Leonard Bernstein Movies

Composer, conductor, and educator Leonard Bernstein made significant contributions to virtually all areas of popular culture, including motion pictures, by way of music in the course of a five-decade career, from the 1940s through the 1980s. Born in Massachusetts in 1918, his musicial ability initially manifested itself through the piano -- composition and conducting came a little later. The major influences on his musical sensibilities included George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and he later became one of the definitive interpreters of both men's music. By his early twenties, Bernstein had developed aspirations as both a conductor and composer. He wrote with some success for both the concert hall and the musical stage during the early '40s, including a critically acclaimed first symphony and the ballet Fancy Free (1944), written in collaboration with choreographer Jerome Robbins. The latter work quickly evolved into the Broadway success On the Town (1944), done in collaboration with Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who were also in the cast), all of whom were to enjoy long professional relationships with Bernstein.
He pursued a multitiered career over the next decade and a half, serving as assistant conductor with the New York Philharmonic, and also under one of his principal mentors, Serge Koussevitzky, at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, while continuing to write for the concert hall and also composing for the Broadway stage. It did take Bernstein nearly a decade to repeat his first success in the latter arena; however, the 1950 musical adaptation of Peter Pan, based on the work of J.M. Barrie, starring Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff, was not a success, though it did last long enough to generate a cast recording. But Wonderful Town (1953), adapted from Ruth McKenney's My Sister Eileen with Comden and Green, and starring Rosalind Russell and Ernie Kovacs, was a hit, running 559 performances and winning five Tony Awards. The operetta Candide (1956), a collaboration with author Lillian Hellman based on Voltaire's work, was a commercial failure on its original run, closing after a two-month run. It was revived in several different incarnations during the 1970s and '80s, initially without Bernstein's direct involvement; during the late '80s, however, following Hellman's death, he returned to the work and prepared a "final revised version" of the piece, which he also recorded. Ironically, in the intervening years, the Candide overture had become a successful concert work in its own right, and one spritely section of the overture became the familiar theme music used by talk-show host Dick Cavett for his ABC and PBS programs, which is how millions of Americans came to know that piece of music.
But it was a year after the failure of Candide, in 1957, that Bernstein reached the pinnacle of his success as a theater and popular composer. West Side Story, written in collaboration with lyricist Stephen Sondheim and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, took the theater world by storm, redefining the nature of the Broadway musical with its youth, energy, and subject matter. The musical enjoyed a long run, both on Broadway and on tour, generating a career's worth of hits in the process, hits that, in those more innocent and less culturally stratified times, were known equally well by parents and their children: "Tonight," "Maria," "I Feel Pretty," "Jet Song," "America," "Something's Coming," and "Somewhere" were as well known as any rock & roll or pop hits of the day. Indeed, a few of them over the ensuing decade and a half entered the repertories of rock & roll groups as different as Jay & the Americans, the Nice, and Yes. The show yielded innumerable productions and revivals across the decades that followed, in addition to a celebrated film version in 1961.
Bernstein's relationship to movies was far less consistent than his work for Broadway. This was due in part to his temperament as a serious composer, unaccustomed to the assembly line methods typical of Hollywood production, and to his career being based in New York and Boston, and also the nature and unique exigencies of the motion picture business, to which some creative artists cannot adjust. His first indirect contact with the film business took place in 1944 when MGM provided some of the financing for the stage production of On the Town in return for the film rights, which it decided to exercise in the second half of the 1940s. The studio's involvement with the show was a godsend in terms of getting it preserved in some lasting reincarnation onscreen, but for Bernstein it proved a decidedly mixed blessing. MGM liked the show and the book, and brought Comden and Green out to Hollywood to adapt the screenplay, but the music was another matter. They ended up using very little of Bernstein's music for reasons that were as much a matter of business as aesthetics. As Adolph Green explained some 50 years later, during a conversation while walking on Broadway, "MGM wanted their own music in the movie, under their copyright and publishing, as much as possible. And in a way that was understandable, from their point of view -- even though the show had been successful, there were no real 'hits' from On the Town, and they felt they weren't giving up anything in having a new score written that they believed would be more commercial." As a result, in the Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly-directed 1949 film, apart from the opening sequence containing the musical monolog/aria "I Feel Like I'm Not Out of Bed Yet" and the big production number "New York, New York," Bernstein's music was mostly gone, replaced by material written by MGM staff composer Roger Edens (with some contributions from Saul Chaplin and Conrad Salinger). Matters were very different for Bernstein a dozen years later, however, when West Side Story was brought to the screen in 1961 by director/producer Robert Wise. That show overflowed with hits and had already yielded a best-selling cast recording, something that On the Town -- which dated from 1944, before the advent of the LP -- had never enjoyed or had an opportunity to generate. As a result, the movie not only left Bernstein's music intact, but reveled in it. Ironically, by that time Bernstein had been forced to leave the Broadway stage behind, a result of the circumstances behind the single most important career development of his life. As a condition of his accepting the post of music director of the New York Philharmonic -- the most prestigious symphony orchestra in the United States -- and becoming the first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra, Bernstein had to relinquish his ties to Broadway.
