In the best film scores, hearing the music can serve to re-create the scene itself: the look of it, and what it did the first time we saw it. Leonard Bernstein knew this, and it’s sad that he didn’t give more time to the art; his On the Waterfront music simply throbs with Jersey grayness and Brando, and that was his one work in the genre. Elmer Bernstein (no relation; they agreed early on, Elmer told me, that he would be “Steen” and Lenny “Stein”) gave his life to that genre, happily, until its end last week. I love the versatility: the ease in the way he brought jazz into bigtime films without ruining it (e.g., the way he used Chico Hamilton’s Quintet in Sweet Smell of Success), the way he could do Western skies (in The Magnificent Seven) without making it inevitable that John Wayne would have to come riding around the next bend, and, above all, the deep, rich humanity of the father and those kids in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Mockingbirdhas to be everybody’s favorite, but I have another couple. One is a tiny moment in Sweet Smell, a tender parting near the end, with a solo clarinet picking up the mood for just a few seconds. Elmer was delighted when I told him how much I valued that moment, because he did, too. The other is the score he did for the designer Charles Eames for a short film all done with old-fashioned toy trains running through a toy landscape; it’s on a DVD collection of Eames short subjects, a lovely disc. It was the first music of Elmer Bernstein I ever heard, at a film festival in 1954, and I was sure they had gotten the name wrong. They hadn’t.
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