By Nicholas Stix
Miklos Rozsa (1907-1995) belongs on the short list of moviedom's greatest composers, along with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman (founder of the Newman Gang), Steiner, Victor Young, Dmitri Tiomkin, Bernard Hermann, John Williams, James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein (aka Bernstein West) and Copland.
He won three Oscars, for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959), and was nominateed for 17. Sometimes, he competed against himself.
Rozsa's score to Spellbound was so stunning, and so upstaged the master of suspense, that Hitchcock had an attack of envy, and refused to work with him again. Hitch apparently got over this problem, or he could never have worked with Herrmann.
Eye of the Needle, based on a Ken Follett novel, was a WWII thriller, starring Kate Nelligan and Donald Sutherland.
Nelligan and her embittered husband, who has been left wheelchair-bound by his war wound, maintain a watch tower on the British coast. Sutherland is a sensitive, sexy, Nazi spy who has to get the location of the D-Day Normandy invasion to the German high command, and who, along the way, seduces the extremely sexy Nelligan, whose character hasn't had a man since her husband was maimed. (Sutherland was almost always "sensitive" and "sexy.")
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Eva Marie Saint is TCM's Star of the month for July. Tomorrow, Thursday, July 4, is her 100th Birthday.
At 8 p.m. ET, TCM shows Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) with Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, and Eva Marie Saint. It received eight Academy Awards, Brando for best Actor, Saint for Best Supporting Actress.
At 11:15 p.m. ET TCM features Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1959) with Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason.
A great many Jewish guys among your list of film composers--most, if not nearly all of them, in fact. I wonder what the Men of Unz would have to say about this.
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