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And, amid these projects – about which he had nothing to recall in his autobiography – Rozsa worked on Paramount’s THE HOUR BEFORE DAWN (1944), directed by Frank Tuttle and starring Franchot Tone and Veronica Lake, about an Englishman who learns that his wife is an Axis spy, kills her, and joins the army. Based on a Somerset Maugham novel that he later withdrew from his official canon, it is probably the only true embarrassment of a movie to which Rozsa’s name is attached (NEW WINE having been released without his credit, and THE GREEN BERETS at least having some good action scenes). It and NEW WINE are to Rozsa what ROBOT MONSTER is to Elmer Bernstein, things that neither man would ever volunteer to discuss. Things would get better after his next project.

In 1944, Wilder made good on his promise, giving Rozsa the job of scoring DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). This movie – which divided the Wilder/Brackett partnership because of what the latter, a New Englander of conservative manner and taste, considered to be its vile subject matter – proved pivotal not just for Wilder (whose reputation for dramas about venality with a cynical edge, and peopled with bizarre characters, started here) but for Rozsa, who began a new phase of his career as a specialist in crime movies in general and film noir in particular. From 1944 right up thru 1981 with Carl Reiner’s DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID, but most especially in the middle and late 1940’s, Rozsa’s music would become associated with the activities of the criminal mind, especially its panic – and curiously enough, much of this work, especially from THE NAKED CITY, wouldn’t be that far in inspiration from THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. The music accompanying the battle with the giant spider might be stowed down and re-orchestrated, even re-composed many times, but the stylistic core was still there.

A year later, Rozsa acquired yet another specialty, writing scores depicting the workings of a disordered mind. David 0. Selznick contracted Rozsa to do the music for Alfred Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND (1945), when Bernard Herrmann proved unavailable, and the result was one of the highlights of Rozsa’s career. The music for SPELLBOUND is among the most passionate ever written for the screen, but also must’ve seemed in its time one of the most frightening of film scores. Rozsa only met with Hitchcock on two occasions during his work on the movie, and he told the composer that his definite requirements included a grand love theme for the two principal characters, and something new for the sequences depicting the possible insanity of the hero – what it was, was up to Rozsa.

Ever since his work on THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, Rozsa had wanted to make use of a device called the Ondes Martinot, one of the first noteworthy electronic instruments. His intention had been to use the device’s otherworldly whine to accompany the Djinn’s escape from the bottle when Sabu opens it, but by the time recording had commenced, inventor Maurice Martinot had been called into military service, and the instrument was unavailable. [The Ondes Martinot later figured very prominently in Richard Rodney Bennett’s score for the 1967 Ken Russell directed espionage film BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN.] The Ondes Martinot was still unavailable, but for SPELLBOUND and its “new” sound, he instead chose a theremin, a device which had been kicking around since the end of the 1920’s, invented by a Russian-born scientist (whose life recently inspired a documentary film).

After much back-and-forth between Rozsa, Hitchcock, and Selznick, the theremin was accepted, and the score as a whole proved sufficiently appealing to earn the composer his first Oscar, beating out his score for Billy Wilder’s THE LOST WEEKEND, which was up for a nomination the same year, and which also used a theremin. (Selznick later threatened legal action against Rozsa for his use of the theremin in the score for THE LOST WEEKEND, until it was pointed out to him that the use of a musical instrument couldn’t be copyrighted or trademarked.) Although Rozsa considered THE LOST WEEKEND the stronger score by tar, SPELLBOUND’s love theme had just enough Rachmaninoff-like sweep and “haunt count” to overpower it in the balloting.

Rozsa’s most successful piece of popular music, The Spellbound Concerto, resulted from his friendship with Jerome Kern, who convinced Chappell and Company, of which he was a part owner, to publish the score. Kern had obviously noted the success two years earlier of Richard Addinseil’s Warsaw Concerto, a Rachmaninoff-through-water adaptation of the music from DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT. Despite his success with SPELLBOUND, Rozsa chose to terminate his relationship with Selznick when he was asked to participate in a demeaning and ridiculous “contest” among six composers to determine who would get the assignment for the producer’s biggest movie yet (other than GONE WITH THE WIND, which he’d had to give up to MGM), DUEL IN THE SUN.

