Music Pioneers of Film

There have been countless fictionalized biographies of music professionals turned out by Hollywood over the years including Cornel Wilde’s Academy Award nominated Best Actor performance as Chopin in A Song to Remember (1945) . So many have been released – like 1984’s Oscar winning Best Picture about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – that there are far too many to include all of them in a single article. To narrow down the subject matter I chose to explore the cliched struggle of the “pioneer” composers – those artists whose work is so unique for their time that it’s not initially accepted by the public (or his peers).

Appropriately the movie credited with ushering in the sound era was The Jazz Singer (1927) a story about a cantor’s son that went against his family’s tradition to make a name for himself by helping to popularize a new kind of music. A three disc deluxe edition DVD of this classic will be released next month to celebrate its 80th anniversary.

Though not based upon his own life Irving Berlin wrote an original story (which earned him an Oscar nomination) about a composer that struggled to get his new sound heard in Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938); Tyrone Power played the titled leading role in this Best Picture nominated drama that earned film composer Alfred Newman his first Academy Award for its Music Score. Berlin’s original song “Now It Can Be Told” also earned a nomination.

Believe it or not the father of Johann Strauss wanted his son to be a banker in lieu of a musician and the youngster had to secretly learn how to play the violin. Thankfully he would succeed in spite of such resistance and go on to write operas and plenty of waltzes like “The Blue Danube” which became the rage in his home city of Vienna. Fernand Gravet aka Gravey plays the prolific composer in The Great Waltz (1938).

George Gershwin was fired for playing his own music for a wannabe singer instead of peddling the company’s standards he’d been hired to sell in the fictionalized biography of his life titled Rhapsody in Blue (1945). Alan Alda’s father Robert (in his film debut) played Gershwin and Oscar Levant who was a friend of the uniquely American composer also appeared as himself.

Producers passed on Cole Porter’s music initially a fact that’s emphasized in the fictional Night and Day (1946) which features Cary Grant as the composer and Alexis Smith as his wife. Since Smith had played one of Gershwin’s female distractions in the aforementioned biography and Monty Woolley plays himself (a friend of Porter) these Warner Bros. productions are similar.

James Stewart plays the title role in a fictionalized biography about the well known arrangement composer in The Glenn Miller Story (1953); the story recycles much of the same cliche: an artist whose work is not appreciated such that when it is (and he succeeds magnificently) we wonder how it could have ever been so. Making this one feel particularly familiar is the fact that the actor was paired with June Allyson who played Stewart’s wife in two other movies as well.

Part of W.C. Handy’s real-life story apparently paralleled the fictional Jazz Singer’s! According to the biographical drama St. Louis Blues (1958) the jazz songwriter’s music was shunned by his Reverend father. Nat ‘King’ Cole plays the blues composer and Juano Hernandez plays his stern father who proclaims that there are only two kinds of songs: hymns which praise God or music for the Devil. This causes a rift between the two of them and even temporary blindness in the younger Handy until the fulfillment of his gift brings about their reconciliation.

Gary Busey earned his only Oscar nomination for playing the title role in The Buddy Holly Story (1978) the last of this type which comes to mind. The singer songwriter’s “jungle music” sound eventually earned him recognition as one of the founding fathers of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Each of the above artists created or revolutionized a new type of music with their unique sound such that they are recognized as pioneers in their field. While there have been other great music artists that struggled and then succeeded whose stories have been told cinematically – from James Cagney’s Academy Award winning performance as the multi-talented George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Danny Thomas (with Doris Day) as lyricist Gus Kahn in I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951) to Sissy Spacek’s Oscar winning role as singer Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and others – I think that music’s compositional pioneers stand apart from the rest.

© 2007 Turner Classic Movies – this article originally appeared on TCM’s official blog