Max Steiner: Maestro of Movie Music

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.

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.

Born in vienna, home to other, early, important music and musicians. Steiner himself was published at age nine. His father was an astute businessman, and built performance halls, which eventually went out of business. Due to the war, steiner left england, and came to the united states in 1914. He started in new york, to accompany the silent films. Steiner moved to hollywood with the advent of live talkies, which needed orchestras to accompany the action. Apparently, steiner was one of the few who saw the value in music which accompanied the action, to set the mood, with david selznick. Michael feinstein plays and explains how some of the songs and melodies became pop hits, giving steiner the royalties he would come to need, with all his alimonies. They also show and explain the various mediums that steiner used and collected. Showing these various recording technologies is an interesting bonus. Well worth the two hours investment! Max had won three oscars, and was nominated for many more. Directed by diana friedberg. Written and narrated by lionel friedberg. Who knew steiner was so important in establishing the role of music in film?

"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.