Actress Geraldine Fitzgerald once told the story of how Bette Davis, while shooting her climactic walk up the staircase to her death in Dark Victory (1939), suddenly stopped and turned to director Edmund Goulding and asked if Max Steiner was going to score the film. When told he was, she famously remarked, "Either I'm going up these stairs or Max Steiner's going up these stairs but we're goddamned well not going up together!" Davis knew she was a good actress but she also knew how effective a Max Steiner score could be and she didn't want anyone to think that Steiner's music had helped her performance. In his career, Max Steiner scored over 300 movies. During the 1930s through the 1950s he was one of the top film composers in the world, with eighteen Academy Award nominations and three wins, for The Informer [1935], Now, Voyager [1942] (starring Bette Davis) and Since You Went Away [1944]. And yes, Steiner did go up the stairs with Davis in Dark Victory. She later claimed he was her favorite film composer.

Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner was born in Vienna, Austria on May 10, 1888. He was a musical prodigy completing an eight year course of study at the Imperial Academy of Music in just one year at the age of 13. There is no doubt his teachers had a profound effect on him: Johannes Brahms (a family friend who had been discovered by Steiner's father, Gabor, one of the top theatrical producers in Vienna) taught him piano and Gustav Mahler taught him how to conduct. It also didn't hurt that his godfather was Richard Strauss.

After a few years in the musical theater, Steiner spent a brief period in London, but when war broke out in 1914, he left the country because he faced arrest as an "enemy alien". Instead of returning to Austria, he went to New York and Broadway where, as he later said, he left one entertainment capital for another, "When I left my home in Austria as a very young man, it was the Viennese Operetta that ruled the entertainment world. Now in the New World, I was to be in on the formative years of the American Musical Comedy. During my lifetime I was a witness to the evolution of this art form to its present pinnacle as represented by such shows as My Fair Lady, South Pacific, Oklahoma!, Brigadoon, and others. It was my privilege to know and sometimes to work with many of the great talents which were then emerging in the musical comedy world: Victor Herbert, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, Sigmund Romberg, as well as impresarios and theatrical producers like [Florenz] Ziegfeld, the Shuberts, George White and many others who played a large part in the development of musical comedy. Later on, I was also to be in on the very beginning of the art of scoring a motion picture."

Steiner's work on Broadway led to him being brought to Hollywood at the advent of talking pictures in the late 1920s but as the studios decided to flood the market with musicals, what Steiner described as a "gold rush" for musicians soon turned into a drought when the public quickly grew tired of musicals, "Through lack of sufficient good material and the ever changing taste of a fickle public, musical picture after musical picture failed, and the studios decided to call it a day and go back to dramatic pictures. It therefore became unnecessary to maintain a large staff of musicians, and so in September 1930 I received a letter telling me that the studio would not require our services any longer and to dismiss everyone not under contract. In most instances the studios even tried to buy up existing contracts."

Although Steiner's agent quickly got him hired as a musical director for an operetta soon to open in Atlantic City, fate took a hand and RKO asked Steiner to stay on a month-to-month basis as Head of the Music Department. "By spring of 1931 directors realized that music could be used for more than musical films." Music could be used by the filmmaker to "support love scenes or silent sequences. [...] Many strange devices were used to introduce the music. For example, a love scene might take place in the woods, and in order to justify the music thought necessary to accompany it, a wandering violinist would be brought in for no reason at all. Or, again, a shepherd would be seen herding his sheep and playing his flute to the accompaniment of a fifty-piece symphony orchestra."

Steiner initially orchestrated other composer's works but in 1932 he created his first completely original score for Bird of Paradise starring Joel McCrea and Dolores del Rio. As Laurence MacDonald wrote in his book The Invisible Art of Film Music: A Comprehensive History, "This film allowed Steiner free reign to create a continuous musical commentary. As a result, Bird of Paradise contains the first truly 'wall-to-wall' score."

