Max Steiner: Gone with the Wind (1973 re-recording)

Charles Gerhardt conducts the National Philharmonic

RCA 0452-2-RG

David Aspinall

No other film score has found such a warm and lasting place in the affections of so many people.” So says Rudy Behlmer, who did the expert commentary for the definitive 4 DVD set recently released to the unbounded delight of Gone With the Wind’s legion of fanatics. I remember bumping into Don Harron (TV’s Charlie Farquarson) at one theatre showing in the 1970s. He admitted to having seen Wind more than 20 times. As if that wasn’t sufficient to convince anyone of his devotion, he showed up on crutches.

Back in the late 1960s, the original soundtrack finally became available when Wind was re-released in “widescreen” (meaning the top and bottom had been lopped off.) I and thousands more bought it simply on the strength of the Tara theme. I hadn’t even seen the film yet. So it is with all who fall under Tara’s spell. MGM’s album had warehouse sound and pseudo stereo. It didn’t matter. I must have played that album dozens of times in the first year. Just to hear Max Steiner’s original recording of Tara. That performance, even with its wretched sound, was electrifying. Any of the other FM arrangements I had heard before were merely beautiful by comparison. This neophyte film music lover immediately knew the difference between movie themes, however beguiling their adaptation, and real film music! I must have seen the film nearly as many times as Don Harron in those faraway bachelor days. And probably would have gone just to hear the magnificent opening statement of Tara one more time in its original setting – under the credit shots of the real south, no dialogue getting in the way, in a dark theatre with 100s who might be hearing Steiner’s music for the first time in the context for which it was created. One time I remember taking about 20 friends. As communal experiences go, it didn’t get any better than this. It still doesn’t.

At the time of its release (1939) Gone With the Wind was the most expensive movie yet made. At over 3 1⁄2 hours it was also the longest movie yet made by a Hollywood studio. And by the time its first run was over, in the middle of World War 2, GWTW was by far the most successful movie of all time. When one factors in its many re-releases and 3 generations of inflation at the box office – the average ticket price in 1940 was still 25 cents! – Gone With the Wind is by a Georgia mile the most seen movie ever.

Part of its initial success no doubt devolved from Selznick’s inspired publicity ploy, the unprecedented 3 year search for his Scarlett. Though as the press releases would have us believe the hunt covered America’s hinterland from Atlanta to Alaska, Selznick finally, of course, settled on an almost unknown Brit, Vivien Leigh. It was providential. Otherwise Selznick might well have had to hire his prior favourite, Paulette Goddard. That might have proved embarrassing, as Miss Goddard at that time was living with Charlie Chaplin across the road from the Selznicks in the Hollywood hills. One can see the headline: Selznick searches coast to coast, finds Scarlett next door!

So the producer’s hunt for the perfect heroine of the Old South led him to the very British Leigh. At least southerners could be consoled Scarlett wouldn’t be a Yankee. There was, however, no search for the composer for Gone With the Wind. Max Steiner was producer David Selznick’s first and only choice. Steiner had pioneered the art of film music under Selznick at RKO. With the enthusiastic encouragement of the young production head, Steiner scores for Symphony of Six Million, Bird of Paradise and especially King Kong had established the rules, set the standards for the Hollywood background score. And when Steiner left RKO in 1936, Selznick claimed his services for his new studio’s productions Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Garden of Allah and A Star is Born. Though Warners signed him on full time soon after, as far as the producer was concerned there was no way Max was NOT scoring Gone With the Wind.

Steiner could not have been more pleased. He’d even had the opportunity to ‘warm up’ for Wind by scoring Jezebel, Warner’s excellent drama of the south which, though it went into production a year after GWTW, won an Oscar for Bette Davis the year before Vivien Leigh won her’s as Scarlett. The William Wyler-directed Jezebel, though unabashedly capitalizing on the Gone With the Wind fever by now pandemic in America, had also garnered Oscar nominations for best picture and Steiner’s score.

