Epic Sound Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Films by Stephen C. Meyer (review)

For nearly two decades following the end of the Second World War, one of the most popular and profitable of American film genres was the biblical epic. And one of the most prominent features of those movies was the music—full-throated, symphonic scores of unusual length and stylistic variety performed by large studio orchestras for playback through multichannel sound systems. In later years, the biblical epic came to be scorned or even ignored by film critics and scholars. Stephen Meyer of Syracuse University finds the dismissal of these films regrettable, for he regards them as particularly revealing of the “ideological and aesthetic” tensions within American society. These tensions were bound up with its Christian religious identity, historical and imperial role in the early years of the Cold War, ethnic and racial character, and gender relationships. In addition, these films “embody a sense of unreflective excess that lies at the heart of American cinema—and perhaps at the heart of postwar American culture more generally” (2). The scores themselves, which were so effective at limning the cinematic stories to which they are wed, deserve to be reevaluated, “not simply because their intrinsic beauty and complexity make them monuments of the art of film scoring, but also because of the ways in which they amplified and resonated with the cultural energies of a pivotal period in American history” (237).

The author devotes a chapter to each of nine scores for films that were released between 1949 and 1965. Collectively, they represent some of the most memorable work of a quintet of the movies’ greatest composers. The legendary Alfred Newman and Miklós Rózsa, once described as vying for the title of God’s cinematic Kapellmeister, claim three films apiece: David and Bathsheba (1951), The Robe (1953), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) for the former, and Quo Vadis (1951), Ben-Hur (1959), and King of Kings (1961) for the latter. Samson and Delilah (1949) came from the pen of Victor Young, who worked on several other Cecil B. DeMille films as well. He was too sick to undertake The Ten Commandments (1956), however, so the job went instead to Elmer Bernstein, only a few years into his own remarkable career. Adding international flavor is Italy’s Mario Nascimbene and his score for Barabbas (1961).

Meyer does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of the scores; instead, each chapter focuses on unique issues that help to determine which aspects of the music receive his attention. Nonetheless, it is remarkable—and greatly to the author’s credit—how much about each score and composer he is able to convey. Young’s music for Samson and Delilah, like the film itself, tends toward the conventional, and, as such, “was less a model than a point of departure for subsequent composers of biblical epic scores” (45). To some extent, the same is true of Bernstein’s music for The Ten Commandments, where DeMille’s vision again strictly dictated the composer’s approach. By contrast, Newman’s score for David and Bathsheba is crucial to conveying the “moral ambiguities and emotional complexity” that characterize the film itself, and thus offers “a very different model of what music in biblical film might be” (50). Rózsa was particularly concerned about achieving historical authenticity in Quo Vadis with his hymns and marches, but audiences were probably more impressed by the quality of his dramatic underscoring, which helped to define the sound of the ancient world in the movies. By the time he worked on Ben-Hur at the end of the decade, authenticity no longer was a priority; instead he applied a Wagnerian “leitmotivic” approach in so sophisticated a way that the result is arguably the apogee of the biblical film score. The 1960s saw the emergence of new trends in the music for these films. For the movie version of Pär Lagerqvist’s existentialist novel Barabbas, for instance, Mario Nascimbene heightened the drama of key scenes with “new sounds...