Rozsa spent the next few years working for various independent producers, including Hal Waffis (THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS, 1946), Sol Lesser (THE RED HOUSE, 1940, and Mark Hellinger (THE KILLERS, 1946; BRUTE FORCE, 1947; THE NAKED CITY, 1948), and for a time seemed destined to chronicle the dark side of human behavior in his music. Indeed, his four-note theme accompanying the appearance of the two hired assassins in THE KILLERS, adapted without his permission, became the theme to Jack Webb’s TV series DRAGNET, which may be the most ubiquitous of all Rozsa’s creations through the series’ familiarity (Art Carney quotes it in at least two HONEYMOONERS episodes of the era) and its perpetual reruns on cable television. Nicholas Rozsa reports that the DRAGNET theme generates more publishing royalties than anything else in his father’s output, including the music from BEN-HUR.

Rozsa won his second Oscar three years later for A DOUBLE LIFE (1948), a drama based on a pre-World War II, Korda-produced movie called MEN ARE NOT GODS, Marring Ronald Colman as an actor so obsessed with his role of Othello that he strangles a woman he believes to be Desdemona. Rozsa and Colman both won Oscars, while director George Cukor and co-author/producers Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin were nominated, in the wake of his second Academy Award, Rozsa was invited to join the staff of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer under a contract unique in its time, in addition to being granted his summers off to compose, Rozsa was given ownership of all his compositions for the concert hall; additionally, he had the right to refuse any assignment to re-work scores by another composer, and, in turn, his work could not be adapted in the hands of another composer without his permission. And he had the right of first refusal on MGM’s most prestigious pictures. Although he likely never stood back and recognized his situation as such, Rozsa had no peer at that moment in Hollywood.

Only Erich Wolfgang Korngold, among all of Hollywood’s composers-in-residence, ever had a better contract, and that had been signed at a time when Korngold was a giant among Europe’s composers, and nothing but good business seemed in the offing for the movie capital or Warner Bros. Additionally, by 1948, Korngold had left Hollywood in a tragically unsuccessful bid to resume his serious music career in Vienna, and Rozsa was now the film capital’s most distinguished serious composer. Among the remaining veteran composers, Newman held a position of greater power and respect at 20th Century Fox, and was regarded by anyone who cared to look closely as a brilliant arranger and conductor, though only a fair composer, with a great ear for talent; Steiner, who had been Newman’s only peer in the early 1930’s, was aging gracefully at Warner Bros., occasionally delivering up a surprise like THE FOUNTAINHEAD; Dimitri Tiomkin, a one-time student of Glazunov and former piano virtuoso who was probably a better “re-creative” (i.e., performing) musician than a creative musician, was beginning to pick up the scraps – such as Selznick’s DUEL IN THE SUN – that Rozsa left behind, as he would later with Samuel Bronston’s independent productions of the mid-1960’s, and found an unexpected niche applying his sub-Tchaikovsky-ian technique to Westerns, sometimes (as in RED RIVER) with surprisingly good and always at least serviceable results.

Rozsa’s only serious rival at this time – not that he ever thought in these terms of any of these men, and perhaps not about Tiomkin at all – was Bernard Heremann. American-born and from New York, Herrmann had come out of Juilliard intending to beat the world, but instead found the world laying for him. By the mid-1930’s, he was a radio conductor with aspirations to the concert hail. He wanted to be a serious composer in a time when the American concert hall didn’t look favorably upon its own, but he made it to Hollywood with a tow from Orson Welles, won an Oscar his second time out in his first year there (for THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER), and had a seemingly secure future at RKO, when he’d thrown it all away by threatening to sue the studio if his name wasn’t removed as composer from THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, over the way the film had been edited and rescored. In contrast to Rozsa, who understood and adapted to the limitations of thinking (especially about music) that afflicted most Hollywood executives, wincing at what he was asked to do but also building a reputation for professionalism and the ability to work with even the most ignorant of filmmakers (especially if it was requested of someone who had helped him, such as Korda), Herrmann had built up a reputation for irascibility that would blight his entire career. No studio would ever ask him to accept, nor could he ever accept, a long-term contract, and no producer, director, or studio executive could be sure that he wouldn’t turn on them verbally. The musician in him that was inspired and occasionally brilliant they didn’t understand, and the person in him that was demanding and arrogant, and who they had to deal with, they didn’t like – this went double for production chiefs who’d spent long careers building up their own arrogant and demanding natures.