But as one wit noted, despite its pedigree, Jezebel was, when set beside Selznick’s gargantuan Wind, merely a respectable breeze. So Steiner, though he had 11 other assignments in 1939, got Jack Warner to guarantee him 3 months to write the score for GWTW. Given Steiner’s proclivity for composing wall to wall, or better, credit to exit background scores, no one was astonished when Max composed 3 hours of music for the film which Hollywood wags continued to refer to as “Selznick’s folly” – until the Wind blew away all existing box office records,

Over 2 1⁄2 hours of Steiner’s music made it to the final cut. GWTW is by a long stretch the composer’s most ambitious score, marking the aesthetic apogee of his first decade in Hollywood, the appropriate grand finale for the 100+ scores Max scored for RKO, Warners and Selznick before WW2. GWTW is also by far the most popular of Steiner’s scores, indeed the most beloved background score ever to grace a film soundtrack. Even Star Wars has not yet topped its achievement of generating half a dozen complete or at least comprehensive recordings. Yet despite the perhaps unrivaled popularity of its most famous theme, Tara, the score has not had the status among critics that has, say, Steiner’s groundbreaking music for King Kong. This is no doubt partly related to the composite nature of the final soundtrack. Selznick, who survived the production schedule by non-stop consumption of bennies, gave too little lead time to his composer. In order to motivate Max to meet the December ‘39 deadline, the producer gave very unsubtle hints that he might have to call on Franz Waxman and MGM staff stalwart Herbert Stothart to supplement Steiner’s score. Max, also chemically assisted now, redoubled his efforts. That despite writing 3 other scores during the fall of the fateful year 1939. Yet there are bits of Waxman, Hugo Friedhofer, William Axt and Adolph Deutsch on the edited soundtrack (as well as Alfred Newman’s Selznick trademark before the main title.)

So, the final score, at least as revealed in the film, is a bit of a quilt. It also incorporates, as Selznick insisted, a considerable quota of the popular music of the Civil War period. Hymns, folksongs, Stephen Foster tunes and patriotic music are liberally interspersed and interwoven with Steiner’s original invention. These factors, no doubt, have contributed greatly to the critical diminishing of Steiner’s accomplishment. And, I would suggest, Gone With the Wind’s astonishing popularity, both as film and score, has decidedly worked against its critical status.

Therefore in considering Max Steiner’s magnum opus we must first discuss the nonpareil popular success of both the book and film. Why did Margaret Mitchell’s book break best seller records during the depths of the depression? Why did the book and film resonate so deeply with both pre-war and wartime America, indeed the entire western world?

Margaret Mitchell had been a flapper in the ‘20s. But the careless levity of the lost generation had evaporated by 1930. Prosperity and progress, which before the Great War had seemed irresistible, were no longer to be taken for granted. The heady hedonism of Scott Fitzgerald’s America fizzled fast. As the Depression deepened despair succeeded the superficial cynicism of the jazz age.

When Margaret Mitchell began her only novel as a hobby in the relative repose of the 1920s’ deep south, she had no way of knowing that her generation was passing through a transition paralleling the one she chronicled in the work that eventually would be known as Gone With the Wind. For just as the Civil War and the era of reconstruction were seared in the memory of the American south, not less in the imagination of the next generation represented by Margaret Mitchell, so the Great War and its immediate consequence – the manic roadster ride of the ‘20s into the abyss of the ‘30s – would scar and yet somehow steel Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation”, those who would have to face a war yet greater than the war that would end all war.

By the end of 1936, when the novel Gone With the Wind was selling in unprecedented numbers, Americans needed to see some light. They had been in the tunnel 7 years. Hollywood had its own fiscal issues, to which it responded with what seems, in 70 years retrospect, an unexampled burst of creative energy. Which creativity, it must be admitted, usually had as its immediate intent escape from or at least comfort in the long night of the Great Depression. Frank Capra’s corn was elephant high, Astaire and Rogers and Busby Berkeley surreally relevant to the nation’s ordeal. An explosion of costume dramas – Dickens and Tolstoy, Dumas and Hugo – did not exactly provide escapist entertainment. But the classics made the suffering and tedious greyness of the present more bearable by contrast with the privations – and the foresworn fashions – of the not-so-distant past.

And so Margaret Mitchell’s novel had serendipitous timing. For its vision of the old south’s “secure world”, the ruin that resulted from the “rebellion”, and the survivors’ struggle toward rebirth, resonated at a mythical level with readers of the 1930s. Particularly women. For Scarlett O’Hara was the epitome of the survivor. (We can thank editors everywhere that publisher Macmillan prevailed over author Mitchell, who had named her heroine the spectacularly inapposite “Pansy O’Hara”.) And without doubt the attribute in Scarlett to which David Selznick himself related best was, to use Margaret Mitchell’s own description of her heroine, her “gumption”. The perpetually broke David Selznick knew how to create your cuisine from turnip and dress your poverty in the family drapes. A phrase in the script for the Selznick A Star is Born comes to mind: Hollywood, according to screenwriters Dorothy Parker and hubby Alan Campbell, was the “metropolis of make believe”. For Margaret Mitchell, David Selznick, and at least 20 million Americans, the make believe Gone With the Wind became, as the western world staggered toward another world war, a kind of un-reality.