Almost dead-center between the films of On the Town and West Side Story, however, Bernstein got in one great, even phenomenal inning of his own on a Hollywood soundstage, with the only dramatic film score of his career, for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). It was a towering achievement, one of the finest bodies of music ever written for a motion picture, for a movie that was (to use a phrase from the script) loaded to the gunnels with great dialogue, phenomenal acting, and Academy Award-caliber work from top to bottom, the score was still one of the highlights and earned Bernstein an Oscar nomination. That was, itself, an unusual honor from the normally insular Hollywood community for an East Coast-based composer. The entire soundtrack, though very modernistic, sings with achingly memorable passages, from the mournful, menacing, subdued opening theme through the love theme, and the savage, brutal sections accompanying the violence that permeates the world of hero Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brando). It was a very forward-looking score on a number of levels. Parts of the soundtrack actually anticipate elements of West Side Story, which was still a couple of years in Bernstein's future and some sections of the music incorporated elements of jazz, which was very unusual for a Hollywood movie in 1954. The whole score resonated with the same youthful, brash boldness that permeated Bernstein's stage and concert works, and the music burst in every bar with the confidence not only borne of youth (he was 35 when he took the film assignment), but also a decade's worth of experience working with some of the best orchestras in the world (he'd already recorded with the New York Philharmonic, albeit billed for contractual reasons as the "Stadium Symphony Orchestra of New York"). Bernstein scored a hit his first time out as a film composer, and he could easily have gotten more movie work. He would never have signed a long-term contract with a studio, but there were producers who would have commissioned scores from him for specific individual projects. On the Waterfront was one of the most successful and honored films of its era, and anyone involved with it who was willing had any future that they wanted in the film business. But he found the process of film composition as practiced in Hollywood, with the music's inevitable subservience to the editing of the movie, to be frustrating. In connection with On the Waterfront, he was able to salvage those parts of the score that had been left on the cutting room floor in the concert suite that he subsequently prepared, which became a popular work in its own right. Ironically, the On the Waterfront score, even though it had been composed by Bernstein under a contract that reportedly reserved its use exclusively to that movie, ended up reappearing uncredited in at least one subsequent film. About two minutes of the music, all of it very distinctive, was tracked into the score for the 1958 Gerd Oswald-directed thriller Screaming Mimi, released by Columbia Pictures, the same studio that had released On the Waterfront. The composer was apparently unaware of that reappearance of his music; by 1958, he had other pursuits to focus on. And having come to Hollywood and proved he could score movies with (or even better than) the best of them, he never looked back at the film business again.
Nor did he ever need to. In 1952, Bernstein started making regular appearances on television as a musical educator on the CBS arts series Omnibus, which began the process of turning him into a popular culture figure. The On the Waterfront score and Oscar nomination, and, later, the massive stage success of West Side Story, only heightened his celebrity. In 1957, he assumed the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic -- itself a highly visible cultural position -- and soon after he started presenting his Young People's Concerts. These were broadcast on CBS for nearly 15 years, originally as part of the network's Saturday morning schedule and later in primetime, and they earned Bernstein an Emmy award for Best Musical Contribution for Television. By the 1960s, he was a media celebrity many times over, winning three more Emmys for Outstanding Classical Performance, in addition to hosting numerous network specials on music. In the course of his career, he was a friend and/or collaborator to nearly every major musical and cultural figure in Hollywood or on Broadway, and even far beyond the boundaries of either. In 1966 on a CBS network special, Bernstein introduced Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys performing his most serious composition to date, a subdued, lyrical, surreal piece entitled "Surf's Up," at the piano; this was at a time when most classical conductors wouldn't even allow their names, much less their images, to be publicly associated with anything to do with rock & roll music. In the '70s, he gave several Norton lectures at Harvard, which were captured on video and have been released commercially (as Bernstein at Harvard). And during the 1980s, he returned to such early career triumphs as West Side Story in concert performances that were captured on video for posterity, involving all-star operatic singing casts and major orchestras, and assembled his last adaptation of Candide. He also conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood during the summer season and left behind numerous televised performances with the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and, most especially, the Israel Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he developed special professional relationships. And in 1998, some eight years after his death, he was the subject of an American Masters portrait, entitled Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide