Bernstein, Elmer

(b. 4 April 1922 in New York City; d. 18 August 2004 in Ojai, California), Academy Award–winning film composer who wrote innovative scores for over two hundred movies and television shows in a wide variety of genres, breaking with Hollywood’s longstanding reliance on nineteenth-century European music and incorporating such popular forms of American music as jazz.

Bernstein was born in Brooklyn to Edward Bernstein, a high school English teacher, and Selma (Feinstein) Bernstein, a homemaker. Bernstein’s father instilled an early interest in jazz in his son by playing recordings of Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong. Both parents strongly encouraged Bernstein to pursue a career in the arts; he showed an early aptitude for dance and painting as well as music. He attended the King Coit Drama School for Children from 1932 to 1935, where he studied acting as well as dance. It was music, however, that won out over his other interests. At the age of twelve, Bernstein committed himself to a career as a concert pianist and received a scholarship to study with Henriette Michelson, a teacher at the Juilliard School of Music. Michelson was so impressed with the young Bernstein’s ability to improvise that she had him play for the composer Aaron Copland. Copland in turn sent Bernstein to study composition with his pupil Israel Citkowitz. Bernstein also studied with the composers Roger Sessions and Stefan Wolpe. It was Copland’s interest in popular American music, however, that most profoundly influenced Bernstein’s film scores.

Bernstein graduated from the Walden School (a conservatory for musically gifted high school students) in 1939 and then went on to the Steinhardt School of New York University; he graduated from the school with a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1942. He performed as a concert pianist regularly from 1939 to 1950 and represented the United States on several world tours. During World War II he was inducted into the Army Air Corps and assigned to make musical arrangements for Glenn Miller’s Army Air Forces band and for the Armed Forces Radio Service. After the war Bernstein returned to the concert stage, gaining recognition as a virtuoso. In 1946 he married Pearl Glusman; they had two sons.

In 1949 Bernstein wrote the music for a United Nations Radio documentary on Israel. His radio work led to a job offer writing musical scores for feature films. Bernstein’s first film scores were for Saturday’s Hero (1951), a movie about a college football player, and Boots Malone (1952), a drama about horse racing that starred William Holden. In 1952 Bernstein wrote his first powerful and inventive score for the film noir classic Sudden Fear, starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance. Bernstein’s career should have soared after this success, but he encountered the political wall many others did during the early 1950s: the blacklisting of Hollywood figures who had been associated with left-wing causes. Bernstein was never actually blacklisted, but he later described himself as “graylisted” for his left-wing views. This label kept him from working on major Hollywood productions, or “A pictures.” Instead, Bernstein spent several years writing music for such B pictures—low-budget genre films—as Battles of Chief Pontiac (1953), a Western starring Lon Chaney, Jr., and two science fiction movies, Cat-Women of the Moon(1953) and Robot Monster (1953). These films have garnered a cult following, with Robot Monster sometimes called the worst movie ever made.

Bernstein was brought back into the Hollywood mainstream by an unlikely source: the conservative director Cecil B. DeMille, who hired him for the biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956). Bernstein was given another assignment while he was working for DeMille: composing music for Otto Preminger’s film about a heroin-addicted jazz musician called The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), starring Frank Sinatra. Bernstein’s music broke new ground because it was one of the first all-jazz film scores. It won Bernstein his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Original Score.

Bernstein combined his early critical successes with a prolific outpouring of film music. The late 1950s are a good example of his almost nonstop work for such films as the Western Drango (1957); the baseball film Fear Strikes Out (1957), starring Anthony Perkins; the Korean War film Men in War (1957), directed by Anthony Mann; the film noir classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957); another Western, The Tin Star (1957), starring Henry Fonda; a picture about the War of 1812 called The Buccaneer (1958); an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms (1958); the drama God’s Little Acre (1958); the war film Kings Go Forth (1958), starring Frank Sinatra and Natalie Wood; the Western Saddle the Wind (1958); and a third film with Sinatra, Some Came Running (1958), directed by Vincente Minnelli.

Bernstein’s work throughout the 1950s reflected major changes in the entertainment industry. He began his work in Hollywood under the old studio system, wherein the major film companies ran like factories. With the rise of television and the breakup of the studio system, however, Bernstein entered the 1960s with innovative music for new kinds of films. Although Bernstein admired such important film composers as Miklos Rozsa and Bernard Herrmann, he altered the formula of the traditional Hollywood film score by using American popular music and smaller orchestras.

