writing to the direction to the whining narration (really the narrator is the very worst part) this film is just plain terrible.

It utterly fails to do justice to the wonderful career of Max Steiner.

P. S. I notice it got very few but very high ratings here on IMDB. I suspect further nepotism.

What does it take to make a movie? The auteur theory claims that one man makes it, usually the director. Perhaps that's true if you talking about Georges Melies, but I think that a movie is the most collaborative of the arts: thousands of people contribute to a movie. Some are more prominent, like the screenwriter, perhaps the producer, certainly the director, the performers, the cameramen, the set designer....

Max Steiner, born into a theatrical production background, formed the basis of movie music, drawing on the classics of European composition, particularly opera. Almost singlehandedly -- albeit with the collaboration of David Selznick, who backed him at RKO and later used him whenever he could -- he established the need for film scores. Yet while this movie is about Steiner, and the talking heads point out what he actually did (particularly Michael Feinstein) -- an endless flow of leitmotifs with an understanding of how to link them together in a way that communicated to the audience -- it's also an endless flow of collaborators: his orchestrators working off his cue sheets, the performers, directors, and producers who wrote rhapsodic letters praising his contributions to their work.

This is a fine documentary that not only shows what he did, but how he came to do it.