Max Steiner too must have seen himself somewhere among the cotton and magnolias. He had coveted Gone With the Wind. Steiner knew what it was to lose a comfortable world and lift oneself from the dust to face a new day. Max was named after his grandfather Maximilian, the same man who had convinced Johann Strauss, Jr to write for the theatre. Max’s father Gabor had built the famous Ferris wheel in the Prater in Vienna. The boy had early exhibited prodigious talents to his teacher Gustav Mahler. He was soon conducting and composing, and while still a teenager accepted an offer from impresario George Edwards to conduct The Merry Widow in London. This was 1906. His burgeoning career in England was suddenly interrupted by the outbreak of war. Steiner was interned as an enemy alien. Only through the intervention of the Duke of Westminster, a fan, did Steiner obtain his exit papers. His possessions and funds impounded, Max arrived in New York in December 1914. He had $32 in his pocket.

It wasn’t too long till Steiner had built a new life as arranger and conductor for the top Broadway composers, Gershwin, Youmans, Kern and Victor Herbert among them. A decade later he was in Hollywood. Within the first 7 years of the sound era he was the invaluable music director for the early musicals of Astaire and Rogers, and already recognized as the dean of film music composers.

Just 3 years later Steiner had earned the ultimate accolade, the opportunity to score the biggest epic even Hollywood had ever attempted. Max dove into the project with his accustomed discipline, dividing the score into what ultimately would be 99 cues. The score was built up from 11 original themes, with the use, at Selznick’s urging, of 16 other familiar tunes from the Civil War era. As was mentioned before, there is, on the final soundtrack as heard in the film itself, evidence of haste and considerable editing. The rush to finish the film for its Atlanta premiere made it necessary Steiner and his orchestrators – among whom were Hugo Friedhofer and Adolph Deutsch – work unconscionable hours. So too the sound editors. But so too David Selznick. The obsession of the boss was catching.

So seams are showing in the music track of the film. That is why the music of Gone With the Wind is best heard in the suite form favoured by Charles Gerhardt and Steiner himself. (Although a few years ago Rhino released the complete original recording on 2 CDs.) In 1954 Steiner recorded his own 30 minute suite for RCA. A few years later Muir Matheson redid this version in newfangled stereo for Warner records. Then in 1973 Gerhardt recorded an expanded suite, which includes Steiner’s dance cues and several sequences not heard on any previous recording. The Gerhardt version had the approval of Max himself.

When heard in such concentrated form as the 45 minute Gerhardt recording, Steiner’s score reveals what may be its most significant drawback, if we cannot exactly call it a weakness. Perhaps particularly due to the intense nature of the film itself, the score apart from the film is a rather overpoweringly heavy experience. Though the melodic materials are almost always arresting, the treatment demanded by the script’s dramaturgy, when matched with Steiner’s penchant for full scoring, has a density which makes the addition of dance sequences in the Gerhardt recording a welcome contrast. The heaviness may well fatigue the casual listener. One finally agrees with the wish of Aaron Copland, who made his Hollywood debut that same year with Of Mice and Men, that the film music norm of that day had allowed more flexibility in orchestration. But hey, if you had an orchestra to play the stuff you wrote the night before – no charge! – wouldn’t you take advantage?

That said, the score of Gone With the Wind is a remarkable achievement in film music. Steiner’s 11 themes deserve separate comment. 4 of them are among the most memorable and beautiful ever to emerge from a soundtrack. And these 4 are not the ones you might anticipate. Even the minor characters are characterized by distinct musical ideas. Gerald O’Hara, father of the clan, has his own lilting Irish air. Mammy has a jaunty theme that supplies a mood contrast to the emotional overload that often threatens. Mammy’s motif, perhaps revealingly, is actually the first Steiner motto heard, almost imperceptibly preceding the first unforgettable statement of Tara in the main title. Does its presence there indicate Steiner’s attitude to the character, which handed Hattie McDaniel the first Oscar ever awarded to a black performer? The film took much flack even at the time for its treatment of the ‘Negro race’. But perhaps Steiner’s early reference to her theme can be understood in the same spirit as Rhett’s comment to Scarlett re Mammy, “one of the few people whose respect I’d like to have”.