David Raksin, composer of hundreds of films scores including Laura (1944) , wrote in an article entitled David Raksin Remembers His Colleagues, "In the early Thirties, RKO Studio was in trouble--RKO was always in trouble! Most of the musical staff had been laid off, and Max Steiner had been asked to assume operation of the department with a drastically reduced budget: the limit for any picture was a three-hour recording session with a maximum of ten musicians. The Studio had no stage set aside for music recording; so, on whatever stage was available, whichever sound mixer (musically literate or not) was free would set up four large wooden panels to act as reflecting surfaces. Usually, only one rather primitive microphone was used, so that placement was crucial. In those days there were no immediate playbacks to check for accuracy of performance; the optical film was developed overnight, and the music department personnel hoped for the best. 1933: a group of visionaries and special-effects wizards were expending some 430,000 of RKO's dwindling dollars on a picture about a gigantic ape. The director was Ernest B. Schoedsack. When the movie was ready for music, the Studio's president, a prudent man, took one look at the footage and decreed that there was no reason to throw good money after bad. His orders to the composer were explicit: No recording. "Use some music tracks we already have." As it happens, this composer (who is the subject of our story) had also written the music for nearly all of the Studio's recent pictures, and therefore knew that there were very few forty-foot apes in any of them. "Old music tracks!" he cried, "For God's sake, Ben, what am I gonna use-music from Little Women (1933)?"

"If this were reel (instead of real) life, you would now hear the sound of distant bugles, and we would cut to John Wayne leading a troop of cavalry to the rescue. What actually happened back there in '33 may have been less dramatic, but it was no less effective. Into the breach stepped an extraordinary personage named Merian C. Cooper-adventurer, explorer, news correspondent, combat pilot, visionary, co-producer with Schoedsack of Grass [1925] and King Kong [1933] was his baby. Cooper said the magic words, which I quote: "Maxie, go ahead and score the picture ... and don't worry about the cost, because I will pay for the orchestra." And so he did, to the tune of fifty thousand dollars-an enormous sum to expend on music then; and to hear him tell it, it was worth every dime. The music meant everything to that picture, and the picture meant everything to RKO, because it saved the Studio from bankruptcy."

The influence of Max Steiner on film composition and scoring cannot be understated. Working at the dawn of a new art form, composers like Steiner had to make it up as they went along. So many of Steiner's scores were influential - The Informer for which he won his first Oscar®, reflected his ability to, in MacDonald's words, "crystallize the essence of a film in a single theme". Oddly enough, his most popular score, for Gone with the Wind (1939) did not earn him an Academy Award, although this may have been because he was in competition with himself for Dark Victory. Only once did he win against himself - for Since You Went Away which was up against Steiner's score for The Adventures of Mark Twain (both 1944).

The volume of Steiner's output is simply amazing. While film composers today may spend a year on a single score, Steiner, in 1938 alone is credited on no less than eleven films. During the 1940s and 1950s he continued composing memorable scores for Sergeant York [1941], Casablanca [1942], Mildred Pierce [1945], The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [1948], On Moonlight Bay [1951], The Caine Mutiny [1954], Battle Cry [1955], The Searchers [1956], and A Summer Place [1959] whose theme is still played on the radio.

In the 1960s, approaching eighty, Steiner continued to work on films such as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs [1960] and Spencer's Mountain [1963]. His final film was Those Calloways in 1965. Max Steiner died at the age of eighty-three on December 28, 1971. In 1995 he was posthumously inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame and has been featured on two United States postage stamps: the Legends of American Music series in 1999 and the 2003 American Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes series.

by Lorraine LoBianco

Sources:
The Composer in Hollywood by Christopher Palmer
The Invisible Art of Film Music: A Comprehensive History by Laurence E. MacDonald
American Composers Orchestra David Raksin Remembers His Colleagues by David Raksin
The Internet Movie Database
Wikipedia.org