The Sound of the 40s English • Filmhuis Denhaag Filmhuis Denhaag

The Sound of the '40s

WAR, DISTRACTION AND FILM NOIR

In the late 1930s, the threat of war was becoming ever more tangible. In films too. British filmmakers were predominantly producing serious dramas and war documentaries, with scores to match. Their American colleagues were making films in which they spoke out against the war. But when the United States also became embroiled in the Second World War, their films called for patriotism. One such film was Holiday Inn (Mark Sandrich 1942) with the iconic song White Christmas. 

The war meant that people yearned for distraction, and Hollywood delivered with light-hearted adventure films, cheerful musicals and exciting thrillers. And every genre had its own kind of music. Appearing at the same time were more sombre affairs with dark soundtracks: film noir. An early film noir was Laura (Otto Preminger 1944), a crime thriller with a theme that became a worldwide hit. 

After the war, Shakespeare adaptations helped the British film industry to recover. In the United States, a new, typically American, film genre became popular: the Western.


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Listen to the silence before the storm

Experience the threat of war, let time slip by with a hit song from a "war classic", be enchanted by the sounds of an extraterrestrial instrument & hum along with compelling zither music from Vienna.

Facts of Filmmusic

Dangerous Moonlight (1941)

The British film Dangerous Moonlight (1941) is about the German bombing of the Polish capital Warsaw and a composer who writes a piano concerto for it. Director Brian Hurst had originally wanted to use Sergei Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. But when that proved too expensive, composer Richard Addinsell added his own piano concerto in the style of Rachmaninoff to the score: the Warsaw Concerto. The film and its concerto became a huge hit, culminating in the recording of a 78-RPM record with the piano concerto. The Warsaw Concerto was such a success that it even made the unusual journey from cinema screen to concert hall. The concerto’s unexpected success had another consequence. The piano part was played by pianist Louis Kentner. Fearing it would damage his career, he wanted to remain uncredited. He changed his mind, however, when the record went on to sell millions of copies.

Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book (1942)

The musical score that Miklós Rózsa wrote for Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (1942) became the first soundtrack of a non-musical film to be commercially recorded. In 1943, the film’s score was released on a set of four 78-RPM records, making it the first time that a film’s entire soundtrack, rather than just a single song, was recorded on vinyl. Another first was the specially-designed cover with a photograph of the main lead Sabu on an elephant. The compelling music that Rózsa went on to write for various film noir classics attracted the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who hired him for his film Spellbound (1945).

Casablanca (1943)

A famous quote from the film Casablanca is ‘Play it again, Sam’, with which Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) asks pianist Sam (Dooley Wilson) to play the song As Time Goes By for her. But the quote is incorrect, because what Ilsa actually says is: ‘Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake, play it Sam, play As Time Goes By.’ Nevertheless, ‘Play it again, Sam’ has become one of the most famous quotes in film history. So famous that Woody Allen wrote a screenplay with the title Play it Again, Sam in tribute.

Spellbound (1945)

The theremin is a musical instrument invented in 1919 by Léon Theremin. It was the first analogue synthesiser that let you slide from one note to the next. The music is created by moving your hands between two antennas – if you raise your hands, the pitch goes up. It produces an other-worldly sound. In 1945, composer Miklós Rózsa used the theremin in the music for two films: The Lost Weekend by Billy Wilder and Spellbound by Alfred Hitchcock. In Hitchcock’s film, Rózsa used the instrument to reflect the disturbed mental state of the male lead Gregory Peck. The film is famous for the scene in which Peck has a dream devised by the Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí. Hitchcock himself wasn’t a fan of the music for Spellbound, but Rózsa went on to win an Oscar with it.

The Third Man

The Third Man is a film noir from 1949, directed by Carol Reed. The film’s success was partly due to its music. During filming, Reed heard Anton Karas playing the zither in a wine cellar. Immediately realising that this was the music he needed for his film, Reed asked Karas to compose and perform the soundtrack. The composition that became famous as The Third Man Theme had long been in Karas’s repertoire. He hadn’t played it for some time because it took a lot out of his fingers. Karas preferred the kind of tunes that he could play all night while eating sausages. Nonetheless, Karas’s zither music became famous: within several weeks of the film’s première, more than half a million copies of The Third Man Theme had been sold.
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