Although Rozsa’s years at MGM weren’t always harmonious – he had his frustrations with those in power, over outrages such as his beautiful prelude to John Houseman’s production of JULIUS CAESAR (1953) being replaced by Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien – he saw most of what he set out to accomplish become a reality on the soundtrack. For Sam Zimbalist’s production of QUO VADIS (1951), starring Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Leo Germ, Finlay Currie, and Peter Ustinov, he stretched his research skills far beyond anything he’d required for THE FOUR FEATHERS. Rozsa would not simply assemble a group of fanfares and other material out of whole cloth, but, rather, chose to seek out authentic Roman sources. The problem with this notion lay in the fact that not a single piece of Roman music has survived in any form. So, Rozsa chose to pursue authenticity in a roundabout way. He was aware that there existed a dozen relics of ancient Greek music, written in a system whose notation can be read and played. He sought these out, along with some of the earliest Christian music, working from the notion that the earliest Christians were partly Jews and partly Greeks, and might well have derived their music from Greek sources. And the Romans, who borrowed much of the attributes of their high culture from the Greeks, might well have used Greek sources for their music as well. Nero’s song about the burning of Troy was drawn from the Skolion of Seikilos, the oldest known musical relic possessing a recognizable melody; Nero’s song about the burning of Rome was derived from a Gregorian chant; the music for the bacchanale was drawn from a second century Greek fragment; and the title music for QUO VADIS was modeled on a Gregorian source, “Libera me Domine.”

All of this was probably Greek to L. B. Mayer, Dore Schary, or anyone else in the chain of command at MGM, but Rozsa had long ago accepted this situation, and was given a free hand by John Green, the head of MGM’s music department, so long as he stayed on schedule and within budget. The number of great scores – most more memorable than the films that they were attached to – that resulted from this relationship should have been the envy of any music department in the world: PLYMOUTH ADVENTURE, QUO VADIS, IVANHOE, KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE, LUST FOR LIFE, and BEN-HUR, for which he won his third Oscar.

He also did his bit to help the studio’s record label, which began releasing his music with QUO VADIS, although they didn’t always speak the same language. In 1953, Rozsa had been asked to write a ballet for dancer-turned-film actress Moira Shearer and her appearance in the film A STORY OF THREE LOVES. He was given only a week’s notice, and told the head of the department that this was beyond the range of his productivity. Instead, ordered to come up with an alternative piece from the established repertory, he selected the eighteenth variation from Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, which he had recently conducted at the Hollywood Bowl. The studio liked it, the work was licensed, and the music was integrated into the background score. But when Rozsa-perhaps recalling the success of his own Spellbound Concerto – urged MGM Records to release the piece as a single (first having to explain to the executive to whom he was speaking who Rachmaninoff was), the New York office (obviously manned by people who had never seen David Lean’s BRIEF ENCOUNTER or heard of “Full Moon and Empty Arms”) declined to do so, saying the work had no commercial possibilities. Instead, dozens of other record labels issued versions of the eighteenth variation on singles, albums, reel-to-reel tapes, and anything else they could get it onto, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and making a small windfall for the publisher, and a larger one for themselves – all except for MGM Records, which didn’t realize what was happening until months later, too late to do anything about it except look foolish, especially to Rozsa. (Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, in an appearance on the CBS Morning News in January of this year, recalled that hearing the Rachmaninoff variation in THE STORY OF THREE LOVES led her into serious music and started her on her career as a composer.)

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