Post by erik on May 28, 2022 18:25:23 GMT -5
One of Hollywood's most underappreciated (at least by the public) composers, Jerry Fielding, is in this week's Classical Works Spotlight with his brilliant score to an underrated 1971 psychological Western.
Jerry Fielding: LAWMAN
Born Joshua Itzhak Feldman in Pittsburgh in 1922, Jerry Fielding was among the most prolific of Hollywood film composers from the late 1960’s until his untimely death in February 1980, but he was also paradoxically also among the lesser known of that distinguished group. He was frequently overshadowed by fellow composers like John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, but it was never for lack of talent. Fielding, who had begun as an arranger for big-band leader Kay Keyser in the 1940’s, began working on scoring various TV projects at the medium’s initial inception; but his fierce and politically liberal views and his refusal to name names during Joe McCarthy’s barbaric Commie witch hunt of the early 1950’s caused him to be blacklisted in Hollywood for many years. It wasn’t until the notorious director Otto Preminger took a hint from once-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and hired Fielding to score his 1962 political drama Advise And Consent that Fielding found his way out of the Las Vegas rut he had immersed himself in during his “exile”. In 1966, he did the score for a made-for-TV adaptation of Katharine Anne Porter’s novella Noon Wine that was directed by another Hollywood reprobate Sam Peckinpah; and in 1969, Fielding earned the first of three Academy Award nominations for Best Score for working on Peckinpah’s violent and magisterial Western epic The Wild Bunch. In-between that film and his next Peckinpah collaboration Straw Dogs, Fielding got an invitation from English-born director Michael Winner to work with him. In 1971, the two gentlemen collaborated on two films. One was the horror film The Nightcomers. The other was the brooding psychological Western Lawman. The latter, shot on location in and around Durango, Mexico in the summer of 1970, concerned a by-the-book marshal (Burt Lancaster) who has set out to arrest the group of ranchers who had gone on a drunken spree in his town, unintentionally killing an old man, only to go into the hometown of those ranchers and find a decided lack of cooperation. The scoring opportunity for Lawman allowed Fielding to explore many of the same brooding elements that he showed for The Wild Bunch, with much of the score being in minor keys (notably A Minor for the film’s theme music). It also allowed Fielding to work in London for the first time, at CTS Studios, where he would also work on The Nightcomers, Straw Dogs, Scorpio, and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia. To the end of his life, Fielding always considered his score for Lawman to be among his very best.
CTS Studio Orchestra/JERRY FIELDING (Intrada)
Jerry Fielding: LAWMAN
Born Joshua Itzhak Feldman in Pittsburgh in 1922, Jerry Fielding was among the most prolific of Hollywood film composers from the late 1960’s until his untimely death in February 1980, but he was also paradoxically also among the lesser known of that distinguished group. He was frequently overshadowed by fellow composers like John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, but it was never for lack of talent. Fielding, who had begun as an arranger for big-band leader Kay Keyser in the 1940’s, began working on scoring various TV projects at the medium’s initial inception; but his fierce and politically liberal views and his refusal to name names during Joe McCarthy’s barbaric Commie witch hunt of the early 1950’s caused him to be blacklisted in Hollywood for many years. It wasn’t until the notorious director Otto Preminger took a hint from once-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and hired Fielding to score his 1962 political drama Advise And Consent that Fielding found his way out of the Las Vegas rut he had immersed himself in during his “exile”. In 1966, he did the score for a made-for-TV adaptation of Katharine Anne Porter’s novella Noon Wine that was directed by another Hollywood reprobate Sam Peckinpah; and in 1969, Fielding earned the first of three Academy Award nominations for Best Score for working on Peckinpah’s violent and magisterial Western epic The Wild Bunch. In-between that film and his next Peckinpah collaboration Straw Dogs, Fielding got an invitation from English-born director Michael Winner to work with him. In 1971, the two gentlemen collaborated on two films. One was the horror film The Nightcomers. The other was the brooding psychological Western Lawman. The latter, shot on location in and around Durango, Mexico in the summer of 1970, concerned a by-the-book marshal (Burt Lancaster) who has set out to arrest the group of ranchers who had gone on a drunken spree in his town, unintentionally killing an old man, only to go into the hometown of those ranchers and find a decided lack of cooperation. The scoring opportunity for Lawman allowed Fielding to explore many of the same brooding elements that he showed for The Wild Bunch, with much of the score being in minor keys (notably A Minor for the film’s theme music). It also allowed Fielding to work in London for the first time, at CTS Studios, where he would also work on The Nightcomers, Straw Dogs, Scorpio, and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia. To the end of his life, Fielding always considered his score for Lawman to be among his very best.
CTS Studio Orchestra/JERRY FIELDING (Intrada)