David Raksin

David Raksin

David Raksin was the last great film composer of the 20th century, with a string of successes across four decades and one timeless classic, the song "Laura," to his credit. David Raksin was born in Philadelphia in 1912; his father ran a music store, and as the younger Raksin manifested an interest and ability in music at an early age, he had ample opportunity to pursue this study, first on the piano and then on the woodwinds. He was something of a prodigy, and before he reached his teens he had organized a dance band of his own, and subsequently taught himself the art of arranging and orchestrating. Soon he was composing as well, and the group had its own weekly radio spot. In his teens, Raksin was a fully paid-up member of the musicians union. As a high-school student, he was proficient as a singer, player, and arranger, and worked with ensembles across the popular music spectrum. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, after graduating, moved to New York, where he played piano in Benny Goodman's band. An arrangement that he'd written of "I Got Rhythm" was bought by bandleader Al Goodman -- Oscar Levant, who was working as the pianist in Goodman's band, brought the arrangement to the attention of the composer who, in turn, helped Raksin get a spot as an arranger for Harms, Inc., a major publishing house. Raksin continued his music studies with Arnold Schoenberg and moved to Hollywood. In 1936, Raksin was asked by Alfred Newman -- then based at United Artists and serving as the music director on Charles Chaplin's Modern Times -- to assist Chaplin in scoring the movie. Chaplin was a talented amateur composer, but he couldn't read music or translate his ideas into musical notation, and Raksin performed this function as well as collaborating with Edward Powell in orchestrating the finished score. After a brief interlude in Europe, arranging the music for a London theatrical production, Raksin returned to Hollywood and made his career there for the next 69 years. When Newman joined 20th Century Fox and became head of the music department, he hired his younger contemporary. Although Raksin did get to work on such big-budget releases as Suez (1938), Hollywood Cavalcade, and Stanley and Livingstone (both 1939), his early years at Fox were spent in relative anonymity, spent mostly as an arranger, where he worked mostly on the studio's lower-profile, lower-budgeted B-movie titles. This was partly because of his relatively independent and bold approach to dealing with other, more senior employees at the studio; for a relatively junior employee, he was quite undeferential in speaking with uncooperative directors (including Alfred Hitchcock), which, coupled with his unusually bold and creative ideas, made him seem a loose cannon (though one too valuable to be dispensed with) at the studio. Raksin occasionally had the chance to actually write music for specialized scenes, such as the "Polka Dot Ballet" that he composed for one scene of the patriotic Busby Berkeley-directed musical The Gang's All Here (1943). It was by sheer, blind luck in 1944 that Raksin got his first important film assignment. Otto Preminger's Laura had already survived a tumultuous production history, including the firing of the original director, and it had all the earmarks of a bad-luck project. Alfred Newman found himself with no time to score the movie, and initially offered the project to Bernard Herrmann, who turned it down (almost certainly out of an expression of pure ego -- since Newman didn't deem it worthy of his talents, Herrmann wouldn't touch it either), before settling on Raksin. The young composer suddenly found himself offering suggestions to Preminger (who had wanted to use Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" as the centerpiece to the score) and studio production chief Darryl F. Zanuck (who was not known for taking opposing suggestions kindly, even from department chiefs, much less junior employees), who wanted to cut what Raksin saw as an absolutely key scene. Fortunately, he was able to persuade them to let him try his music, and delivered material that lived up to what he promised. The actual main theme from Laura coalesced in Raksin's mind at the end of an otherwise fruitless weekend of attempts, and grew out of his having received a farewell letter from his wife. The resulting music had a dark, brooding quality about it, and was seemingly laced with feelings of passion, resignation, and loss that reflected the emotions that the characters in the opening section of the movie felt toward the title character, portrayed by Gene Tierney. Moreover, the central theme worked well in a multitude of settings, from the big, orchestral version over the credits, which successfully imparted Wagnerian proportions to the music and the attendant passions, to the small-group version heard elsewhere, in a lighter mode. And attached to the "problem" scene that Zanuck wanted cut, Raksin's music made it work and, indeed, transformed the movie into a compelling whole, and also instantly wiped away Preminger's fixation on the Ellington song. Laura was a huge success, and its release turned Raksin's music into a hit in its own right. There were so many requests for the music that Fox's publishing arm was obliged to try and generate a song from the central theme -- dozens of lyrics were submitted, until a set of words by Johnny Mercer won Raksin's approval (at one point, the publishing division hinted to Raksin that they thought he was being unreasonable, insisting on quality lyrics for the song, until he reminded them that he didn't have to approve any words, or allow the piece to be turned into a song). The Raksin/Mercer song "Laura" became one of the most recorded songs of the 1940s, generating many hundreds of versions and enduring across the decades, so that even Frank Sinatra (who