The 1960s proved to be one of Bernstein’s most fertile periods; he wrote over thirty film scores and received eight Academy Award nominations. He started the new decade with his most famous film score. His music for The Magnificent Seven (1960) redefined film scores for the Western genre and earned Bernstein his second Academy Award nomination. In addition to composing music for genre films, Bernstein also produced scores for such serious dramas as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), for which he won a Golden Globe and another Oscar nomination. Bernstein’s films of this period include a comedy, The Rat Race (1960); The Story on Page One (1960), written and directed by Clifford Odets; a Western, The Comancheros (1961), starring John Wayne; Summer and Smoke (1961), a drama based on a play by Tennessee Williams that won Bernstein a third Oscar nomination; the classic prison film Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), starring Burt Lancaster; and Walk on the Wild Side (1962), which brought Bernstein an Academy Award nomination for Best Song.

These films were followed by The Caretakers (1963), starring Joan Crawford; another war classic, The Great Escape (1963); Hud (1963), starring Paul Newman; Baby, the Rain Must Fall (1964), starring Steve McQueen; the comedy The World of Henry Orient (1964); the Western comedy The Hallelujah Trail (1965), which won the Western Heritage Award for Bernstein’s music; the last film directed by John Ford, 7 Women (1965); The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), another classic John Wayne film; and the war film Cast a Giant Shadow (1966).

In 1965 Bernstein divorced his first wife and married Eve Adamson. This second marriage produced two daughters. The following year Bernstein was nominated for three Academy Awards: two nominations for Hawaii (1966; Best Original Score and Best Song) and one for the score for the sequel to The Magnificent Seven, called Return of the Seven (1966). Before the decade ended, Bernstein wrote the music for such films as The Silencers (1966), starring Dean Martin; the comedy I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968), starring Peter Sellers; another sequel called Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969); and True Grit (1969), the film that earned John Wayne his only Oscar, for Best Actor. Bernstein won his own Oscar in 1967, for Best Original Score for the musical comedy Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Bernstein’s music filled Hollywood films over the next three decades. The composer once defined his approach to his work: “The first question I ask myself is ‘Why is there music in this film at all? What’s it doing here?’” In the 1970s and 1980s he solidified his reputation by writing scores for such big-budget comedies as National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), The Blues Brothers (1980), and Stripes (1981). He wrote the music for many of John Wayne’s last films, including Big Jake (1971), Cahill: United States Marshal (1973), McQ (1974), and Wayne’s final picture, The Shootist (1976).

The 1980s saw Bernstein emerge as the preeminent composer of scores for comedies, with music for Airplane! (1980), Ghostbusters (1984), Spies like Us (1985), and Three Amigos! (1986). Bernstein’s score for Trading Places (1983), a comedy about Wall Street, earned him his twelfth Academy Award nomination.

Despite these big-budget productions, however, the end of the decade saw Bernstein turn to low-budget independent film projects. He supplied the score for the critically acclaimed film My Left Foot (1989) free of charge because he believed in its message. He also wrote music for the independent film The Field (1990). Bernstein composed the music for Stephen Frear’s neo-noir film TheGrifters (1990). Its producer, Martin Scorsese, was an important figure in the New Hollywood. When Bernstein first met him, the filmmaker was preparing to remake a 1962 film called Cape Fear; Scorsese’s version was released in 1991. Bernstein asked to work on the film because Bernard Herrmann had supplied the original score. “Bernard Herrmann,” he said, “was one of my heroes and I felt it would be a privilege to work on one of his scores.” In 1993 Bernstein received another Academy Award nomination for the score to Scorsese’s next film, The Age of Innocence (1993).

Bernstein worked throughout the 1990s in a variety of films that showcased his range and versatility. He wrote music for the comedy The Cemetery Club (1993); the Neil Simon dramatic comedy Lost in Yonkers (1993); the crime film Devil in a Blue Dress (1995); the action film Bulletproof (1996); the gangster drama Hoodlum (1997); The Rainmaker (1997), directed by Francis Ford Coppola; Twilight (1998), starring Paul Newman; Bringing Out the Dead (1999), directed by Scorsese; and the action comedy Wild Wild West (1999).

Bernstein’s final two film scores were Keeping the Faith (2000), a romantic comedy, and Far from Heaven (2002), an homage to the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. For this final film score Bernstein was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.

In 1996 Bernstein was given a star on Hollywood Boulevard, a fitting tribute to a composer who changed the music of the movies. He died of cancer in August 2004 at the age of eighty-two. Martin Scorsese remembered Bernstein as a vital part of Hollywood history: “It’s one thing to write music that reinforces a film, underscores it, or gives it dramatic muscle. It’s entirely another to write music that graces a film. That’s what Elmer Bernstein does, and that, for me, is his greatest gift.”

There is no book-length biography of Bernstein as of the early 2000s; however, his film scores are discussed at length in Tony Thomas, Music for the Movies, 2nd ed. (1997). A memorial tribute to Bernstein appeared in the Film Music Society’s Notes and Events (29 Oct. 2004). Obituaries are in the Washington Post, New York Times, and San Francisco Chronicle (all 20 Aug. 2004).

John Rocco