Of the 4 main characters, 3 have themes relatively little used. The biggest surprise is Steiner’s musical treatment of Scarlett. She actually has two themes. Early in the film, an obscure Stephen Foster melody, Katie Bell, serves as the basic motif for Scarlett. When the war begins, this melody disappears and an original Steiner motif takes over. But this arcing melody is almost invisible to the ear, and is used less than the themes of the other 3 main characters. Rhett’s motif is confident, in form a march, but it too is little developed. Even at the last, when Rhett launches his most famous line, Rhett’s theme gets only a slight reprise as he leaves Scarlett and disappears into the fog.

Contrast Rhett’s cocky motto with Ashley’s theme, which is deliberately weak, descending in two short phrases to a feeble fade. Curiously, though the theme itself is ineffectual, Steiner gets much dramatic mileage out of its variation. A tribute to the composer’s art. Of the 4 main characters, Melanie gets the most memorable idea. But her own theme, in the first half of the film, is less significant than the Ashley and Melanie melody. This is actually the love theme throughout, receiving its most famous variation in the reunion scene, the lovers running from opposite sides of the screen in a movie moment endlessly parodied. There is actually NO love theme for Scarlett and any of her 3 husbands, even Rhett. More about that in a moment.

To Steiner’s 4 indelible themes which make GWTW’s score finally so memorable: Surprisingly, the first is an exquisite miniature Max gave a very minor character – the gracious melody evoking Atlanta’s madam Belle Watling. This role, so brief in the film, achieves a profound impact due to Max’s inspired musical counterpoint, particularly in the carriage scene, where Belle confides to Melanie that she too has a little boy – a child she barely sees because of her ‘career’. Fascinating too is that the Belle theme is briefly broken off by the single most moving use of Scarlett’s motif. Steiner shows here that he knows what Rhett knows. Belle, unlike Scarlett, has a heart. So does Max Steiner.

As I said, the strongest of the themes which Steiner provided the main characters belongs to Melanie. Scarlett & Rhett may supply the sizzle that is the most saleable aspect of GWTW, but its emotional and moral core is the character of Melanie. For her Steiner provided a theme which is a model of simplicity and spiritual serenity, and which contrasts so starkly with the often overtly melodramatic uses of his Ashley theme. Its most unforgettable appearances, with perfect symmetry, are at the birth of Melanie’s child, and in Melanie’s death scene, where Steiner adds wordless chorus ever so unobtrusively, superimposing the Ashley and Melanie theme as Scarlett says her last goodbye. Then, breathtakingly, a final coda which moves us to Rhett’s tribute to Melanie: “God rest her. She was the only completely kind person I ever knew. A great lady, a very great lady,”

There is yet one more unforgettable creation. Bonnie is of course at first the theme for Rhett & Scarlett’s tiny daughter. After her death, in the climactic scenes of the film it virtually becomes their love theme. Or better, their bond theme. The melody has a strangely sad contour even when Bonnie is alive. When she dies, Steiner ironically moves this gorgeous yet implicitly tragic melody to the centre of his musical landscape. Its permutations, in combination with the Ashley and Melanie love theme, and especially with the spiritual, alternately serene and soaring Melanie melody, create in the final scenes a musical apotheosis. Such is the strength of Steiner’s inventiveness with these melodic materials that he can hold back his most famous theme, Tara, for the final shot!
Tara! No discussion of Max Steiner’s score could be complete without a tribute to movie music’s most celebrated creation. That Selznick’s composer selected this theme to both begin and end the film tells us that Gone With the Wind is not really about Scarlett, or the south, or the Civil War. The story may concern a spoiled girl’s lifelong infatuation with an older man. But Scarlett’s Ashley turns out to be an illusion – just as the “secure world” of the pre-war south was a dream even with eyes wide open. “And there’s a lesson in intimacy for many of us in her story – our buying into romantic obsession almost certainly guarantees we get the last person we need.” (James Monaco, The Movie Guide)

No, GWTW is not Scarlett’s story. Ben Hecht’s printed introduction scrolls before us as Steiner segues from Tara to a gentle version of Dixie. “There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South ... Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave ... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind ...”.

Not a world remembered in a dream, but a dream remembered. As Rudy Behlmer insightfully adds, Tara stands for “ love of home, ground and tradition”. Steiner’s most famous theme is the closest any film composer has ever come to evoking intangible memory by the use of melody. There’s something inherently nostalgic in its shape, something aching with loss even in its classical simplicity. If ever a melody deserved to be called “haunting’, surely Tara does. It lingers on the periphery of our consciousness while 3 1⁄2 hours of narrative occupy our eyes. It also lingers long after. Even multiple years between viewings cannot nullify Tara’s ability to instantly conjure “cavaliers and cotton fields”.

