Dimitri Tiomkin

With the advent of talking pictures, Tiomkin and his wife, the former dance director Albertina Rasch -- whom he'd met while on a vaudeville tour of America in the early '20s -- relocated to Hollywood. He made his debut as a film composer in 1930 with Our Blushing Brides, a drama starring Joan Crawford, and his subsequent movie projects included Broadway to Hollywood, Paramount's Alice in Wonderland (both 1933), and Mad Love (1935). His association with director Frank Capra started with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), but he didn't achieve prominence until the release of Capra's Lost Horizon in 1937. That fantasy adventure film featured one of the most prominent scores of any movie of the 1930s; Tiomkin's music was uncommonly bold for the era, the action sequences written in a manner recalling Max Steiner, while the portions of the score covering the parts of the movie depicting Shangri-la, filled with rich, Eastern-sounding melodies and lush choruses, were even more striking, and brought him to the attention of the mass public. Tiomkin became Capra's composer-of-choice for the next few years, helping to close out the director's Columbia Pictures career and open his period as an independent director/producer on Meet John Doe (1941). Tiomkin continued to work on other independent productions, including The Moon and Sixpence (1941), mixed with the occasional big-studio project such as Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and he later scored the Capra-produced wartime documentary series called Why We Fight (1943).

During the early days of American involvement in World War II, Tiomkin was in charge of evaluating the abilities of draftees with musical training and selecting those who would work in Special Services (i.e. entertainment) units or be assigned to Hollywood in the making of movies for the armed forces. He evidently abused this authority on at least one occasion; according to composer Miklos Rozsa, a young but already well-established composer from Europe, who was an experienced film composer with two major-hit credits, Tiomkin interviewed him and summarily designated Rozsa to a combat unit, in what could only have been a matter of extreme jealousy. Fortunately for movies and for Rozsa, the composer later revealed a health problem that made him ineligible for military service, but he never forgave Tiomkin for what the latter had tried to do.

Tiomkin's career took off in the post-World War II era. He worked on independent and medium-budget studio productions such as Dillinger (1945) and Angel on My Shoulder (1946), but it was his selection to write the music for David O. Selznick's mammoth production of Duel in the Sun (1946) that put Tiomkin into the front rank of screen composers. Although ostensibly a Western, Duel in the Sun was really an overheated drama of sex and passion that happened to be set in the 19th-century American West. Tiomkin's main struggle was delivering a piece of music to accompany a love scene between the characters played by Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones that "felt" to Selznick like a sexual climax. In one of the funniest exchanges of criticism and memos ever recorded in old Hollywood, the producer kept saying that the music for the scene somehow missed what Selznick was looking for. Duel in the Sun was ridiculed by most critics, but it did earn a substantial box-office gross, and some of Tiomkin's music was released as a 78 rpm album, placing it among the earliest such commercial soundtrack releases.

Tiomkin's relationship with Capra ended with a disagreement over the scoring for It's a Wonderful Life (1946), but he was involved in arranging Claude Debussy's music for Selznick's Portrait of Jennie (1948), and his next big break came when Howard Hawks engaged him to write the music for his epic Western Red River (1948). The movie was everything that Selznick's lust-in-the-dust epic hadn't been, and it was a huge hit, critically and commercially, helped in no small measure by Tiomkin's rousing central theme. Around the same time, Tiomkin was engaged by producer Stanley Kramer for the first time, on So This Is New York (1948). The latter was a failure at the box office, but it was his association with Kramer's next two movies, Home of the Brave and Champion (both 1949), that proved fortuitous. The former was a critical success and the latter was a huge hit, establishing its star, Kirk Douglas, as one of the top leading men of the period, and also earning multiple Academy Award nominations and enhancing the careers of virtually everyone associated with the movie. By this time, Tiomkin's music was beginning to show certain patterns and recognizable, "signature" elements, such as the brassy "growl" that the composer used to underscore intense action scenes or intense, suspenseful moments.

Tiomkin was one of the busiest composers in Hollywood in 1950 and 1951, scoring six movies in each year, among them the pioneering big-studio science fiction production of Howard Hawks' The Thing, for RKO, and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train at Warner Bros., as well as the independent production The Well. In 1952, he scored nine movies, among them Hawks' epic The Big Sky, but his most important scoring assignment was for a movie that seemed destined for failure. Stanley Kramer's production of High Noon (1952), directed by Fred Zinnemann, had been pegged as a box-office bomb and was even turned down by Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn as part of Kramer's new contract with the studio. Tiomkin was called in to see if a musical score could save the movie, and he delivered -- in tandem with lyricist Ned Washington and country & western singer Tex Ritter -- a full score as well as a ballad, officially called "High Noon" but also known by its opening line, "Do not foresake me, oh my darling." Tiomkin's resulting score, patterned loosely after the work of Earl Robinson on a 1945 war movie called A Walk in the Sun, mixed instrumental music and a haunting ballad. The latter moved the action forward and played an essential role in making the movie a hit, the score and the ballad filling up long silent minutes of screen time that had seemed interminable to screening and preview audiences. The song became a hit several times over, including a pop release by Frankie Laine and a country single by Ritter himself, while Tiomkin earned two Oscars for his work. Additionally, Tiomkin became one of the Hollywood community's more visible composers, thanks to his somewhat flamboyant manner and his mangling of English pronunciation, calling the cowboy singer "Tax Ritter" and otherwise establishing an image as a cheerful, volatile Russian émigré. The movie was more than a career-defining release for Tiomkin -- it was a career-expanding one.

Over the next decade, Tiomkin would periodically write ballads (especially on Western themes) for movies and television shows, and enjoyed another hit with the theme for the television series Rawhide. He would occasionally steal from himself -- some of his music from Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs was borrowed liberally from his own score for Lost Horizon -- and not all of the ballads were memorable (few people remembered the songs from Take the High Ground or Blowing Wild), but he was generally in the top rank of film composers, working on such major (and respected) movies as Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, William Wellman's The High and the Mighty (both 1954), and George Stevens' Giant (1956). The latter yielded a song that was later adopted by the state of Texas as its official song. Tiomkin was engaged by producer Hal Wallis for a pair of Westerns, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and The Last Train From Gun Hill (1959), both directed by John Sturges, with the former yielding up a superb ballad underscoring the action. Tiomkin also became John Wayne's composer of choice, on the actor/producer's outsized production of The Alamo (1960), in addition to scoring the Howard Hawks Western Rio Bravo (1959), also starring Wayne. For the latter score, Tiomkin deliberately recalled musical elements from his first Wayne/Hawks movie, Red River.

The 1960s were less kind to the composer. He started off well enough with The Guns of Navarone and Town Without Pity (both 1961), both of which received Academy Award nominations, but by the middle of the decade, Tiomkin was working on far fewer movies than he had in the previous one. In 1963, Tiomkin moved his base of operations to Europe and became a kind of front-ranked bottom-feeder, replacing Miklos Rozsa as the principal composer at producer Samuel Bronston's Spanish-based studio. Rozsa had walked away from his relationship with Bronston, and no other major composer would go near the man's outsized but frequently shapeless epic films; Tiomkin took the work and was responsible for scoring 55 Days at Peking (1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), both of which saw release as soundtrack albums and received Academy Award nominations. He also closed out Bronston's epics with Circus World (1964) (which won him a Golden Globe Award). He was back working with John Wayne again on The War Wagon (1967), but by the end of the 1960s, with the move by most Hollywood producers to a less densely orchestral, more pop-oriented brand of soundtrack music, Tiomkin's activities came to a halt. His last Academy Award nomination was for Tchaikovsky in 1971. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide