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As the work on The THIEF OF BAGDAD progressed into the summer of 1939, with Michael Powell now at the helm, war broke out in Europe. Powell was moved over to complete a propaganda film called THE LION HAS WINGS, while a new crisis loomed for Korda. He had already extended his credit to the maximum in England and the outbreak of war had left him out of money and out of time in his adopted homeland, with his biggest picture not yet finished. The producer did the only thing he could under the circumstances, moving the entire production and all the personnel he needed, including stars Sabu, Conrad Veidt, and June Duprez, and his brother Zoltan – followed later by Vincent – to America to complete shooting. Rozsa, who had thought his work on the film completed and felt perfectly content to stay in London, was among them, making the journey by way of Paris to Genoa, and from there to New York by boat.

Filming of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD was finished in 1940 in Hollywood, and the movie opened on Christmas Day of that year. Rozsa received his first Oscar nomination for the score, although it was cinematographers Georges Perinal and Osmond Borradaile who won Academy Awards.

To call this a landmark score in Rozsa’s career would be putting it mildly. Much as the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 is perceived as the moment where Ludwig van Beethoven became a gigantic presence in his own right, THE THIEF OF BAGDAD was the point where Rozsa emerged as a major movie composer. No score before it had presented such a rich palette of sound, texture, or invention so prominently in a movie – even THE FOUR FEATHERS, for all of its excitement as a score, was relatively subdued in its use of music.

THE THIEF OF BAGDAD was more in the spirit of Max Steiner’s score for KING KONG, “a symphony accompanied by a movie.” Moreover, it showed Rozsa writing in various idioms and styles, from the gently playful Abu’s Theme (“I Want To Be a Sailor”) to the fierce passages accompanying his battle with the giant spider in his quest for the All-Seeing Eye. And it did what the best filmusic can and must do, telling the entire story as surely as an opera score. Indeed, the music is what keeps the giant spider sequence, which looks rather hokey today, exciting to a modem audience, with its pounding rhythms and savage attack on the instruments, and makes the entire sequence inside the idol just as tense and mysterious today as it seemed 55 years ago. And all of that music is built, one way or the other, around “I Want To Be A Sailor.” The “Djinn’s Flight Theme” similarly carries the Rex Ingram/genie sequences, despite some model work that now looks rather crude (if they could’ve plucked an extra five years out of the last 40 or so, Ray Harryhausen and Charles Schneer should have found a way to buy the remake rights to the entire movie, as well as the synchronization rights to the score, and just done it again), and elevates some of the Miles Malleson dialogue (especially the genie’s exit speech about the foibles of the human race) to some of the most memorable in screen history.

(Note: One cryptic published source indicates that Rozsa’s score for the movie was replaced with one written by Hubert Bath (“The Dream of Olwyn”) for release in the Far East, but there’s never been any confirmation of this.)

The film was released in an era before there were soundtrack recordings, but the score quickly took on a life of its own, with “1I Want To Be a Sailor,” becoming popular in its own right and the “Djinn’s Flight Theme” later becoming the basis for the wartime flyers’ tribute “High Flight.” Rozsa continued under contract to Korda, through his Alexander Korda Productions, and, in addition to working on the films THAT HAMILTON WOMAN,

LYDIA, and THE JUNGLE BOOK, was assigned to various independent productions that Korda picked up to fulfill a multi-picture deal he had signed with United Artists. These included Walter Wanger’s war drama SUNDOWN (1941), and a grotesque biographical film in about Schubert entitled NEW WINE (1941), which he deliberately kept his name off of, so bad was the film itself. Rozsa later followed this experience up, marginally more happily, adapting the works of Chopin for the film biography A SONG TO REMEMBER in 1945, and Rimsky-Korsakov for the 1947 release SONG OF SCHEHEREZADE. And, as Korda’s one-man music department, he started work on Ernst Lubitsch’s TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942), which Rozsa felt was in extremely bad taste for its satirizing of the Nazi occupation of Poland, despite the opportunity it gave him to work with Ira Gershwin, whom he liked a great deal. (According to Rozsa’s autobiography, A Double Life, Korda apparently didn’t think much of the idea behind the movie either).

THE JUNGLE BOOK score was the most important and visible of Rozsa’s early Hollywood film work, making music history when it proved popular enough to justify a commercial recording. In 1943, Rozsa went to New York to record the music for RCA Victor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. RCA Victor had previously released a 78 r.p.m. disc of the waltz from LYDIA, but THE JUNGLE BOOK, narrated by the movie’s star Sabu in a Peter and the Wolf-type suite, was released as a set of 78 r.p.m. records, literally the first soundtrack “album” (the LP term derives from those huge photo album-like 78 r.p.m. sets) ever released commercially.

Rozsa was always much more comfortable in musical than he was in film circles, and this and his other visits to the East Coast for concert performances of his work were a relief from the relative isolation he felt while at work in Hollywood. In the course of his living in Los Angeles during the early 1940’s, he made the acquaintance of Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, and also managed to meet his longtime idol, Bela Bartok.

In November of 1943, the Theme, Variations and Finale received its New York premiere with the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York (later the New York Philharmonic) under the baton of Bruno Walter. Rozsa and Walter were by this time friends, and the conductor gave the composer some suggestions about how to improve the piece, which Rozsa accepted. The Theme, Variations and Finale later figured in an historical event, when Walter fell ill for the night of the Philharmonic’s broadcast performance, and the orchestra’s then-unknown assistant conductor, Leonard Bernstein, stepped in at the last moment, making front-page news and an overnight name for himself. Curiously, that same year, Rozsa had been approached by a then-unknown Jerome Robbins on the recommendation of conductor Antal Dorati, about scoring a proposed ballet dealing with a group of sailors on leave in New York – Rozsa’s music proved more European in character than Robbins was looking for, and the commission for the ballet, entitled Fancy Free, which evolved into the musical ON THE TOWN, eventually went to Bernstein.

But the most important event in Rozsa’s life that year occurred when he married Margaret Finlason, a British actress whom he’d met at a party at the home of June Duprez, the female star of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. His Concerto for Strings (Op. 13), published in 1943, was dedicated in her honor. With Rozsa’s contract to Korda ended, he had to make his way in a film capital filled to capacity with European emigres, an Oscar nomination and a hit or two (THAT HAMILTON WOMAN, THE JUNGLE BOOK) for Korda under his belt but not much else. The Academy Award nomination was nice, but not entirely convincing to the movie capital’s department heads, for it had come in association with an extremely exotic “genre” film, and showed no evidence that Rozsa could score a conventional Hollywood movie. And the hits he had been associated with were Korda productions, and, thus, not really Hollywood movies to a film community that could smell a foreign production a mile away.

Moreover, the film capital’s movers and shakers generally knew and cared little about music – according to Rozsa, neither the moguls nor their department heads, nor even most of their music department heads, ever listened to concerts on the radio, paid attention to the reviews from the press back East, or even attended concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. They knew and cared nothing about Rozsa’s success in the concert hall, either in Europe or New York. And Hollywood had already extended its most welcoming hand to one established European emigre composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and he was giving the community all the highbrow music it needed on behalf of Warner Bros. and Errol Flynn.

Essentially, it was the difference between being a craftsman and an artist – some people are both, some people are one or the other (and some are neither!). Hollywood needed craftsmen, who could deliver a finished piece of work designed to precise specifications on an agreed upon schedule, whether it was sets, costumes, scripts, performances, or music. But the most highly renowned among the serious composers from Europe settling in Hollywood were artists, with their own timetables and a creative pace more suited to the needs of the concert hall – where commissions can take place years in advance of premieres – than filmmaking organizations releasing 52 or more new works each year. And legend has it that one mogul, approaching Igor Stravinsky (then the most renowned living composer in the world, Richard Strauss having surrendered that stains outside of the Third Reich by continuing in live in Germany and briefly serving the government) about writing a score, ended the conversation when the composer offered the possibility of turning one in-in the space of a year.

Rozsa could have returned to England around this time, but saw little point in doing so, especially as his sole patron in the film world, Korda, was living in Hollywood. As a Hungarian national, he was in an awkward position, with his homeland – where he hadn’t resided since 1925 – having declared war on the United States in December of 1941, in alliance with Germany and Italy. With the help of the Korda office, he applied for citizenship and, in a delightful stroke of luck, appeared for his hearing on the same day as the celebrated violin virtuoso Josef Szigeti, a fellow countryman. Though they knew nothing about each other personally, the immigration authorities used each one to vouch for the character and loyalty of the other.

Rozsa’s age made him fully eligible for military service, and he did, in fact, receive a draft notice. He was advised to contact the Selective Service’s Motion Picture Office, in the hope of being requisitioned to compose and conduct music for military training films. This resulted in his first and only official contact with his fellow emigre composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who was in charge of the Hollywood office responsible for requisitioning musicians on behalf of the war effort. Rozsa’s son Nicholas recalled, in a 1995 interview, what happened next: “Tiomkin turned my father down, saying this his services weren’t needed. This virtually assured that my father would end up serving in combat, and he could only believe that Tiomkin did this out of jealousy – after all, my father already had one Academy Award nomination at the time. He avoided any contact with Tiomkin from that day forward. Luckily, my father was declared 4-F, unfit for military service, soon after that, and he contributed to the war effort by conducting the orchestra at the Hollywood Canteen.” Interestingly, writing even 40 years later in his autobiography Rozsa was too polite to delve into this incident, exhibiting a quality that was to serve him well in Hollywood.

Rozsa fared rather well, possibly because of his youth and the experience he’d gained in England, coupled with the fact that he knew how to work quickly when he had to. His formal entry into the American studio system took place at the behest of fellow Austro-Hungarian expatriate Billy Wilder and his associate and collaborator Charles Brackett, who recruited him to score Wllder’s second American feature as a director, FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (1943). Rozsa was Wilder’s second choice as composer, his first, Franz Waxman, was already under contract to Warner Bros. and unavailable, as Wilder freely admitted, but he would use Rozsa on his next movie if the score for FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO proved acceptable. As it turned out, the score – a rich, melodic work built around the same dark lines that had shown up in the action scenes of THIEF OF BAGDAD – was more than acceptable to Wilder and Brackett, but not to Victor Young, the head of Paramount’s music department, who felt that Rozsa’s music was needlessly complex and dissonant, and wanted something with a smoother, more typically Hollywood sound.

In his autobiography Rozsa specifically recalled Young (best remembered as the author of “Stella By Starlight” from THE UNINVITED) objecting to a passage in which the violins were playing G natural and the violas G sharp. The music department head wanted both sections to be playing G natural, and Rozsa objected to this change, while Young took umbrage at his reaction, Wilder came to the defense of his composer, and Rozsa lived to score another day at Paramount (though the subsequent editing of the film did chop the music up a bit, much to Rozsa’s embarrassment when Walter attended a showing to hear what his friend had written).

After FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO, Rozsa was able to make the rounds of the studios on a picture-by-picture basis. He continued at Paramount with director/producer Mark Sandrich’s wartime drama SO PROUDLY WE HAIL (1943), then moved to Columbia for his friend Zoltan Korda’s World War II action drama SAHARA (1943), starring Humphrey Bogart. The result was a stirring score, which bore similarities to FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO, not entirely surprising given the similarity of subject matter and setting.

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