It is triply ironic that Steiner’s Gone With the Wind lost the Best Score Oscar to The Wizard of Oz. Ironic first because Victor Fleming directed both. Second because Georgia’s own Herbert Stothart, Selznick’s ace in waiting in case Steiner couldn’t deliver on time, won his only Oscar for Wizard. Third, because the message of both films is the same. “I can grasp that feeling for Tara,” said Steiner in 1939, “which moved Scarlett’s father and which is one of the finest instincts in her, that love for the soil where she had been born., love of the life before her own which had been founded so strongly. That is why the Tara theme begins and ends the picture and permeates the entire score.”

Bette Davis, Steiner’s Jezebel and before that a favourite candidate for Scarlett, put her finger on Max’s supreme gift – the rendering of emotion beneath the externals of a scene. “Max understood more about drama than any of us”, said Bette. Two examples will suffice to illustrate Davis’ point. The Atlanta depot, one of the most famous shots in all cinema. I remember being let down when I first saw this fabled sequence. Not by the scene, among the most wrenching ever filmed. But by the comparative understatement of Steiner’s music. I had only heard, at that time, the rearranged, intensely dramatic rendering on Gerhardt’s album, which formed the emotional climax to the first half of the score. But here, in the movie itself, Steiner opted for a much less dramatic, understated approach. The same materials, alright. Glancing allusions to Dixie, Maryland, My Maryland, as we see Scarlett’s reaction before we are allowed to see the tragic scene opening out before her. A dirge like Old Folks at Home forming the melodic centrepiece as the camera pulls back and up, till we see, before the camera finally stops, dozens, then hundreds of Confederate wounded, without comforter, sprawled across the tracks and to the most distant point of the depot. And in the foreground, as Stephen Foster’s tune gives way to Taps, which struggles through as if rising from the dust, a tattered Confederate flag flaps in the breeze. The whole scene takes less than a minute; Steiner never even rises to a forte. I was disappointed then. But not now. Steiner’s rearrangement for record perfectly captured all the pathos and drama without visuals. The original version is perfect for the film. Its very understatement supplies the necessary irony, the camera supplies the dramatic point, our gut response the pathos. The art of film music at its highest level.

Then there’s the penultimate scene. Rhett at the top of the stairs, explaining to Scarlett why he’s leaving. “I want peace. I want to see if somewhere there isn’t something left in life of charm and grace. Do you know what I’m talking about?” Rhett is going back to Charleston, once his home. But it’s plain that for Rhett, as Thomas Wolfe told us in the title of his book published the same year Wind swept across America, You Can’t Go Home Again. No, Scarlett hasn’t a clue what Rhett wants of life. But at another level, she has. After Rhett is gone, Scarlett is disconsolate. But after she collapses at the bottom of the stairs, voices from the past raise her head once more, calling her back home to Tara. A ghostly version of Gerald O’Hara’s motif begins the sequence, then the first phrase of Tara breaking through the mist of memory; at last, as we see the final shot of Scarlett silhouetted on the hill, a full statement of Tara, this time with chorus.

This shot is what most remember best of the finale and Max Steiner’s music. But for me, what lingers longest and penetrates deepest is the transcendent variation of Bonnie’s theme, as Rhett takes leave of Scarlett. We all seek, even it we’re sophisticated cynics like Rhett, something of charm and grace. And if we’re a lower level of primate, like Scarlett, we at least want to go home and rest from the wars and wear of life. And beneath Rhett’s words there’s dear Max, saying all this in a few inspired, forlorn musical phrases. Reaching, as film and film music seldom do, the least accessible level of our being, way beyond and beneath mere words, where death and hope, love and loss alone can reach.

EPILOGUE: David Selznick died in 1965, never having returned to Tara. He lived past 60, but never did equal a movie he’d made in his thirties. Max Steiner lived on until 1971. His last decade was made bitter by the realization that the style of film composing he had invented was no longer in demand. Love story and Raindrops keep falling on my head were far outselling the soundtrack of Gone With the Wind. But the boy who had sat on the lap of Emperor Franz Josef survived to see Charles Gerhardt plan the RCA series of recordings which heralded the rediscovery of the golden age of film music. Among those dozen treasured albums there is but one which presents a single score – Gone With the Wind.