described it as a favorite) recorded it on three different occasions across 30 years. Raksin's career was made from that point on. He moved to the front rank of staff composers at Fox, and was from then on a respected, established member of the Hollywood music community. From his "accidental" choice to score Laura, he was now specifically chosen for some of the studio's most high-profile productions, among them Forever Amber, directed by Preminger, for which Raksin engaged in some faux English-sounding period scoring, evoking the era of Restoration England, and earned one of his two Oscar nominations; and Preminger's Whirlpool (1949), which marked the end of his initial tenure at Fox. Separate from the studio, Raksin also scored the Goldwyn-produced Danny Kaye vehicle The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and the independently made crime thriller Force of Evil, where his more modernistic sensibilities took hold. The latter was another case where he clashed with a director, in this case Abraham Polonsky, and one result of their dispute was the use of a theme from Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in one key sequence, building up to the execution of a key character. But Raksin's music from the film is some of his most deeply evocative of his career, of tragedy and corruption, high aspirations doomed, and also of seduction, as well as of the city of New York, where the movie was set and mostly shot -- the score often sounds like an opera without words. Many of the people associated with Force of Evil (which was made by Enterprise Productions, a company founded by mostly left-leaning Hollywood figures), including its star,John Garfield, and director Polonsky, were later caught up in the Red Scare, and Raksin himself was ordered to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Raksin's career was not interrupted by the repercussions of his testimony -- though there were those who regarded his willingness to testify as a sell-out -- and he was busy throughout the 1950s and beyond. He moved to MGM in 1949, working on such high-profile films as William Wellman's The Next Voice You Hear, and Across the Wide Missouri, and John Sturges' The Magnificent Yankee and Right Cross. Raksin's most enduring score from this period, however, was for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), directed by Vincente Minnelli and produced by John Houseman. A movie about the movies, it gave Raksin a chance to have some fun at the expense of the conventions of the industry, with an extremely clever score and one of the most insightful to come out of the MGM music department during this period. He returned to work with Preminger at Fox on River of No Return (1954), and got his second Oscar nomination for his music for the Hecht-Lancaster-produced drama Separate Tables (1958), directed by Delbert Mann for United Artists. Raksin's other notable films of this period included Richard Wilson's Al Capone (1959) and Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), again produced by Houseman. In 1956, Raksin was appointed a professor of film scoring at the University of Southern California -- he continued to teach as an adjunct professor at the school until his death 48 years later. Even as he continued to score films and became more involved with teaching -- he also taught urban ecology at the USC School of Public Administration -- Raksin found time to extend his work to television. Among his best work for the small-screen medium was the distinctive, highly rhythmic, and rich-textured wind-and-brass-dominated main theme for the medical drama Ben Casey (1961-1966). In a 1989 interview with this writer, Raksin recalled that he was called in at the last moment, just before the show had to be delivered to the network, to write a new theme to replace a piece of music by another composer that the producers found unacceptable. "The producers described the visuals associated with the credits, and the time I had to work with -- the idea of these ceiling panels and fixtures, seen from the point-of-view of a patient being wheeled on a gurney, gave me the rhythm and the basic structure for the theme, which I delivered two days later." The series ended up running for four seasons, and the theme proved to be one of Raksin's most familiar pieces of work. He was also heavily involved with various film music professional associations, including the Composers and Lyricists Guild from the 1950s onward, and played a very active role in fostering the preservation and new recording of film music. In the mid-'70s, Raksin became involved with RCA Victor's Classic Film Scores series, produced by Charles Gerhardt, when an LP was prepared of new recordings of his music for Laura, Forever Amber, and The Bad and the Beautiful. Unlike other volumes in the series, however, which were conducted by George Korngold (son of composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold), this album was conducted by its composer. "They originally intended for George Korngold to conduct," Raksin remembered (in the same 1989 interview), "and I asked why. They told me that, 'Well, George Korngold has conducted our volumes devoted to Max Steiner and Alfred Newman. I pointed out that this was fine for Max Steiner and Alfred Newman, who weren't with us anymore, but David Raksin is. So they let me conduct the New Philharmonia Orchestra on the album." That album was remixed for Dolby Surround and reissued on CD in 1989. In the years that followed, Raksin's original complete music for Laura and Forever Amber was unearthed from the 20th Century Fox vaults and released commercially on compact disc. Raksin remained active as a composer and teacher until the final months of his life, when his health began to decline. He passed away from heart failure in August of 2004, at age 92. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide