The programme started with one of the all time greats of film music composition: Miklos Rozsa. An immigrant to the USA from Hungary, he composed nearly a hundred film scores, was nominated for an Oscar on seventeen occasions and won three for Spellbound, A Double Life and Ben-Hur. The list of Hollywood movies for which he wrote the music is endless. For example his score for The Killers ( another nomination) was typical of the music for film noir for which he became famous.
Alfred Newman went from cinema pianist to conducting musicals on Broadway and ended up in Hollywood in 1940. For 20th Century Fox he became their music director and composed over 200 film scores, winning five Academy Awards to go with those he won at the end of the 1930's. Over his career, he gained 45 Oscar nominations and won nine, more than any other composer in history.
Although Newman's films were mostly new to me, the same cannot be said for Bernard Hermann. How he came to only win one Oscar (for The Devil and Daniel Webster) is a mystery, especially as the greatest film of that decade Citizen Kane was notable for his score. Much later he did, however win a BAFTA for Taxi Driver. His scores for the seven movies with Alfred Hitchcock are classics that include The Trouble with Harry, Marnie, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho.
Franz Waxman moved from Germany to Paris and then Hollywood in 1934 after being beaten by Nazi sympathisers. He became successful with his music for Hitchcock's Rebecca in 1940 and never looked back. He worked again for the same director on Suspicion. As a composer he gained twelve Oscar nominations and later won two for A Place in the Sun and Sunset Boulevard.
Those composers from the previous decade were still successful in the 1940's such as Max Steiner with Casablanca. The programme described how film scores had developed over this decade and went out with that Harry Lime theme from The Third Man written and played by Anton Karas.
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