Frank Skinner at Universal, part 2

In a previous post I wrote: "Skinner worked to formula in a musical style that was the lingua franca for Hollywood in the 1930s but had begun to sound a bit old-fashioned when paired with high-quality widescreen image tracks in the 1950s. His music for action scenes (sword fights, battles, etc.), in particular, sounds dated, as if it were stock music taken from 1930s B-films."

Although the generalization stands -- one need only compare Skinner's scores with contemporaries such as Alex North (examples: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Misfits) or late-career masters like Franz Waxman (Spirit of St. Louis) to get the point -- the specific statement about music for action scenes needs qualification. Under Joseph Gershenson, who had been a producer but became music department head in 1949, Universal maintained the practice of collaborative scoring much longer than did other studios. This was by no means always the case, especially later in the 1950s (except for the title song, for example, Skinner wrote all the underscore for Written on the Wind), but even when one composer wrote most of the music, action scenes were often scored by someone else -- or drawn from Universal's large music library, whose holdings stretched back to the mid-1930s.

Action scenes were particularly prone to being shunted off to someone other than the principal composer because they were almost always generic -- that is, they rarely involved thematic material from the film; they were there to increase excitement and tension. Furthermore, unless there was some reason for close synchronization, most any "hurry" would do -- then, pulling something out of the library often made sense and also saved time (hurries are note-heavy) and money (especially if a recording could be re-used).

You can get information about a film's music from Clifford McCarty's Film Composers in America: A Filmography, 1911-1970 (2d ed., 1999) -- he made a thorough study of studio cue sheets, conductor scores, and other archival sources. His results, however, don't always match those given on IMDb, whose information about music seems to be taken mostly from the databases of rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI.

A simple example: McCarty credits Skinner and Hans Salter for the music to The Rawhide Years (they do both receive screen credit), but IMDb adds Eric Zeisl as composer of "stock music, uncredited." Zeisl's name appears in the ASCAP records for the film.

An example of collaborative work and re-use: Herman Stein received screen credit for The Unguarded Moment. McCarty lists Henry Mancini under "additional composition." ASCAP has an entry for Mancini but also one for Skinner. Stein's theme for the film was re-used in Imitation of Life (Skinner) and two of Mancini's cues were re-used in The Tattered Dress (also Skinner). In both cases, I took the information from the studio cue sheets.

Frank Skinner at Universal

Frank Skinner's career at Universal spanned nearly thirty years, from 1938 to 1966. The composer did yeoman's work, as did others ranging from Hans Salter in the '30s to Henry Mancini in the '50s, under the music department's head, Joseph Gershenson. Like Paramount, but unlike Warner Bros., orchestral underscore for a film was often a group job, for which Gershenson alone received screen credit for music supervision.

I am currently finishing up a project to digitize more than 60 films for which Skinner himself composed an orchestral underscore. The films are mostly from the late 1940s through about 1960, VHS dubs from television a decade or so back, when the American Movie Channel (AMC) was still showing a large number of Universal-International films without commercial breaks. A majority, unfortunately, are in widescreen format that has been reduced by pan-and-scan, but AMC clearly had access to excellent prints and, apart from the formatting changes, image and sound track quality are quite acceptable, even when passed through television and VHS to mpg files.

Skinner worked to formula in a musical style that was the lingua franca for Hollywood in the 1930s but had begun to sound a bit old-fashioned when paired with high-quality widescreen image tracks in the 1950s. His music for action scenes (sword fights, battles, etc.), in particular, sounds dated, as if it were stock music taken from 1930s B-films. On the other hand, his main title cues stand out as remarkably tuneful: Skinner often gives a perfunctory nod to the clichéd opening maestoso, then quickly drops into a soaring melody whose style may or may not be directly related to the film's setting or story. These tunes are generally too intense ("heavy") to be associated with the female lead--they typically recur in dramatic emotional situations between the principal male and female characters. In that sense, one might say, they mark an advance on the 1930s-era two-part main title cue. (See HtM, chapter 6, for discussion of the design of establishing sequences.)